There’s a New Benefit in Town: Psychedelic Therapy. Are Companies Ready to Embrace It?

BY Lesley Alderman, LCSW | October 16, 2023

Especially since the pandemic, companies have been trying to increase access to quality mental health care for their distressed employees. For good reason: Nearly one in five Americans are currently being treated for depression and three out of four workers report feeling burned out, according to Gallup. At the same time, there’s been rising interest in an unconventional approach to treat mental maladies: psychedelic therapy. Many researchers believe that psychedelics, paired with psychotherapy, have the potential to transform health care.

The prospect that psychedelics could become mainstream has inspired entrepreneurial interest. One company, Enthea, has become the first to offer psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT) as an employee benefit for U.S. companies. Launched last year with $3.3 million in seed money, led by Tabula Rasa Ventures, Enthea now has seven customers signed on—including Dr. Bronner’s, Launchbox, and Black Swan Yoga—and 50 more in the pipeline, according to Sherry Rais, Enthea’s co-founder and CEO. To be sure, advocates of PAT will face a complicated road ahead, since psychedelics vary widely in their properties and are covered by a crazy quilt of state and federal regulation, but assertions of PAT’s beneficial effects are being supported by a growing field of scientific research.

How Psychedelics Can Help 

It takes time for our brains to change longstanding patterns. Psychedelics, including ketamine, psylocibin (a/k/a magic mushrooms), and MDMA (a/k/a ecstasy) can speed up the process and create profound changes in perspective. How? Taking psychedelics has the potential to change one’s brain for the better. They silent repetitive ruminations, promote neuroplasticity, and can surface new emotions and memories.

When used under the guidance of trained clinicians, research has found that psychedelics may help “patients to achieve meaningful improvements in function, symptomatology, and overall outlook in a relatively short amount of time,” according to a review published in 2022. Here’s how PAT works: the patient takes a measured dose of a psychedelic substance under the supervision of a clinician. A trained therapist prepares the patient for the experience, which can last one to several hours, and helps them make sense of what comes up during and after, a process called integration. “It’s not just as simple as taking a capsule and hoping for the best,” said Paul Hutson, director of the Transdisciplinary Center for Research in Psychoactive Substances at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, in a December 2022 presentation.

By quieting the hum of worries and concerns that plague one’s brain, anxieties may soften. New cell growth and connections help make some of these changes more permanent. Meanwhile, new emotions can be processed and new insights into the past or patterns of behavior can be explored. These developments can lead to feelings of relief and often long-term change.

“I felt like I let go of a lot of anger and resentment towards my parents,” a cancer patient in a psylocibin trial at New York University explained in a paper published in 2017. “I mean, I thought I had already done that, but I really hadn’t, and I kind of saw them more as, like, these flawed human beings who did the best they could,” the patient said.

“Psychedelics are mind manifesters,” Alex Belser, a psychedelic researcher and psychologist at Yale University, told From Day One. “Some aspect of the mind is being manifested that had not been present before. The challenge is to transform altered states into altered traits.”

A Healthcare Entrepreneur’s Journey

For nearly a decade, Enthea co-founder Sherry Rais traveled the globe working on poverty-reduction programs in the developing world. One of her conclusions: You can’t solve poverty without also addressing mental health. And to address mental health, you need effective, low-cost, and accessible treatments. 

She started to look for novel solutions and was “blown away,” she said by the research on psychedelic medicines. But she realized that implementing these treatments in the developing world would be premature, she told From Day One.

Sherry Rais, Enthea’s co-founder and CEO (Company photo)
Sherry Rais, Enthea’s co-founder and CEO (Company photo)

Instead, she and her partners founded Enthea as a public benefit corporation, deriving its name from the term entheogen, which describes substances that can produce changes in consciousness, perception, and mood. Besides offering PAT as a benefit for employers, the company plans to initiate programs for underserved communities, such as formerly incarcerated individuals. Said Rais: “Access and health equity are extremely important to Enthea’s mission.”

