Do you remember what you were doing a year ago, when the world changed? I remember vividly. Our team at From Day One had just returned from our conference in Atlanta, where we hosted hundreds of business leaders at the Georgia Aquarium. Everyone was far more transfixed by a whale shark swimming lazily in its tank than the invisible threat circulating in the community. Back in our hometown of Brooklyn, we were planning to depart soon for our next destination, Chicago, when we heard disturbing news about a phenomenon we had never really considered: a super-spreader event, a conference in Boston eventually responsible for more than 100 new cases of the novel coronavirus. We didn’t want that happening to us and our From Day One community, so we scrubbed our live events. That was the responsible thing to do, but it raised a painful question: for a conference company with no conferences, does this mean we’re out of business?

I’ll tell you how our story turned out in a moment, but the theme here is reinvention amid the crisis. In a pandemic year of death, suffering and economic devastation, it was also a time of transformation in the way we work, raise our kids, and think about the roles of government and business. We had no way of seeing last March 11, when the global pandemic was officially upon us, how many old ideas would be turned upside down. But lots of thoughtful people are striving to help put the pandemic year into perspective, including how we frame its place in the trajectory of our lives.

In a sense, the past year was its own time, not like what went before, or what comes next. For a recent piece in the New York Times, writer Casey Schwartz was interviewing Sherry Turkle, the renowned thinker on human-technology interaction, about her new book when the topic turned to the meaning of the pandemic year, Schwartz wrote. “In many ways, Turkle believes that the pandemic is a ‘liminal’ time, in the phrasing of the writer and anthropologist Victor Turner, a time in which we are ‘betwixt and between,’ a catastrophe with a built-in opportunity to reinvent. ‘In these liminal periods are these possibilities for change,’ she said. ‘I think we are living through a time, both in our social lives but also in how we deal with our technology, where we are willing to think of very different ways of behaving.’”

While many of our transformations have been well-documented–we learned to work from home, we absorbed a better understanding of racial and social injustice, we gained a new appreciation for mental-health care, we adopted more pets, and we learned to bake bread–some of the transformations were more subtle or unheralded. To find out more about those, we asked some of the people who’ve spoken at our events to tell us about their own experiences in their businesses and life.

Striking Out on Her Own: Myla Skinner, who has moderated several of our events and has worked for organizations including the education-advocacy group OneGoal, decided to heed the advice of a mentor and friend who advised: “What you want to do doesn't exist, so build it yourself.” So that's what she did, launching her own consulting firm. “I wanted to do work that focuses on navigating complex and consequential change with care for people at its core. I wanted to do work that leveraged my experience to support businesses as they do really big things. And I wanted to do work that puts love at the center and foundation. So I built a business to do that. It's called Quarter Five (Q5), whose name represents an extra quarter in the year to focus on the things that most matter to your business related to change. The pandemic forced me to spend real time with myself examining how I wanted to both live and work. I had to sit in the still and silence that this awful virus created. I had to dig deep to find what would bring my life joy. I recognize my privilege in having the opportunity and I'm hopeful that this work will create opportunities for others to do their best work and be their whole selves.”

Saving Young People from a Missed Opportunity: For more than two decades, the EXP internship program in Southern California has been the on-the-ground partner to schools and industries, helping young people gain experience, unlock doors to opportunity, and build confidence. During the 2019-20 school year, the program served nearly 6,350 students at ten high schools. But at the onset of the pandemic, “when those classrooms and companies shut down, we were terrified,” says Amy Grat, EXP’s CEO. “We had lost both halves of the circle that we seek to complete–youth and volunteers.” Yet in a dramatic shift, EXP’s team let go of its previous assumptions of what an internship should look like, distilled it down to the essentials, and created a virtual experience. Earlier this month, more than 350 high-school girls from across Southern California, along with nearly 100 industry professionals, logged into a virtual conference space for EXP’s fifth-annual Women in STEM career day. The pandemic crisis, says Grat, turned out to be “a huge catalyst for growth and innovation,” especially in expanding EXP’s reach.

