🔧 HR Budgeting Hacks, Q&A with Compt's CEO, MS Teams Risk - Nov 5, 2025

On today’s agenda:

🔧 HR budget hacks

✅ LMS platform checklist

🎙️ Q&A with Compt’s CEO

🛡️ MS Teams at risk

QUICK POLL

THE HR SPOTLIGHT

🔧 HR Budget Hacks: Do More With Less, Without Losing Impact

With tighter budgets and rising expectations, it’s time to get creative, lean, and impactful. Let’s turn constraint into opportunity.

🕵️‍♀️ The situation

Gartner reports that 65％ of HR leaders expect flat or decreased budgets this year — yet business demands keep climbing. Meanwhile, salary-increase budgets are stagnating too, with the average U.S. increase projected at about 3.6％ for 2026. This means HR’s tasked with delivering big from slim resources—and failure isn’t really an option.

💡 HR spending hacks

• Automate processes: Use tools that reduce cost-per-hire by ~30 % via AI and skills-based screening. 

• Collaborate with other departments: Share budgets (e.g., training with L&D), co-create cost-effective programs and show joint ROI.

• Reallocate smartly: Link every cost to business outcomes (efficiency, retention, performance). The highest ROI comes from targeting, not just spending. 

• Tap free/existing resources: Use internal talent to lead peer-driven learning, establish cross-functional mentoring, and minimize external spend.

• Track relentlessly: Use benchmarks (yes, those 20 % of HR leaders leverage them!) to spot where you’re over- or under-investing. 

Tight budget? No sweat. With these hacks, you can still deliver standout people strategy without cutting the heart of HR.

✅ LMS Shopping? Make Sure You’re Asking the Right Questions!

🛡️ MS Teams Vulnerabilities Uncovered – HR Dive

• What’s unfolding: Researchers uncovered four critical flaws in Microsoft Teams that could let attackers edit messages without trace, spoof notifications, and even impersonate executives.

• Why it matters: If your organization uses MS Teams, coordinate with IT to ensure patches are applied, update best practices around communication protocols, and review any insider-threat monitoring.

• What’s unfolding: A rising number of U.S. firms are posting record profits while overall employment remains below pre-pandemic trend levels—driven largely by labour-saving tech like AI.

• Why it matters: This calls for proactive reskilling strategies, career-pathing for existing staff, and transparent communication about organisational direction.

• What’s unfolding: Small businesses in the U.S. maintained stable employment levels in October, but the average weekly hours worked picked up significantly—the strongest gain in nearly a decade.

• Why it matters: HR in smaller orgs should monitor workload and wellbeing metrics, ensure staffing strategies are sustainable, and communicate about work-life balance and recognition of increased effort.

COMPLIANCE CORNER

• What’s unfolding: The U.S. Department of Labor (DOL) has resumed processing of applications for key visa programs including H-1B, H-2A, H-2B and PERM after a shutdown-induced pause.

• HR implications: HR teams must immediately revisit any paused or delayed visa-sponsored hiring plans and communicate updated timelines to affected candidates.

• What’s unfolding: The NLRB’s structure and authority were upheld by the US Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit, creating a legal split with the 5th Circuit which found the Board’s structure likely unconstitutional.

• HR implications: Updating compliance frameworks and legal counsel coordination is advisable while the split remains unresolved.

• What’s unfolding: A lawsuit alleges that a tech company’s owner and senior executives pressured a female executive to convert religion, and engaged in retaliatory termination and religious discrimination.

• HR implications: HR must ensure workplace practices protect against religious coercion, review training on harassment and discrimination, reinforce complaint channels and check whether organizational culture inadvertently crosses into unlawful religious pressure.

BREAKROOM

📬 Missed Monday’s issue ‘Corporate Cardio’? Read it »