Over the next few years, Rais hopes to be working with hundreds of employers, millions of employees and to have increased awareness about and acceptance of psychedelic therapies, which at the moment is rarely covered by insurers.

What’s In It for Employers

Workers are struggling, and they expect their companies to help. A recent workplace wellness study by the Employee Benefit Research Institute (EBRI) found that 79% of employees agree with the statement, “Your employer has a responsibility to make sure employees are mentally healthy and emotionally well.”

According to an EBRI survey, about 61% of employers offer mental health benefits and despite the uncertain economic environment, they are not likely to cut back in benefits of this kind. A healthier workforce, after all, is a more productive workforce—and a less expensive one. Workers who rate their mental health as fair or poor report four times more absences than their colleagues with good or excellent mental well-being, according to a Gallup survey.

Will employers embrace PAT as a new offering? Paul Fronstin, PhD, director of health-benefits research at EBRI, is circumspect: “Most employers don’t want to be first,” he told From Day One. “They will wait on the sidelines to see what others are doing and how it’s working out.” And he added that ultimately, companies want benefits that help their bottom line. If PAT prevents workers from requiring expensive in-patient hospital stays, it could be a win-win for employees and employers. 

Psychedelic Properties Explained

There’s a lot of hype around psychedelics and a lot of time and money being poured into investigating them. These mind-bending drugs, which include ketamine, MDMA (methylenedioxymethamphetamine), psylocibin, and LSD, can help soothe suffering in people with terminal illnesses, veterans struggling with PTSD, individuals with treatment-resistant depression and even those grappling with persistent addiction. However, most are not legal or FDA approved.

Ketamine, an anesthetic that can also alleviate depression, has a leg up on the others: it’s legal and has been used safely in surgical settings for more than 50 years. In 2019, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a version of ketamine, Spravato (esketamine), for treatment-resistant depression. Many clinics use ketamine off-label to treat a range of a ailments (beyond the approved use of treatment-resistant depression) from mild depression to anxiety. 

Some companies sell ketamine lozenges via email and then monitor patients via telemedicine. The FDA recently issued an alert about the dangers of treating psychiatric disorders with compounded versions of ketamine. 

MDMA, which was developed in 1912 to control bleeding and became celebrated in the 1980s as a “club drug,” may be effective at treating a range of mental health issues, and is gradually gaining traction for therapeutic use. In 2017 the FDA granted Breakthrough Therapy status for MDMA as a potential treatment for PTSD; this status allows clinical trials to be conducted to test MDMA’s safety and efficacy. The following year, the FDA granted the same status to psyilocibin. 

An important study published last month showed that MDMA-assisted therapy was effective at reducing symptoms of PTSD. The drug is on track to be an FDA-approved drug in 2024. If approved, “MDMA-assisted therapy would be the first novel treatment for PTSD in over two decades,” Berra Yazar-Klosinski, the senior author of the study, told the New York Times. “PTSD patients can feel some hope.”

Psychedelics, except ketamine, are illegal on the federal level for recreational use, but states and cities are making their own laws, the pattern followed with the decriminalization of cannabis. In 2020, Oregon approved decriminalizing small amounts of psychedelics and the supervised use of psilocybin in a therapeutic setting. Colorado passed a ballot measure to decriminalize psychedelic mushrooms and to create state-regulated centers where participants can experience the drug under supervision. Several cities in California–Oakland, San Francisco, Santa Cruz, and Berkeley–have decriminalized psylocibin.

Enthea, as this time, offers only ketamine-assisted therapy to its customers. The company has a credentialing process to ensure that the clinics providing the therapy meet high standards of care, Rais said. According to Enthea’s website, a typical ketamine session is one to two hours in length and patients will experience “a sense of detachment from normal reality and self. This may foster increased creativity, purpose, and perspective. It can also enhance feelings of tranquility, insight, inspiration, and gratitude.”