Discovering the True Nature of a Vacation: Deep Mahajan, senior director and head of people development at the tech firm Nutanix, said the year 2020 inspired her to reinvent what vacation means to her. “Earlier it meant finding and booking a fancy location, packing our suitcases, travelling by air or by road, clicking a ton of pictures, checking off all sight-seeing places–even if it meant cramming the schedule and heading back to wrestle with Monday blues and an inbox exploding with two weeks’ worth of emails,” Mahajan said. “Today it is different. Vacation to me today can be something as simple as taking a weekly hike with a loved one to a place that was always just a few miles away but was undiscovered till now. I consider taking a mindful walk after work in the evening too as my daily ‘vacation.’ It has helped me admire the change of seasons in the color scheme of my neighborhood. It amazes me how all those trees bursting with the season’s shade and the flower gardens in my neighborhood went unnoticed all these years. Perhaps because I drove past them thinking about a million other things. Walking has changed my understanding and awareness of where I live. You know the best part? After any of the above ‘vacations,’ I never have the dull feeling of ‘going back to work.’ I do not even have to take PTO for this!”

Taking a Meeting Outside: Lisa Nichols, an SVP in HR at Citigroup, is a firm believer in being productive without having to sit at a desk for hours on end. “I think one thing that has stayed with me is trying to care for yourself and building movement into your day. One way many of our managers have accomplished this is by doing walking, one-on-one phone meetings where we are simply providing updates or reviewing strategies,” Nichols said. “It has allowed us to get a little exercise while also completing a meeting that did not require that we needed to be in front or our computer or a Zoom meeting. This has been a good way to break up the day and get some movement to clear our minds.”

Building a Matchmaking System for Jobless Workers: “As we all were sent home a year ago, the enormity of the implications on jobs started to set in. If businesses are shut down, they can only carry their employees for so long,” said Kamal Ahluwalia, president of Eightfold.ai, which produces software for talent management and acquisition. “So we did what we usually do: organized a hackathon to repurpose our technology for the citizens.” The result was the Eightfold Talent Exchange, created in partnership with McKinsey & Company, which uses artificial intelligence to match unemployed workers to jobs. Ahluwalia shares the story of a Starbucks barista in Philadelphia named Joshua, whose hours were reduced because of the pandemic. As it happened, Starbucks was offering its workers some resources like the Talent Exchange, which Joshua used to land a manager position at a local Walgreens. “There are tons of stories like that, small but meaningful,” said Ahluwalia. “Makes me appreciate what we have a lot more, and try not to take things for granted.”

Learning to Let Some Problems Solve Themselves: Rob Smith, executive editor of Seattle and Seattle Business, embraced a new time-management technique. “I found it easier to obsess around perceived issues and problems because of the inability to communicate spontaneously with colleagues. So I started writing down things I wanted to tackle, and if they weren’t major, I stuck them in a drawer and revisited them later. I initially did this every day, but then started looking at them Friday afternoons. I was pleasantly surprised that most had either resolved themselves or I had misjudged how important they really were. I will continue this new tool post-pandemic.”

Getting to Know Each Other Better Remotely: Matt Orozco, organizational change consultant for the employee-engagement platform Peakon, said his company has committed to strengthening the ties among remote employees. As an example, “We improved the use of internal comms tools (in our case, Slack) by adding fields to ‘profiles’ so we can be more inclusive and share more about ourselves. Some fields we added were pronouns, name pronunciation (we operate in five countries worldwide), and a link to a ‘ways of working’ doc so each employee can share how best to work with them.” He described it as kind of a user manual, but for human colleagues. On the personal side, he said that, “as a film student by education, I finally started to channel my passion for writing and film into a creative outlet by contributing to a film website,” as well as coming to grips with “the manufactured pressure to be more productive with respect to personal goals and side hustles during lockdowns.”

Keeping Employee Careers on Track: One of the biggest concerns among employees working remotely is that their career development suffers from being out-of-sight, out-of-mind at HQ. Larry McAlister, VP of global talent for the cloud-computing company NetApp, said the company launched a new, AI-enabled tool for setting goals and career paths. “We want everyone at NetApp to feel you can do the best work of your career from your kitchen table. We had a ‘career week’ a few months before launching the tool and we are now the vendor gold standard for adoption of the tool,” McAlister said, adding that the company keeps employee well-being in mind too: “We implemented Wellness Days, where the whole company has a day off each quarter. We have also implemented ‘No Zoom Fridays’ every month.”

