HR News: 12 June, 2017

1.

Humu: Google’s former HR chief’s startup is as interesting as it sounds

The name of the company has apparently been derived from the name of a fish called humuhumunukunukuapua or the reef triggerfish or Picasso triggerfish, which is the state fish of Hawaii.

Laszlo Bock—former SVP of people operations at Google— and Wayne Crosby— former director of engineering at Google— have come together to create a startup that seems to promise to make work life simpler, helping improve work–life balance.

Although much of the details are still undercover, Bock introduced the idea publicly on LinkedIn. He announced that he is starting a company called ‘Humu’ along with Crosby. While Bock left Google last year, Crosby, who had joined Google in 2007 with the acquisition of Zenter—which provided Google cloud product Docs with its PowerPoint presentation feature— quit Google last month.

In his LinkedIn post Bock mentions how people spend so many precious hours of their life working, more than anything else, and unfortunately, most people don’t even enjoy the work or their jobs. It remains simply a means to an end. “It needs to be better than that. If we're devoting most of our lives to work, that experience should be meaningful, impactful, productive,” Bock said in his post.

“Our mission is to make work better everywhere through science, machine learning, and a little bit of love,” he concluded.
It is being speculated that Humu could be a recruiting or job-search service, or an HR software or service company. The industry can only keep guessing till Bock raises the curtains.

2.

Cognizant offers VRS to senior staff: Will cut costs and digitise operations

Employees with over Rs 40 lakh in annual salaries or those at the director and senior VP level are being considered.

Technology solutions firm Cognizant is working on a voluntary retirement scheme for its senior staff, in a bid to control wage costs, while it looks to digitise and automate its operations.
Cognizant hasn’t yet disclosed the number of people who have been offered VRS, although the IT firm, which has over 2.6 lakh employees, reportedly shares that it represents a very small percentage of its workforce.
Speculations suggest that employees with over Rs 40 lakh in annual salaries or people at the director and senior VP levels are being looked at for the option. It is also being said that as part of the VRS, a salary of minimum six to nine months will be given out to the employees concerned, based on their position. 
Apparently, the voluntary initiative is being communicated to management-level associates—from director-level to senior vice president. However, the eligibility is at the discretion of Cognizant leadership. 
The company hasn’t yet elaborated much on the compensation being offered, but ensured that it was fair and also assured that it provided a positive experience for those leaving.

3.

Working overtime: No cash but time off in return

With the new bill, backed solely by the Republicans, workers will have to forego the extra bucks they could have earned working overtime.

The hourly-wage employees working overtime in the US will now get paid in time off instead of cash rewards, as was the practice earlier. The House of Representatives just passed a bill that will let employers give workers paid time off instead of time-and-a-half pay, whenever they put in extra hours.

The bill will tweak the Fair Labour Standards Act, which mandates that employers who require hourly-paid employees to work more than 40 hours a week will have to pay time-and-a-half, or 1.5 times their usual hourly rate. The bill also prohibited employers from coercing or intimidating employees into choosing  time off instead of overtime pay.

Now, with the new bill, backed solely by the Republicans, workers will have to forego the extra bucks they could have earned working overtime. Interestingly, the bill was not favoured by a single Democrat with six of the Republicans also voting against it.

The Trump administration, on the other hand, supports the bill as The White House mentioned in a news release that the president's advisers recommend that Trump sign the bill into law if it is presented to him in its current form.

The Democrats, on the other hand, strongly oppose the bill as they feel concerned about the fact that now employers have the final say on when comp time can be used. This means, bosses can defer compensating employees for overtime work.