Once MDMA receives regulatory approval for therapeutic use, Enthea will offer that therapy as well. Said Rais: “I really believe people need access to these medicines.” 

Lesley Alderman is a psychotherapist and journalist based in Brooklyn, NY. In her therapy practice, she works with individuals and couples. She writes about mental health topics for the Washington Post and has been an editor at Money and Real Simple magazines and a health columnist for the New York Times.

(Featured photo by Mathia Alvez/iStock by Getty Images)

 

Related Stories

Corporate Empathy: Where It Went and Why It Matters

It certainly seems like a bleak moment to be a worker in America. Scroll the news or social media and a picture forms of an uncaring, turbulent, and miserly workplace.Why is this so striking? Empathy, or the ability to understand and be sensitive to others’ feelings and experiences, became a fashionable trait in business just a few years ago. For a while, employers were getting really good at responding to the needs of the workforce. Some companies even traded on it. Empathy, as well as its more active cousin, compassion, took many forms. As more attention focused on how some demographic groups were often left on the sidelines, employers said OK, let’s find ways to level the playing field, and they set hiring goals and stood up mentorship programs. When Covid lockdown closed schools and day-care centers and quarantined babysitters, companies told workers to take care of their families and welcomed Zoom cameos from kids. When employees needed a reprieve from expensive cities and long commutes, companies converted to remote work and hybrid work. When burnout and loneliness pressed on our minds, employers started footing the bill for therapy.The year 2025 feels really different. Much of change in the weather has to do with what the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are doing to the federal workforce, gutting it haphazardly and villainizing the civil service—and how companies in the private sector are playing follow-the-leader. Meta appeared to ingratiate itself to the incoming administration by axing its DEI programs. And when President Trump ended federal DEI programs, Google and Amazon ended some of theirs. When Elon Musk fired “low performers” from the federal government, so did Meta and Microsoft. Public sector followed private sector in ending remote and hybrid work. First Amazon, AT&T, and Boeing called workers back to the office in late 2024, and the president did the same on inauguration day. Underscoring the dramatic shift: All of this is happening as we arrive at the fifth anniversary of Covid lockdowns in the U.S. In some ways, all those revolutionary changes to the way we work seem to be dissolving. To be sure, many employers insist that employee well-being is still a priority, but surveys show that most workers aren’t feeling it. According to Gallup, the percentage of employees who believe their organization cares about their well-being plunged to 21% in early 2024. At its peak in May 2020, that figure was 49%.These stories and statistics certainly make it seem like employers are pulling the plug on empathy. But while the big tech and banking companies that have toughened up their workplace policies employ a lot of people, as does the federal government, they don’t employ everyone. Do these stories really reflect what it’s like to be a worker in 2025? Is corporate empathy dead? I started asking around.When the Reality Doesn't Match the MessageAs I was working on this story, Lauren Branston, CEO of the UK-based nonprofit Institute of Business Ethics, sent me an email. “I have been hearing people I trust saying they are seeing more and more ‘campaigns’ saying empathy is bad, etc. Which I find worrying,” she wrote. “People are campaigning against a core human value. We aren’t ready for this as an institution or in society because we have assumed these topics to be settled.”For decades, she later told me in an interview, people have operated with the belief that undergirds much of Western political democracy: that those with power can largely be trusted to use that power for good, and if they don’t use it for good, then accountability, in the form of ethics or regulations, will come for them. Now, it’s not clear whether either of those things is enough to stop the rolling tide.“It’s fundamentally challenging, she said. “It’s a moment where your values and beliefs are shaken, and it’s a moment where you have to sit and recalibrate what’s going on. What you see when people’s values are challenged is engagement and collaboration and connection. People organize and get organized. And I think that might happen.”As a reporter, I talk to senior HR leaders and executives every day, and some of them I know well. It’s clear to me that a lot of these people who work in HR are, as individuals, genuinely concerned about the well-being of their colleagues. And some are really pushing for change.In February, I moderated a From Day One panel of senior talent-acquisition leaders, and all of them were insistent on providing a good candidate experience even as they introduce AI into their hiring process and navigate an unwelcoming labor marketplace. In fact, they were most concerned with finding ways to provide feedback to individual applicants, even those who don’t get the job. Comcast, which might get a thousand applications for a given role, learned that what applicants want most is feedback, so its TA team is finding ways to provide that.But when what the company says is not what the company does, a lot of HR leaders