Taking Control of the Calendar: Deep Mahajan, the executive who reinvented her idea of vacation, made changes in her schedule as well. “Unlike earlier, when all ‘house stuff’ used to happen strictly after and before office hours, today our schedules have become truly integrated. So you may be emptying the dishwasher between meetings and taking a meeting after office hours. It requires planning, without which it can be a mess. I re-invented the art of calendar-and-meeting management as I integrated my life into my work. Every Sunday I look at my calendar to mark the meetings that can be done walking, eliminate meetings which are redundant, add meetings for social interactions as needed, and eliminate those 30-minute ‘unproductive’ slots between meetings to be more efficient with my time. Family and house time has also come onto the calendar. Overall, I feel a better sense of control by organizing my time mindfully.”

Learning to Say No, When Possible: Erin Hicks, a senior director of HR at Applied Materials, realized that the lack of work boundaries at home was unsustainable. “For me, 12- to 14-hour days are just a norm I have learned to live with over the last four to five years,” she said, attributing the trend to “increased responsibilities, while there are still only 24 hours in a day, and something in my DNA that requires me to never let anyone down. This past year began with the same unhealthy pattern. That is, until I came to the personal realization that that kind of ‘work ethic’ was not only unhealthy, but it was depriving me of valuable time with my family that I could never get back. So I have worked hard to reinvent the way I work. I stop working when my teenager comes to check in with me on a school break, or when my husband comes in to do the same. The payoff is a lot more laughter during my day. I have reinvented my approach by modulating the work I agree to take on–and setting realistic expectations.”

Hicks added a broader observation on the issue: “From a work-culture perspective, I have really enjoyed seeing managers spending more time thinking about their employees’ physical and emotional well-being. The empathy factor has gone up exponentially. Teams have reinvented the way they interact, and not just from the use of new online collaboration tools. Leaders are finding myriad ways to bring their groups together on a human, social level that has been fun to watch. This forced reinvention of how teams interact as co-workers–and as people–in a virtual world will have a lasting positive impact, regardless of that the new normal or future of work looks like.”

Testing the Limits of Personal Handiwork: Like many remote workers, Mikeisha Anderson Jones, VP of global inclusion & diversity in the Colleague Experience Group at American Express, decided to do some redecorating. “In addition to adjusting to the new ways of working from home, I also fancied myself a weekend and late-night creative by endeavoring to wallpaper my office. Clearly, I’d spent insufficient hours watching the experts on Property Brothers and Love It or List It. When I started on my wallpapering journey, I hadn’t realized that I’d see my handiwork daily for the next 365+ days via videoconference. Thankfully, I love the print and despite my novice-level wallpapering skills, the result is quite lovely. I also learned something about myself: I will never, ever wallpaper another room by myself.”

While some of us may feel like this was a lost year, that might not be true in the long run. In a piece for Time, author and editor Joanne Lipman shared the wisdom of dozens of experts she has consulted for a book she’s writing on reinvention. “The types of transformations they study vary. Yet I’ve been struck by the one step that every type of reinvention has in common: it’s preceded by an in-between time, a seemingly fallow period much like the one we find ourselves in now,” Lipman writes. “The prolonged shutdown, by throwing us off-kilter, may help us reimagine our futures,” Lipman continues, citing the work of a psychologist who has studied survivors of trauma. After time, these survivors tend to “have a sense of fresh possibilities in life, an openness to following new pathways.”

In the midst of all this reinvention, one of our speakers offers a reality check. Daniel Roberts, who did some of his own reinvention recently–he left his job as editor-at-large at Yahoo Finance to become editor-in-chief of the crypto-news site Decrypt–predicts that some workplace transformations will revert to the old ways because they had obvious benefits. “We've all certainly adapted for a year and in many cases I think some workplaces have been shocked to learn how well WFH worked. The news media, I believe, rose to the occasion of covering every aspect of the pandemic–from home or in a mask–and has been extremely resilient,” he said. But don’t assume work-from-home will be for everyone, forever, he said. “I think there are a number of companies that see advantages to having their people in person, and are going to tell people when the coast is clear, OK, come back now. I fear some people will be in for a rude awakening when that happens.” As for journalism, he said, “I am a big believer in the power of the newsroom, and in being able to bat around ideas in person in a lively room with your colleagues.”

