Business

This exec posted on LinkedIn requesting cleaning as a benefit. The next day, HR answered her call

Published

3 hours ago

January 15, 2026

When Christina Le posted generally on LinkedIn about mental health, burnout, and work-life balance, she didn’t expect her company to respond. Le, the head of marketing at social media content creation platform Slate, had offered one small suggestion for executives: “If companies are refreshing benefits this year, here’s a free idea: Add a cleaning service stipend.”

While wellness stipends and gym perks “are fine,” she wrote, “not everyone wants to spend their limited free time on a treadmill. For a lot of us, a clean home does more for our well-being than another obligation.” Le argued a home-cleaning perk could be more “practical. It’s human. It takes one thing off the list.”

And much to her surprise, her company not only responded, but quickly acted to add cleaning services as a benefit for employees.

Le told Fortune she ”genuinely didn’t” expect the company to respond that way, especially since she had just started at the company only a few weeks ago.

“You hear a lot of organizations talk about valuing their people and prioritizing culture, but Slate actually demonstrated it in a very real, very immediate way,” Le said. It wasn’t performative. They didn’t overthink it. They just listened and acted, which says a lot about how seriously they take their team.

In fact, it only took the human resources team at her company one day to message Le to to let her know they had seen her suggestion and “we loved it,” and the leadership team agreed to add it as a benefit.

“It sparked a really good internal discussion, and the leadership team agreed it makes total sense for Slate, especially since we’re a fully remote team,” Pamela Lopez, a human resources specialist with Slate, wrote in an internal message to Le. Employees receive this $200 benefit once per month, and the funds are added to a Ramp card for them to use. Alternatively, employees can request reimbursement for the expense.

Eric Stark, cofounder and president at Slate, told Fortune that while home cleaning services weren’t something the leadership team had specifically discussed as a benefit in the past for his 40-person company, the idea stood out because of “how practical and human the suggestion was.”

“The takeaway is that you don’t need grand, expensive programs to make a real difference,” Stark added. “Sometimes the most impactful benefits come from listening closely to employees and removing friction from their lives.”

Aside from traditional health care and retirement benefits, Slate also offers employees $100 stipends that can go toward a home office or monthly co-working space, professional development and a $200 monthly health and wellness stipend employees can use “that genuinely improve their day-to-day well-being,” Stark said. They’ve also added an “AI enablement” stipend employees can use to explore and experiment with new AI tools.

“Rather than centralizing experimentation or prescribing a single stack, we encourage employees to try emerging tools, learn what actually works in their role, and share those insights back with the team,” Stark said. “It’s been a practical way to build AI literacy across the company without forcing adoption from the top down.”

Le’s post sparks online discussion about employee benefits

Le’s post on LinkedIn received thousands of likes and hundreds of comments—and she also shared her story on TikTok. There it got nearly 60,000 likes and sparked discussions about how companies should approach employee benefits in a modern workplace.

@bbschnook The first time posting on LinkedIn paid off #corporatelife #corporatemillennial #workingmom ♬ original sound – bbschnook

Some people who identified themselves as HR professionals commented they want to suggest cleaning services as a benefit at their own companies, and others shared how their own companies allow them to use their health and wellness benefits for things like the gym, cleaning, tutoring, estate planning, home workout equipment, and food delivery services.

Le said the response she’s gotten both from her company and followers has been “incredibly affirming.”

“Work is hard,” she told Fortune. “We spend an enormous amount of our lives doing it, and it’s difficult to stay motivated when your relationship with your job feels purely transactional.

Especially working in tech, she added, her company is in a “privileged position to rethink what meaningful benefits actually look like—and to keep evolving them as people’s lives and needs change.”

Rethinking health and wellness benefits

In the past few years, many companies have tried adding health and wellness benefits to appeal to employees to keep them happy. While that works for some people, not everyone wants to spend their free time at a gym, and have other things in mind for what would really help their health and wellbeing. In fact, a 2025 employee benefits trends report from ADP shows people prefer customizable benefits over generic plans that don’t need specific needs, and the human capital management company recommends regularly asking for employee feedback on the benefits they need and want.

