Delta did the thing
Hiii,
For those of you who had Monday off, I hope you enjoy this glorious 4-day work week!
For those who didn’t, the next holiday will be around sooner than you think…or at least that’s what I will keep telling myself.
This week we're talking about Delta dropping $1.3B in profit sharing on employees, what it's like surviving as an HR team of one, and the fact that a third of workers want heartbreak leave, which honestly tracks.
Let’s have some fun!
🗞️ Here’s the Tea:Copy anchor linkCopied
💰 Delta Airlines pays out $1.3bn to employees in profit share
The TL;DR: Delta paid out $1.3B in profit sharing, giving employees about 8.9% of eligible earnings (or about 4 weeks' of extra pay). Their formula pays 10% of the first $2.5B in profits and 20% above that, and they say they’ve distributed $11B+ since 2015. Delta positions it as a key comp pillar and a “we see you” reward for performance.
My POV: This is what it looks like when people being your greatest asset is backed by actual money and not just a LinkedIn post with a sunset photo.
Profit-sharing does two useful things HR folks rarely get credit for: it creates a clear line between company performance and employee reward, and it gives leaders a compensation lever that isn’t “we appreciate you” during layoffs and “we can’t afford raises” during growth.
Also, if your org is doing buybacks and bragging about record quarters while employees are getting vibes and pizza, congratulations, you’ve just found your next comp philosophy fight!
🎙️ Mic Drop Moment:Copy anchor linkCopied
“You have survived 100 percent of your worst days.”Copy anchor linkCopied
On the mic this week: Sarah Rose Hattem is a Senior HR Solutions Consultant at Rippling with about 8 years of HR experience, most notably as an HR party of one at early-stage tech startups like Steno and Tilt. She got her master's degree in HR during the pandemic while simultaneously building HR departments, hiring 10 people a month, and managing everything from payroll to employee engagement.
Pin this:
- Being an HR team of one means constantly balancing people needs, business needs, and urgent fires…usually all at once.
- Prioritization works best when you bucket work into business-critical, business-essential, and nice-to-have.
- Technology and automation should be all about freeing you to do strategic work.
- The fastest way to get buy-in for HR initiatives is to understand stakeholder priorities first and tie your plan to ROI.
My H*ly Sh*t Moment: Hearing Sarah say that every terrible, exhausting day is one we’ve already survived reminded me that resilience is something we’ve been proving all along.
▶️ Press Play
📊 Data Is My Love Language:Copy anchor linkCopied
Stat: A third of workers say they want ‘heartbreak leave’
My spiral: Honestly, people are already calling in sick or burning PTO to deal with breakups, so are we really preventing absence, or are we just forcing people to lie about why they're absent?
What's wild is that 40% said they'd only need like three days to recover, which isn't that different from needing a few days off for any other life crisis, but we've somehow decided romantic heartbreak isn't legitimate enough.
If we actually cared about not having people show up completely checked out and useless, maybe we'd stop pretending people can just compartmentalize their personal lives the second they log on!
🛠️ In Your Toolkit Copy anchor linkCopied
When you're being asked to cut costs while also caring deeply about people (with zero context and impossible timelines), you need a lot more than just good intentions!
You need actual frameworks for making impossible decisions.
This month's HR Therapy session, People vs. Payroll: The HR Cost Balancing Act, is we will address this dilemma!
We'll be talking all about how to survive the gray areas when there's no "right" answer.
Join us on Feb 25th for best practices on navigating budget pressure without betraying your values or burning out completely!
🗣️ UNMUTE YOURSELF
For better or for worse, some of our biggest growth moments come from the hires we shouldn't have made and the people we should've let go sooner.
Those decisions haunt us differently than policy mistakes because they involve actual humans and real consequences.
“What's a talent decision you regret, but learned the most from?”
🛠️ TRY THIS TOMORROW:
Inertia is incredibly expensive, but we rarely notice it because "that's how we've always done it" sounds like a reason instead of an excuse.
A lot of our processes exist because someone set them up three years ago and nobody ever questioned whether they still make sense.
Ask your team:
"What's one process we keep doing just because we've always done it?"
👂 OVERHEARD IN SAFE SPACE
Nothing says healthy organization like fighting for every people investment while leadership runs the company on fear and finance runs it on a permanent state of no!
Read what members had to say here.
See ya on Friday!