Finally, what about the From Day One team? On the personal front, two of our families reinvented themselves by having their first children. Babies can certainly be transformative. As for me, I took up yoga, faithfully attending my niece’s classes twice a week.

And as you might have been expecting by now, From Day One reinvented itself. Considering the alternatives, we were left with one possible way to survive: We would go all-virtual. Three weeks after making that decision in March, we produced our first webinar, titled “Smart Ways to Manage a Newly Remote Work Team.” Since then, we have hosted nearly 60 webinars and virtual conferences. Thanks to the intrepid spirit of our speakers, sponsors, audience members, and our extraordinary staff, we are still very much in business–just not the way we were before. The experience has broadened our reach and taught us how to think outside the conference room. But we look forward to seeing you again in person just as soon as we can.

Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time

The Roots of the Rage Against the Healthcare Machine

Most of us, sad to say, realized last week that we can comprehend the anger that drove 26-year-old Luigi Mangione—a privileged Penn grad and tech whiz—to allegedly murder Brian Thompson, the CEO of UnitedHealthcare, as the executive walked alone to an annual investors meeting in Manhattan.UnitedHealthcare, part of United Healthcare Group, which ranks No. 4 on the Fortune 500, is what’s known in the industry as a payer. That’s a term that might enrage a lot of people, especially anyone whose claim has been turned down for any of seemingly a million reasons and therefore is on the hook for medical costs. The payers are even using AI to process claims and make denials, taking humanity out of the process of caring for humans. Doctors say they are fed up with fighting insurance companies about providing needed medical treatments to their patients. In a manifesto found in his backpack after he was arrested, Mangione proclaimed: “These parasites had it coming.”The source of the shooter’s motivation is complicated. A product of a wealthy, well-connected Maryland family, a computer-engineering graduate with a master’s from Penn, he was social, and loved playing computer games and designing them. But he also suffered from spinal problems and severe pain that had led to spinal-fusion surgery. His reading list included anti-corporate tomes, including Unabomber Ted Kaczynski’s screed. Six months prior to the shooting, he cut himself off from family and friends. They begged him to get in touch but he apparently went someplace very dark instead. He emerged a murderer, police say.The coldblooded killing of a corporate executive triggered a similarly coldblooded wave of public vitriol directed toward Thompson and his company. Yelp reviews from hell itself. Wanted posters with pictures of health-insurance executives began popping up on Manhattan lamp posts.We know the drivers of this heartlessness toward Thompson and his peers. Healthcare bills are a leading cause of personal bankruptcy. And our money does not buy healthiness, which Mangione noted in papers found in his backpack. The U.S. spends more per capita on healthcare than any other nation, yet in medical outcomes we are not even in the top 10. In a recent Gallup poll, the segment of Americans who rated healthcare quality as “good” or “excellent” dropped 10 percentage points since 2020, to 44%. Not surprisingly, respondents rated healthcare insurance coverage even worse: 28% rate coverage as excellent or good as opposed to 41% in 2012, the high point, says Gallup.One winner in all of this: UHG, which earned a net profit of about $6 billion. That was in the third quarter alone.The vicious response to Mangione’s alleged actions reflects both the state of social media and the state of corporate America. The former allows anonymous individuals to display the most vile aspects of human nature—and then amplifies them. The latter reflects industry concentration that leaves consumers with fewer choices, and to some degree, powerless and voiceless. And angry about it.That’s true whether you are buying eggs or chickens in the supermarket—and remember that food-price inflation helped drive voters to Donald Trump—cell-phone service or health insurance. The McDonald’s in Altoona, Pa., where Mangione was arrested after an employee called the cops on him was flooded with negative reviews, as if a fast-food chain was part of the corporate conspiracy to suppress consumer discontent. Et tu, Mickie D?The UnitedHealthcare headquarters in Minnetonka, Minn., lowered its flags to half-staff last week honor of CEO Brian Thompson, who was fatally shot outside a hotel in Manhattan. (Kerem