“Many wellness benefits are framed as adding more to your schedule—go to the gym, book a class, make time for therapy,” Le said. “Those things matter, but they don’t remove the everyday mental load people are carrying. Your house is still messy. Dinner still needs to happen. Childcare logistics don’t disappear.”

Instead, offering benefits like cleaning services helps reduce the things people have to do during their 5-9, rather than piling more on. There is a wealth of neuroscience and psychology research showing a clean home can help reduce stress.

“When you take something off people’s plates, you give them real breathing room,” Le said.

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Business

AI will infiltrate the industrial workforce in 2026—let’s apply it to training the next generation, not replacing them

Published

19 minutes ago

January 15, 2026

Jace Porter

A silent crisis is shaking the very foundations of modern society.

The industrial workforce responsible for building the global economy is at risk of crumbling. The people charged with keeping our power grids online, factories humming, utilities reliable, and supply chains moving uninterrupted are retiring at a fast clip. Sure, this may seem like the natural cycle of things as mass retirement opens the door to at least 3.8 million jobs. But it hides a deeply troubling reality: tacit knowledge, along with practical skills refined over decades of hands-on work, is at risk of leaving with them.

While technologies from artificial intelligence to robotics to computer vision are transforming industrial operations, we’re dangerously close as a society to losing the ability to diagnose a failing motor by sound, read analog engineering drawings, or understand the quirks of a 60-year-old machine that predates Disco.

This kind of expertise is rarely written down in one place and always valuable, especially when there’s a mechanical issue or system-level disruption. Meanwhile, generative AI is making information feel instantly available.

The tension here is real and consequential. The question facing junior industrial professionals across industries, from heavy manufacturing to utilities to supply chain: If software can answer questions in seconds, why spend years learning by doing (and, in some cases, failing)?

When it comes to industrial operations, the answer is actually quite simple. We can’t afford to lose earned knowledge or train a workforce that uses AI without understanding the system it supports from soup to nuts.

The opportunity with investing in AI is to preserve the knowledge needed to keep lights on, factories humming, and society moving, and apply it at scale. Success requires keeping pace with gen AI advancements while adapting to macro factors and global challenges that come in waves. This opens the door wider for AI working with humans (and vice versa) to build resilience into essential industries powering the world’s economy for decades to come.

AI’s Elevated Role: Not On Autopilot

Industry runs on machinery and management making the right calls. Consistently. Confidently. But it’s not that simple.

Across the industrial economy, it’s common for a small group of experienced workers to serve as keepers of an outsized amount of knowledge. They know which vibration or clanking noise spells trouble, which workaround keeps production going during a shortage, and which drawing accurately reflects the latest hardware installments in the field.

At the same time, many companies still operate using a patchwork of small group expertise, spreadsheets, and fragmented databases requiring manual collation. When one system goes down or an expert retires (or, frankly, is out sick), it’s nearly impossible to answer simple questions like: what parts do we have, which assets matter most, or where is money being wasted?

These aren’t small businesses or Mom and Pop shops. Manufacturing giants, automobile OEMs, fleet management companies, utilities, and defense contractors are among the collection of expertise-dependent organizations primed for AI support. Every organization is different but they encounter the same critical problem that AI can help solve: data is everywhere, it’s fragmented or siloed, and organizing it requires plumbing every system and file repository to combine relevant information. Humans can collate and organize data collections in weeks or months with a dedicated effort. Today’s AI, meanwhile, can organize data deluges in minutes or hours.

Trade Painstaking Decisions for Decision Intelligence

The other driving factor: Industrial work is full of tradeoffs. Factory managers, technicians, floor mechanics, and engineers are constantly faced with dilemmas: fix or replace, act now or wait, cut costs or reduce risk, maximize uptime or meet sustainability goals. These decisions affect millions of assets and must be made under regulatory scrutiny, often with incomplete information. AI helps people make better decisions, not turn on autopilot and zone out.