are really troubled by this. Lori Osborne is one of them. She has spent her 20-year career in HR, mostly working for corporations and startups, plus a brief stint with a non-profit organization, before leaving in 2024 to be a fractional CHRO for startups. Hypocrisy is why she left corporate HR, after finding that values and behavior just didn’t add up. Publicly, leadership would say, “‘We want you to go on a run at lunch. We want you to go to your kids’ school play. We want you to do this thing that you have a personal passion for, even though it’s during work hours,’” Osborne told me. But behind closed doors, the same leaders debated whether to promote employees who went on lunchtime runs or left early to make the school play. Taking them at their word was a trap. But this didn’t happen in the new, colder environment, it happened years ago, when it was in vogue to be a support-everyone kind of company. Which tends to confirm the worker suspicion that many companies never believed in empathy at all.What It Feels Like When the Vibe ShiftsEven so, I found employees who wanted me to know that they don’t believe corporate empathy is dead. One of them works in product development at a large, U.S.-based tech company. He wanted me to use a pseudonym—we’ll call him Terry—so he could speak candidly.Terry likes his work, which he says is creative and challenging. He also likes that expectations are clear and good work is rewarded. There have been two rounds of layoffs and a reorganization since he arrived, but Terry believes the matters were handled as well as they could have been.Primarily, he told me, empathy is evident in the fact that executives are so accessible. For two years, and especially lately, employees have asked executives during town hall meetings whether they’ll stick with DEI. The answer has always been yes. They ask whether workers will be called back to the office. The answer is no, remote and hybrid work will stay in place. As far as ratcheting up productivity expectations, the company now attaches bonuses to performance, but Terry doesn’t believe that’s meant to hector workers. It’s just what happens when revenue flattens out.But something weird happened. Recently, Terry’s new boss told him to provide weekly status updates, a requirement that sounds suspiciously close to Elon Musk’s ominous email to federal employees, ordering them to list five accomplishments for the week. I asked Terry, does that give you pause? It does, so he’s going to ask his manager why. Is he not trusted? Many workers may be harboring the same concerns, but aren’t confident enough to speak up. “Senior leadership can’t make people ask questions,” Terry told me, “but they can create an atmosphere where you can ask questions in front of everyone, or silently Slack the leadership.” So that’s what he’s going to do.What Does Empathy Have to Do With Business?It may be worth asking ourselves where we expect empathy in the workplace to come from: the executives in the C-suite who represent the business, or the colleagues we interact with on a daily basis?One employee who was recently let go from the Department of Education wrote on LinkedIn about how her colleagues went out of their way to help when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. One tech worker told me how much their manager was a mentor. Federal workers at the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Commerce have told me how they’re banding together to share resources and support. Go looking for empathy, and you’ll find it.What some employees are getting from their employers cannot be dismissed: bullying and badgering, threats and ultimatums. Really big sticks and no carrots to speak of. People are really angry about layoffs. Most people would agree this is really bad humanity. Some would argue really bad business too.Business Insider’s Aki Ito reported on how Meta’s harsh performance reviews may backfire and damage productivity rather than improve performance. “CEOs may think they’re creating a meritocracy,” Ito writes. “but in reality they’re marching their companies straight into a trap of sunken morale, high turnover, depressed profits, and reduced innovation.”There’s evidence that corporate empathy really does affect dollars and cents. Among my favorite examples is a study by a group of researchers in Switzerland and the UK. They examined 510 CEO conference calls by 448 U.S.-based companies on the Russell 3000 stock index that took place in the earliest stages of the pandemic. They found that the more CEOs made statements, even vague ones, that signaled their human concern for employees, customers, or clients, the better those companies’ stock prices fared when overall share prices plunged in March 2020. The researchers call them “human care statements.”We’ve seen the opposite happen in 2025. Tesla’s stock price has been dropping precipitously, for nine straight weeks. Much of that may be politically inspired, but Musk’s gleeful lack of empathy for workers hit by DOGE cutbacks, with references to wood chippers and chain saws, gained viral infamy.The opposite kind of behavior appears to be demonstrably beneficial and stabilizing. “Follow-up explorations unveiled a negative association between CEO human care statements and stock volatility, meaning that market participants discounted these companies’ future earnings less,” the study reads. “Our explorations suggest that it pays off for CEOs to go beyond mere financial information and show some humanity.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism.(Featured photo by Miniseries/iStock by Getty Images)