Yücel/Minnesota Public Radio via AP)Mangione spoke for many of these disenfranchised consumers, and in the worst possible way. You know this feeling of being seemingly without options. I’ve witnessed it at airports, when an angry, disgruntled—and clueless—passenger loudly informs a gate agent that “I’ll never fly this airline again.” Fat chance. You will, in fact, fly this airline again or you can drive across the country because Delta, United, American and Southwest control 80% of domestic airline traffic.This frustration is one reason that assaults on airline employees skyrocketed in the “revenge travel” period that followed the Covid pandemic. People were jammed into full flights, hit with multiple charges for seat selection, checked bags, early boarding, or whatever else the carriers could dream up. Is it any wonder that a number of them lost their shit? The problem, once limited to an occasional belligerent drunk, became so acute that the Federal Aviation Administration had to crack down on the growing number of miscreants, in some cases fining passengers $36,000 for attacking airline personnel.The frustration is everywhere and employees are feeling it. Recently I showed up at my local Hertz station in Manhattan to pick up my rental reservation; there were no cars. So I started getting agitated—and I am now practiced at this because this wasn’t the first time Hertz came up short. I was in mid-harangue when the agent pleaded: “I’m just a minion; it’s not my fault.” Fair enough. “But who else am I going to yell at?” I asked her. We’d both been through this before. Hertz had hung us both out to dry. The shooting is also a grim new chapter in our heavily armed society. We’re all too familiar with workplace shootings—going postal–in which a disgruntled employee or former employees take lethal umbrage on his boss and co-workers for whatever bad treatment or perceived slights they might have endured. But now it is seemingly the customers who are raging for revenge.This corporate assassination is raising the risks for everyone, from customer-facing employees to the big boss. But the CEOs will be able double down on their security; the front-line people will be more or less on their own. UHG’s employees, who number about 440,000, tend to like the company they work for. Until last week, the headquarters team labored in relative anonymity in Minnetonka, Minn. Now many of them feel they are under siege, likened to criminal accomplices working for a nefarious company. As one employee said. “[W]e all do the best we can to do a good job in the system we are in.”UnitedHealth, and other health insurers, have argued for years that consumers are well-served, and satisfied, by the current system. They probably have customer surveys that endorse this view. So do airlines. So what? Clearly the status quo is unsustainable. The anger that UHG’s system has generated has done what few issues in America can do: united Democrats and Republicans. Bipartisan legislation was introduced this week to break up some of the largest healthcare conglomerates by selling off their highly profitable pharmacy-benefit managers (PBMs), the drug middlemen often blamed for high prescription prices. The three biggest ones—CVS Health’s Caremark, Cigna’s Express Scripts and UnitedHealth’s Optum Rx—control 80% of prescriptions in the U.S. “Critics complain that the conglomerates use their size and leverage to steer patients toward their own pharmacies, increasing costs for employers and government programs while driving independent pharmacies out of business,” the New York Times pointed out. Consider that the first round.This week I happened to have a lunch scheduled with the CEO of a healthcare-related tech startup, the source for a story I’m working on. He showed up without any security, and he didn’t plan to engage any. His company isn’t a “payer.” In fact, it helps corporate clients push back against the payers to lower their employee healthcare-insurance costs. Payers such as UHG hate me, the CEO told me, because he was attacking their profit machine. And Americans, as we now know, hate the payers even more.Bill Saporito is an editor at large at Inc. magazine whose work has also appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post. Previously, he worked as an assistant managing editor at Time magazine and as a senior editor at Fortune. He has written for From Day One on the power gap among labor unions, the myth of the “woke” corporation, and the perils of getting technology and people misaligned.Featured photo, top: alleged murderer Luigi Mangione is escorted into a Pennsylvania courthouse this week (AP Photo/Gary M. Baranec)

If the Boss Wants You Back in the Office Five Days a Week, They Should Think Twice