AI is good at pulling together signals from various sources and making sense of them in a way that humans understand immediately, such as maintenance history, sensor data, demand forecasts, market conditions, and environmental risks. When used well, AI can help teams plan, predict, and prioritize. AI backstops human judgment. With the available tech, neither human or machine should be left to their own devices.

This ability to support decision-making goes beyond convenience or cost efficiency. It’s a powerful industrial asset as power grids, utilities, and manufacturers face unprecedented demands from electrification, data center growth and expansion, and full-scale automation. AI can help spot problems earlier, justify investment choices, and safely extend the life of aging equipment. That is not automation for its own sake. It is about keeping essential systems reliable.

AI: A Workforce Equalizer for Trade and Technical Work

Younger workers (18-35) are often criticized for relying too much on technology, or expected to do so when a system falters or machinery requires maintenance. In reality, they want tools that help them do meaningful work safely and efficiently.

Younger workers are also among the first groups to fully embrace that AI advances insanely fast. The tech available today is good enough to accurately reflect seasoned experience, shorten learning curves, and close talent gaps with near-instant, but verified and context-rich data gleaned from real-world work.

Why that matters: AI can demolish the barrier to entry to industrial jobs without neutering the skills required to do the job. Younger pros benefit from AI’s ability to dramatically reduce time spent mining for information or wrestling with fragmented systems. AI actually renders jobs more technical and more rewarding. Both appealing to younger workforce members.

Industrial roles from field service manager to HVAC technician to factory shift worker keep the world running, yet they are often misrepresented as tech-agnostic or low-skill. In reality, they require deep expertise and a variety of skill sets. Across the industrial economy, AI is poised to accelerate skills training ten-fold and open the door for a new generation of industrial pros to step in—and here’s the important bit—without sacrificing quality, let alone imploding the entire system.

We’re seeing vocational programs at community college enrollment numbers tick up, increasing 16% in 2025 compared to last year. This is a signal that Gen Z is open-minded and ready to take on blue collar work in favor of desk jobs. It’s also evidence that AI is not only serving as an equalizer, but actively reshaping and advancing blue collar’s next generation.

Embrace AI as a Workforce Asset, Or Lose Everything

While industrial AI is just beginning to enter mainstream conversations thanks to, for example, $61B in data center contracts in 2025 alone and a buzzy race to collect GPUs for full-scale AI deployments in the physical world, the window to act is already closing. I estimate we have 1-2 years left to capture decades of industrial knowledge in AI applications and front-edge tech platforms supported by AI on the backend, or we lose it. Everything.

The industrial economy operates in the real world, with communities around the globe relying on it for jobs, electricity, and much more. People building AI to meet unprecedented demand need to ship practical tools that respect human experience, support better decisions, and make complex systems easier to understand—whether you’ve been on the job for four weeks or 40 years. Industrial operations are deeply technical, nuanced, and complex. AI alone can’t do the work at scale. Systems need industry-rich context and informed prompts from human counterparts to produce outcomes that solve problems and stand the test of time.

AI can (and should) be applied to industrial operations in an authoritative, but supporting role across sectors and specific use cases.

But industry must adopt innovation that preserves nuance, predictive maintenance inclinations, and incident-specific experience only possible from years of hands-on work. That’s how we add resilience to global operations. To do this in hours and days, not months, we need both AI and people. I’m optimistic that AI won’t hollow out the industrial workforce. In fact, incorporating AI at scale to support a younger workforce may be the only way to sustain it.

The opinions expressed in Fortune.com commentary pieces are solely the views of their authors and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of Fortune.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com

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Business

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Published

50 minutes ago

January 15, 2026

Jace Porter

Good morning. The C-suite drama at Saks Global was one of our most popular stories with subscribers last week—and it’s no wonder why. It had risky dealmaking, a failing real estate scion, and luxury chains flailing even though consumers are spending like never before. Now there’s a new twist—Saks Global has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection and luxury executive Geoffroy van Raemdonck will have the job of turning around the luxury retail group.