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza March 19, 2025

A New Use Case for AI: Succession Planning in an Era of ‘Squiggly Careers’

Careers are more non-linear than they’ve ever been. This trend puts workers who can flex with the times, moving fluidly across roles and departments, in high demand. This is true not only among early-career workers finding their way, but at every level of the organization.At the top, companies are expanding the responsibilities of executives and adding new seats to the C-suite. Traditional paths to the top are being overwritten by “squiggly” careers. Take, for instance, the role of chief financial officer. Fewer CFOs are coming from purely finance backgrounds, with operational resumes becoming a popular pedigree. Some executives are pulling double duty. Salesforce appointed its first dual CFO-COO in 2025, as did PayPal and outdoor-apparel company Cotopaxi. Chief financial officer is now officially a route to the CEO’s job.As careers become more circuitous than straight, succession planning gets harder. Old paradigms are less relevant. It’s now the skills that matter—and the assessment of them.Workforce demographics further complicate succession planning. During the span of 2024-27, more than 11,200 Americans will turn 65 every day. Retiring Baby Boomers are vacating a record number of senior positions. Identifying and preparing the next generation of leaders is a key exercise for HR.Artificial intelligence may be the answer. Overloaded HR teams are already employing generative AI agents to write the first draft of job descriptions and benefits newsletters, but the tasks AI can complete for HR are getting increasingly complex, like identifying attrition risks. Why not succession planning?Succession Planning for a Skills-Based WorkforceArtificial intelligence is a promising solution because it helps identify employees who have the skills necessary for the role, not only the right career history. HR is already using artificial intelligence to identify skills within an organization, typically to match current employees to open roles or new projects, but “you could easily extend that to succession planning,” says Chris Pinc, the director of product management at consulting firm WTW.Firms like WTW and other industry experts are spinning up their own AI-backed agents. For instance, the Josh Bersin Company launched its new AI platform for HR, called Galileo, in 2024. It looks a lot like ChatGPT; users type a query into a search bar and the tool returns an answer. Galileo can suggest prompts or help you find specific content related to HR expertise.Chris Pinc, the director of product management at consulting firm WTW (company photo)WTW released its own AI assistant, Expert, last month, while HR tech firm Visier has Vee, an AI agent specifically for people analytics. Google is working on its own AI-powered instance for its HR team. Like Bersin’s Galileo, the interfaces of Expert and Vee will be familiar to anyone who has used a generative AI tool. Why use tools like Galileo or Expert instead of ChatGPT? First, these platforms are closed environments, which means that the information employers enter about their workforce stays only within their ecosystem; it doesn’t feed the larger corpus underlying the tool. And second, these platforms are trained on data, research, and thought leadership from respected HR firms. Galileo pulls from the Bersin company’s own collection plus others, like research from Heidrick & Struggles. WTW’s Expert is similarly constructed, with the entirety of the WTW library backing the tool. Users can load in their own proprietary resources, like survey results, skills