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Workers increasingly expect their employers to provide holistic support that improves their quality of life.
Yet companies find these offerings are frustratingly underutilized despite investments in a wealth of benefits such as mental health and financial assistance. Leaders are now exploring ways to meet employees’ expectations while improving their return on investment.
“Companies have put 30, 40, 50 programs out there…[They’re] getting between 1% and 5% to 6% engagement rate across the employee population,” said Stephan Scholl, CEO of the IT and consulting company Alight, at a Tuesday roundtable panel at Fortune’s CEO Initiative in Washington, D.C. “CEOs, CHROs, and a lot of CIOs are now playing a much stronger hand in figuring out what do we do?”
At Morgan Lewis, the law firm took an unorthodox approach and formed a new C-suite role in 2019 focused solely on employee engagement: a chief engagement officer.
The chief engagement officer is responsible for the firm’s employees’ “life interests,” including engagement in programming and well-being initiatives, said Jami McKeon, Morgan Lewis chair. Morgan Lewis’s chief engagement officer has trained partners and other supervisors on how to give better feedback and engage with employees and sends weekly alerts in its intranet calling attention to new benefits, new hires, and personal announcements from staffers like marriages or the birth or adoption of children.
McKeon says that communicating existing benefits to employees helps drive engagement, as does creating a dedicated role.
“Just the title says to everybody, ‘We’re focused on employee engagement, we’re focused on an engaged relationship.'”
Employees’ distrust of HR may also factor into erecting this new title. Only 21% of employees say they trust the head of HR to tell the truth about what is happening in the organization, according to Edelman’s 2022 Trust Barometer Special Report. While HR is responsible for administering trainings and benefit announcements, this trust issue may impact how and whether workers take advantage of an organization’s full suite of offerings.
“The CHRO isn’t trusted, so…chief engagement officer is maybe a refreshing way of dealing with [improving ROI],” said one attendee.
Paige McGlauflin
paige.mcglauflin@fortune.com
@paidion
Reporter's Notebook
The most compelling data, quotes, and insights from the field.
A job today could require honing as much as 25% of new digital skills to be effectively performed in five years due to AI, predicts Karin Kimbrough, LinkedIn’s chief economist.
Still, she cautions that investing in soft skills remains important. “We’re seeing the importance of people skills, human skills, perceptiveness, ethical trade-offs, problem-solving,” Kimbrough told LinkedIn editor-in-chief Dan Roth. In other words, people skills and digital skills go hand in hand.
Around the Table
A round-up of the most important HR headlines.
- Millions of people in countries like India and the Philippines make a living working in call centers. But a ChatGPT takeover that’s already underway threatens to leave them jobless. Washington Post
- Fewer Americans quit their jobs over the summer than they did since the early months of the pandemic, data from the U.S. Labor Department shows. That's likely due to decreased confidence in finding new jobs and higher employee satisfaction. Wall Street Journal
- Former Fox News broadcaster Gretchen Carlson’s sexual harassment allegations against the media giant's former CEO Roger Ailes eventually led to his resignation. Now, she’s creating a list of public companies that employ secretive nondisclosure clauses and other silencing mechanisms. Fast Company
- U.S. job openings surged to more than 9.6 million in August thanks to an increase in white-collar roles. Bloomberg
Watercooler
Everything you need to know from Fortune.
Managing managers. The majority of Gen Z workers feel comfortable giving feedback to their managers, according to new Adobe research, and around 90% are just as comfortable openly discussing their job satisfaction while in the office. —Orianna Rosa Royle
Friday’s for AI. JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon believes an AI-driven uptick in productivity will usher in three-and-a-half day work weeks. —Eleanor Pringle
Seeing red. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit against Union Pacific Railroad for using a vision test to disqualify color-blind employees from working. The EEOC, representing 21 former employees in its lawsuit, claims the test does not effectively determine a worker’s ability to identify railroad signals.—Josh Funk, AP
CEO sees shortage. Speaking at Fortune’s CEO Initiative, IBM CEO Arvind Krishna said repetitive white-collar jobs are most vulnerable to AI replacement. —Paolo Confino
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