It’s an area where van Raemdonck certainly has relevant experience: In 2018, he became CEO of Neiman Marcus Group (which included Bergdorf Goodman), then struggling under the weight of heavy debt from years of private equity ownership. This time around, as CEO of Saks Global, which also piled on debt stemming from the $2.7 billion union in 2024, he’ll have an even tougher job with multiple chains to fix.

During his six years running Neiman Marcus, he succeeded in protecting its market share from the industry headwinds facing luxury department stores and returned it to profitability. As CEO of Neiman Marcus Group, he often called his management philosophy “leading with love,” a term that often won him snickers at conferences.

What it really meant was making sure luxury was not merely transactional but more about a deeper connection with the consumer, whether inspiring their loyalty from highly personalized service or making them feel like they were at the forefront of fashion. (He famously landed in controversy in 2023 after he told Fortune that his plan was to focus on the well-heeled, much more than on those aspiring to be part of the elite.)

But you can’t woo customers if you have stale or low inventory, so winning AWOL customers, which should be van Raemdonck’s top priority, will certainly have to begin with mending fences with beleaguered vendors. Between sluggish business and its cash crunch, Saks has in the last two years delayed payments to many vendors. Many of the suppliers, particularly smaller ones that could give Neiman and Saks tastemaking cachet, have stopped shipping to its stores. Nordstrom and Bloomingdale’s have wasted no time in swooping in and grabbing some of that market share.

Indeed, one of the reasons van Raemdonck got the job, on top of his experience heading Neiman, was his many years of management experience as a vendor, including years at Ralph Lauren and Louis Vuitton; he speaks their language.

His hands-on experience guiding a company through a bankruptcy reorganization will be a huge help. He knows how to talk to financiers, vendors and employees all at once. That’s a good place to start in the quest to get these historic brands back to health.—Phil Wahba

Contact CEO Daily via Diane Brady at diane.brady@fortune.com

Top news

A ‘watch and see’ approach to Iran

President Donald Trump said Wednesday that Iran had stopped killing anti-government protestors, which seemed to dial down his earlier threats of a military strike. Trump has vowed to attack Iran if it killed demonstrators. U.S. troops were starting to mobilize from a base in Qatar as human rights groups reported hundreds of such deaths. The president said Wednesday, “we’re going to watch and see what the process is,” when asked whether a strike was now off the table. Oil prices sank on the apparent deescalation.

Dimon’s break with Trump

Jamie Dimon has worked to repair his relationship with President Donald Trump, often expressing support for the administration while watering down criticism of specific policies. But now the JPMorgan CEO’s criticism of the DOJ’s Federal Reserve investigation threatens to derail the relationship again.

TSMC earnings boost confidence

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. reported blowout earnings Thursday, posting higher profit and revenue in the last three months of 2025. The world’s largest contract chip maker indicated it could meet surging demand for AI chips, reassuring tech investors who had moved away from the Magnificent 7 in recent days.

Another visa crackdown

The U.S. will pause immigration visa processing for applicants from 75 countries, including Russia, Iran, Brazil, Egypt, and Thailand as it tries to block foreign nationals who may rely on public services. The government will still issue short-term visas.

AI’s risk to London jobs

In an address tonight, London Mayor Sadiq Khan will warn that AI could lead to “a new era of mass unemployment” in the British capital and call on lawmakers to establish guardrails that ensure AI is used for “positive transformation” and not the “destruction of jobs.”

Citigroup CEO issues stern employee memo

Citigroup CEO Jan Fraser stressed to employees that “the bar is raised” in a new internal memo, reported previously by Bloomberg, that emphasized to employees that they are “judged on our results.” The bank plans to cut about 1,000 jobs this week.