assessments, projects, plans, frameworks, processes, and original research. Amy Farner, Bersin’s SVP of product and member experience, said, “We’re not letting it go out there and troll the web.” These companies tell the AI what content to trust.Where AI Can Supercharge Succession PlanningLet’s say it’s time to start looking for a successor to your chief marketing officer, who’s likely to retire in the next three years. Let’s use generative AI to find a good fit. You might ask your tool: I need to find employees who have taken on several major, client-facing projects in the last year. Ideally, with the marketing team. They need to score high on our leadership assessment for innovation and creativity. They also need eight to 10 years of people-management experience.The tool returns a list of leaders matching the criteria. You’re surprised to see Kelly Kapoor, a senior manager from business development, on the list. You learn that last year she worked on a successful product launch and still attends regular meetings with the tech and marketing teams. Not only that, Kelly’s name appears on several proposals for new product features and she has created detailed presentations on original competitive research. Plus, her performance reviews are excellent.Amy Farner, SVP of product and member experience for the Josh Bersin Company (Company photo)It looks like she might be a promising candidate, but under the company’s traditional framework, she never would have crossed your radar. So you load the CMO job description into the AI tool and tell it to map a three-year development plan to prep Kelly for the seat. You learn that she hasn’t yet completed a few key leadership-training courses, and she has very little experience working with creative teams. Plus, she’s had only two or three direct reports at a time. Looks like Kelly has a ways to go before she’s ready, but now you have a new candidate and a plan.What Other Talent Have We Been Overlooking?This is a fictional example, but there’s real-world precedent. Pinc has seen it happen. Recently, one of his colleagues in IT was promoted to a senior finance role. “She took on a special project to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of our overall software-development function,” he said. “She learned a lot about finance, then became a logical person to be the finance director for the IT function. She understood the finance work from that project and she understood the IT from her previous role.” Use AI to fill a role like this, and it can be scaled for an entire organization. The success of so many nonlinear careers raises the question: What other great talent have employers been overlooking?AI can lower the cost of succession planning too, said Pinc, who worked closely on the creation of Expert. Companies have long used leadership assessments for succession planning to find people who are capable of climbing the ladder, but it’s expensive to interpret the results, present them to leadership, then work with HR to write development plans. “That’s human time that I think will be able to be taken over by AI,” he said.AI is still relatively new to HR professionals. This is due, in part, to privacy concerns. Companies can’t just throw employee data into a gen-AI chatbot, even if it is a closed system. And HR is not historically a tech-forward department, but that’s changing. For now, HR is primarily using AI for time-saving, says Farner, but that will expand over time. Organizations are beginning to move past tapping AI as an assistant completing admin tasks to tapping AI as a consultant that operates like a colleague.Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism.(Featured illustration by Photoman/iStock by Getty Images) 