In its heyday as the proto–Silicon Valley tech company, Hewlett-Packard innovated by what became known as the “next bench” syndrome. H-P was a company founded by engineers (Bill and Dave) for engineers and new products happened when one engineer asked a fellow practitioner sitting nearby if there might be something else the company could make that could be useful to him.While this ask-your-office buddy ideation might seem quaint—after all, innovation can and does come from anywhere—corporate America is now demanding a return of sorts to the days of white shirts and pocket protectors. After a long, pandemic-induced experiment with remote and then hybrid work, the people in the C-Suites are apparently lonely.More and more of them want your butt back in the office five days a week, and they are going to get their way, leaving some very unhappy employees to stew about it. According to a recent poll by KPMG, 79% of CEOs see all the professionals back at their office posts in the next three years–that’s up from 34% last year. This will be distressing news to people who moved away from corporate cities like Seattle to places such as Omaha, which tried to position itself as a low-cost haven for remote employees. At least companies are providing some perks for your five-day-a week return: unlimited amounts of hand sanitizer, for instance, and cleaning wipes. Maybe some more free food.Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is among the latest to announce that sitting in front of your laptop at home with your dog and your three year old no longer qualifies as getting it done. Some Amazon employees voiced outrage, even threatening to quit. “Go right ahead,” seems to be the response from HQ in what some have labeled a layoff by another name. Long before that, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon decreed that bankers and traders, who tend to operate in packs anyway, had to decamp from their Manhattan apartments and Manhasset manses to reoccupy the company’s pricey office buildings, especially its new HQ. Dimon’s argument is basically, “I’m not spending $100 a square foot to look at empty desks.” Nor does he believe that managers can lead effectively from home.Other financial industry bosses apparently concur. In Manhattan, where I work, office “busyness” rates reached 73.4% in August, a figure that compares occupancy to pre-pandemic levels of 2019. Nationwide, the rate is 60.4%, according to Avison Young, a real-estate advisory firm.What the Research ShowsFrom a productivity viewpoint, there doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason to mandate a return to the office, at least not based on academic research. The data, for the most part, points the other way. In the largest study yet of working-from-home professionals, Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom found that employees who work from home two days a week are “just as productive, likely to get promoted, and far less prone to quit.” According to the job-finding site FlexJobs, employees who work at home at least part-time can save up to $6,000 annually on commuting and other costs—a back-door raise they are loath to give up.True, Bloom’s study was limited to an experiment on 1,600 employees at Trip.com, a Chinese travel agency. And an earlier study, of which Bloom was a co-author, determined that fully remote employees were 10% less productive than their office-dwelling counterparts. Meanwhile, yet another study from the University of Essex in England notes that, while remote workers there put in more hours–including 18% more after normal business hours—their average output didn’t change much. “Therefore,” the study concluded “productivity fell by about 20%.”What Most Workers WantAny survey of employees, however, will deliver the consensus that, while they enjoy being with their colleagues, they love a workplace that can be molded to their needs. Parents with kids need the hybrid flexibility, and Gen Z kids may need the socialization of the office. They both want a little of both.The kind of CEOs who get driven to work and have large private offices don’t necessarily see it that way. Nor do they seem particularly interested in the workplace data that supports the benefits of hybrid work. They’re focused on another data set: current economic data, which is now turning in management’s favor. That data shows that layoffs are up, quits are down, and the unemployment rate is ticking up, if ever so slightly. (Recent hurricanes will boost unemployment, temporarily.) The pending election might also be causing people to lower their appetite for risk and stay put.There could be more than executive ego at work here, too. If you’re the big boss, you want to be able to see and hear, in person, all the people you are bossing, even if you recede to your office sanctuary for most of the day.Which means that job holders and job seekers are no longer calling the shots the way they did in the roll-your-own days of the pandemic. In my shop, our CEO just upped the ante to three days a week in the office from two, citing the need for enhanced collaboration to tackle these particularly perilous times in the publishing industry. I get that need for collaborating on site, having worked as a print magazine editor for a couple of decades. But surrendering the now comfy confines of my home office for an additional day at the office feels like a loss.And for the germaphobically inclined, it’s not as though the pandemic is in the past; companies have just chosen to treat it that way. When I pointed out to a colleague that Covid-19 cases are rising rapidly nationwide, the response was on the order of: Yeah, but the latest wave isn’t as severe as past versions and there are now vaccines and remedies such as Paxlovid. In other words, suck it up, cowboy.The 13 million Americans employed in manufacturing might find all this contretemps about office work a bit