Coinbase CEO throws wrench in Senate crypto act debates

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong abruptly came out against the Genius Act, a landmark crypto bill that is set for debate by the Senate Banking Committee. Armstrong named a number of specific critiques in his X post, including disagreements over offering rewards on stablecoin holdings and asserted that “we’d rather have no bill than a bad bill.”

The markets

S&P 500 futures were up 0.34% this morning. The last session closed down 0.53%. STOXX Europe 600 was up 0.36% in early trading. The U.K.’s FTSE 100 was up o.52% in early trading. Japan’s Nikkei 225 was down 0.42%. China’s CSI 300 was up o.2%. The South Korea KOSPI was up 1.58%. Indian markets are closed today. Bitcoin was at $97K.

Around the watercooler

Peter Thiel makes his biggest donation in years to help defeat California’s billionaire wealth tax by Nick Lichtenberg

Whole Foods cofounder says his hardest ever business decision was firing his father from his company board: ‘That was when my mentorship was over’ by Sasha Rogelberg

Rural America is getting a bailout, but not from Trump—billionaires are riding to the rescue by Nick Lichtenberg

The job market is broken, but Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang is ‘fairly confident’ that AI will increase productivity and therefore, hiring—but there’s a catch by Preston Fore

CEO Daily is compiled and edited by Joey Abrams, Claire Zillman and Lee Clifford.

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Business

Desperate job seekers are abandoning the idea of a ‘dream job’

Published

1 hour ago

January 15, 2026

Jace Porter

As companies slow hiring and job growth stalls, many Americans feel lucky just to have a job.

A new survey from ZipRecruiter Economic Research reports that many new hires are taking pay cuts and not negotiating compensation. While a majority say they would leave their roles for higher pay, opportunities to do so seem scarce.

About half of new hires (53%) — defined as people who have started their jobs within the previous six months — found their job within one month. Over a fourth (27%) of new hires took a pay cut, often after an extended period of unemployment, and only 56% increased their pay, down from 61% from last quarter. Benefits suffered too, with only 15% of new hires receiving a signing bonus last quarter, the lowest rate of 2025.

Only 30.4% of new hires negotiated their offers. Those who did negotiate got a better deal, often higher base pay, which may suggest that some job seekers are leaving money on the table.

“We’re seeing more decisions being made out of necessity,” said ZipRecruiter Labor Economist Nicole Bachaud. “What we’re seeing is that with the challenges of this market, how difficult it is to secure even that first offer. There has been a kind of pullback from workers feeling that they have the power to negotiate.”

The long term unemployment rate is up over 15% from a year ago in November, according to ZipRecruiter, and only 50,000 jobs were added to the economy in December. Last year, Amazon laid off 14,000 corporate employees, and Microsoft cut 15,000 jobs. Verizon, UPS, and Target also significantly reduced their workforces last year.

Those who did negotiate got a better deal, often higher base pay, which may suggest that some job seekers are leaving money on the table.

No waiting for a dream job

Workers are looking for stable employment and paychecks as long-term unemployment continues to rise, Bachaud said, which makes them less likely to wait for a dream job. In Q4, only 25.2% reported landing their dream job, down from 36.2% in the previous quarter.

Despite pay tradeoffs, the majority of new hires feel secure in their jobs, and over half have stopped actively searching for new positions after accepting an offer. More than a quarter intend to stay with their employers for five years or more.

Still, 60% of respondents said they would leave their current roles for a higher-paying job.

“That just speaks to what drove these new hires into these roles,” Bachaud said. “Employers need to be really focused on what is going to make workers leave if the market does change, and make sure that they’re staying ahead of that so that there’s not a mass exodus, or that they’re able to take advantage of movement from other companies and workers leaving their other positions when that time does come.”

A stressful workload and poor management are the two main drivers of new employees regretting their career moves and ultimately leaving their roles.

“Having a good work life balance and having good manager relationships are really, really important to workers right now, and businesses ought to be focusing on those pieces to make sure that their workers are happy and are planning to stay in place for the foreseeable future,” she said.

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