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza March 19, 2025

5 Priorities for 2025: How HR Leaders Plan to Meet a New Wave of Change

In 2025, HR will be at yet another inflection point. With high levels of employee detachment, anxiety about the arrival of AI, and a huge demand for new skills, corporate CEOs are saying to their chief people officers (CPOs): We need you to fix these things. And by the way, restructure how your own HR operations run–and keep spirits high too!It’s a lot, but chief HR officers are gearing up for another wave of change, even after the incessant disruption in the five years since the pandemic arrived. The consulting firm Heidrick & Struggles interviewed 70 chief people officers around the world about what it takes to do the job. Jennifer Wilson, the co-head of the global HR-officers practice at the firm, wasn’t surprised by the substance of their findings—artificial intelligence, generational changes, and the need to adapt to a stream of curveballs are all priorities they expected to find. What surprised her is the urgency that CPOs expressed, and the evidence that CEOs are leaning so heavily on them for answers. CPOs are super-connectors, the report says, with demands on their attention coming from all sides. As a result, “progressive organizations are playing with their HR functional models,” Wilson said.From Day One spoke to HR leaders and the consultants who work with them about their plans for the new year. Among the myriad responsibilities on their plate, what will they focus on in 2025? This is what they told us they plan to do.Renew the Focus on Company CultureSpeculation about the future of work once conjured images of workers zipping around the office on hoverboards, said Dan Kaplan, senior partner at consulting firm Korn Ferry. Now, futurists train their focus on culture. “It should be the guiding light for companies,” he said, but “they’ve gotten away from that.”The percentage of U.S. workers who say they’re thriving in life has hit a record low: Just 50% of workers Gallup surveyed in 2024 are feeling good about their current life and future prospects, a figure that has declined in the past decade. Gallup also found that employees are detached from their jobs. The chief culprit: rapid organizational changes and the persistent uncertainty around flexible work schedules. If CPOs are still fighting with their CEOs and boards about workers returning to office in 2025, “then you’ve lost,” Kaplan said. The HR leaders who will win are those that can push executives closer to their employees, and inspire them to deliver.Elaine Becraft, the SVP of HR at global medical-tech company Siemens Healthineers, believes that company culture must connect workers to each other and to the mission of the business. Long gone are the days of clocking in and clocking out to collect a paycheck. In 2025, she’s going to focus on holistic employee care.Workers need a new relationship with their employers, and that responsibility has been handed to HR. “There is a recognition that the workforce overall is tired,” said Wilson at Heidrick & Struggles. “We’ve been through a lot over the last few years. The nature of work is changing. Mental health issues in the western world are more prominent than they’ve been in the past, and that’s really become a reality for chief people officers.”Get to the Next Steps on AIArtificial intelligence is unavoidable, but there’s a gap between expectations by CEOs and the actual embrace of AI by workers. “So far, employee adoption of AI in the workplace is lagging behind the hype,” Gallup reports. If your company isn’t an early adopter, it’s probably trying to catch up. Among the innovators is media agency VML, where the global head of organizational development, Loren Blandon, is prioritizing AI upskilling. “In our industry, it’s really critical that we position ourselves as a leader in integrative use, application, adoption, and innovation of AI. We need people fully embracing and using it,” she told From Day One.How do you get world-class creatives to adopt technology that poses an immediate threat to their jobs? “You have to show them that it’s going to amplify their work,” Blandon said. “Then you get them to understand that whether you accept this or not, it’s coming, and it’s in your best interest to start using it rather than fighting yourself into being obsolete.” She’s found that many who dig in their heels just haven’t experimented with AI yet. But when you invite them in and show them how to play, the wheels start turning, and suddenly it’s cool.Ninety-one percent of early-adopting firms report positive results with AI, including increased productivity and cost-savings, according to a report from the Institute for Corporate Productivity, or i4cp. And companies that operationalize AI will outpace their peers.Workforce concerns about AI will continue, with employees anxious about their being displaced or replaced. “That has landed in the CPO’s lap,” said Wilson. HR executives are responsible for equipping the workforce with AI skills, but with no precedents for use, it’s still not always clear when, where, how, or why they’re meant to apply those skills–at least not yet. Of course, HR has its own misgivings about AI encroaching on its territory, and CPOs will have to quell concerns from their own teams at the same time they upskill their colleagues.Invest in the Skills-Based WorkforceForget the traditional concept of a job. It’s a skills-based world now, with much more malleable definitions of roles and projects. And “until companies shift their cultures, efforts to scale skills-based marketplaces will stall,” i4cp’s report says.In a skills-based workforce, employees flow from one assignment to the next, pick up skills in fractional roles, dip into new teams with temporary projects, and volunteer their expertise in new departments. Ideally, all work is promotable and company tenure is no longer a deciding factor.  There’s a large share of the workforce that may be attracted to the fluidity of skills-based work. Sixty-five percent of workers feel stuck in their current roles, according to a Glassdoor survey, a situation that can breed resentment. “It used to be that you stepped into a defined job with tasks, and that was your role all the time. Now it’s more project-based,” said VML’s Blandon. For one team you might be the brand leader, and for another you’re the project manager. “I think jobs need to be fundamentally redesigned to tap into people’s ‘gig desires.’ They want to bring more skill sets to the table. They want to explore more things, and I think we can be savvy in leveraging that.”Maintain a Commitment to DEI, But Change the LanguageDespite recent high-profile changes in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs by the likes of Walmart and Ford in the face of anti-DEI activists, the overall corporate commitment to DEI’s principles isn’t dead. “Activists are overstating the surface-level changes many companies are making to get rid of the heat,” CNN reported this week based on a review of company policies. “Nearly all the largest companies in America still say they are committed to promoting DEI.”Companies are motivated to persist with the principles of DEI because, in an increasingly diverse population, it has been proven to be good for the bottom line, as well as employee retention and motivation. That said, companies still want to avoid the political flak, so they have shifted the emphasis of their language, focusing more on inclusion and belonging. The values have already been operationalized and, in some cases, leaders have asserted that they have not abandoned those values, but are waiting to see what the temperature will be under a second Trump Administration before speaking out more.How can HR make sure thier companies evolve their practices, and not just the labels? The NeuroLeadership Institute’s DEI Impact Case recommends three actions that organizations can take to maintain their investments in DEI, no matter what they’re calling it, as Fast Company reports: “prioritize diversity by aligning it with specific business goals, habituate inclusion through targeted learning and performance tools that integrate it into daily practices, and systemize equity by examining policies and procedures to embed and sustain fairness throughout.”Reshape Organizational StructuresThe new skills-based economy is shaking up corporate structures, and companies are “delayering” their organizations, removing expensive middle managers believed by some to stymie productivity, while companies are also trying to teach managers to be more effective. Blandon says we’re due. “When was the last time we truly thought about reframing that? Manager, subordinate. It hasn’t been really tweaked in a long time, and people are questioning it.”Some companies are delayering to usher in the next generation of executives. Baby Boomers in the C-suite are retiring, and “you’ve got to get that next layer ready,” Wilson said. As vacancies open en masse, “how do you make sure that you don’t have business disruption from that newness?”Kaplan hopes that a shallow hierarchy will shrink the distance between the CEO and the rank and file–and motivate the workforce. “The CEO should be the most inspiring leader in the company,” he said, and by bringing workers closer to their leader, they may feel more connected to the company.At many comppanies, the HR department is getting a reorganization of its own. The traditional “centers of excellence” model, in which HR segments specialize in narrow disciplines, is on its way out, and a cross-functional model, in which HR teams are multi-skilled and capable of working with all departments, is gaining popularity. People ops no longer waits for requests, but goes problem-solving on its own. “We’re seeing agile teams form and disband for specific organizational issues,” said Wilson.Experiments abound. Some companies have moved all administrative tasks to a general shared-services center, leaving HR to “focus entirely on talent, leadership, succession, bench strength, organizational design, and [organizational development].” And, according to Wilson, this could be “a smart way to get HR out of the administrative chains that it’s been under for so many years.”Maybe it’s time for HR and people operations to get a new name? “Talent operations,” Wilson suggested, but then paused. Even that suggests the team is doing more admin than it really does, and the discipline continues to grow. “Maybe talent advisors?” Whatever the name, she said, it should demonstrate that talent is at the center of its responsibilities.“We’re like the lookout on a boat,” Becraft said about her team at Siemens Healthineers. “We see issues, challenges, and opportunities coming toward the company, and it’s our responsibility to bring those to the right people and make sure they understand what’s going on out there.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz, Business Insider, and Fast Company.(Featured image: Photo by Kobus Louw/iStock by Getty Images)

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza December 18, 2024