amusing. It might be possible to say, build a transmission in your living room, but the machining noise tends to be loud. Likewise for the people working in service industries from restaurants to retail to healthcare. Sure, you can consult with a teledoc, but that’s not going to help you when you need to be pried out of your wrecked car by firefighters and EMTs. You want a first responder, not a chatbot. Nor will your garbage be picking itself up anytime soon.The Upsides of the OfficePart of me sides with the bosses. What the productivity studies can’t measure is that a significant benefit of going to the office is being at the office. Being social. Being part of a company’s culture, which is a living breathing thing, as opposed to being merely part of its labor pool. Sharing not just the work but the human interaction that attaches. Going to lunch with office friends. And yes, the water cooler gossip, even if water coolers have been displaced by kombucha or cold-brew coffee dispensers. Need we mention, too, that office romances can hardly be undertaken sans office?(One thing that isn’t coming back to the office is any semblance of a dress code. Want to show up for that meeting in shorts, a T-shirt and Crocs? Go right ahead, and I’ll try to take you seriously.)As for the office work itself, we’ve all experienced those moments when a bunch of people thrown together suddenly connect on a breakthrough idea or solve a vexing operational problem. Indeed, the power of in-person collaboration has been likened to having a free electron floating around the room, just waiting to give the particle of a fabulous idea the positive charge that gives it energy. That spark could come from a sideways glance, a brief, post-meeting chat, or simply by running into a colleague in the elevator or parking lot.There’s also a reason why companies brag about being a great place to work. Yes, you can be employed remotely, but that’s not remotely the same experience.Why We Need to Find a Creative SolutionThis current faceoff leaves office managers and HR in a bit of a quandary when top management demands to see butts in seats. Perhaps looking at the question from an either/or perspective is the wrong way to do it. What the studies on office vs. remote work can’t control for is an individual’s performance. A high-performing employee is likely to be high performing whether they are working from home, at the office or at the beach. The most successful employers will figure out the geography that suits them best.Some companies, such as the HR platform Workday, have tried to appease bosses and workers with a sort of hybrid-hybrid. The company’s “work from anywhere” approach allows workers to spend 30 calendar days in a 12-month period working from just about anywhere. They may be on to something. Think about benefits. In most firms, there’s a benefits “menu” that allows employees to select from, say, several health insurers and within those insurers a variety of plans.Maybe we need to offer menu options with remote and hybrid work–a variety of packages to people in different life stages. The parent package could offer maximum flexibility in return for extended work hours. Take your kid to soccer, but give us those two hours back when we need them. The Gen Z package could include an exercise program near the office or lunch at Chipotle; the older workers package could include a more private workspace or a wellness program. Or something called chronowork, based on a person’s’ own body rhythms, which suits someone like me, attuned to working vampire hours. Running through all of them is the option to demand that all of the people show up at the office some of the time—on demand, even.People worked in offices for centuries because a central location was the best way to organize and run a business. The advent of computer networks altered that universe, making a central location less relevant; the pandemic then completely severed the historic relationship between work and geography. Some CEOs are now trying to redraw the management map to match the 1985 version. It’s sort of like going back to fax machines. Yes, they still function, but new technology has rendered them obsolete. The hybrid model, which is inclusive of the vast variety of people and work styles today, is the new tech of business organization. It’s work that can work for everyone.Bill Saporito is an editor at large at Inc. magazine whose work has also appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post. Previously, he worked as an assistant managing editor at Time magazine and as a senior editor at Fortune. He has written for From Day One on the power gap among labor unions, the myth of the “woke” corporation, and the perils of getting technology and people misaligned.(Photo by Sam Edwards/iStock by Getty Images)

Why a Software Glitch Sent Delta into a Tailspin: The Perils of Getting Technology and People Misaligned

Customer-facing airline employees are some of the most remarkable people in business. How can they not be? The workers on the ground face the annoyed, the demanding, the delayed, the furious, the not-going-anywhere-today, and the inebriated. Then they get a lunch break. Those on the jets face the entitled in the front and the cramped-and-cranky in coach.My admiration for these folks has only increased over the last decade as their ranks have been thinned by technology (with a push from the pandemic) while their tasks have been made increasingly fraught by the air-travel system in which they now toil. And in which we frequently roil.We got to see this combination of imperfect technology meeting overwhelmed staffing earlier this summer during the great CrowdStrike meltdown. Until its cybersecurity upgrade blew up, CrowdStrike was a company known mostly to sys-op jockeys and hackers. Then the company introduced a wonky software update that within hours crippled millions of servers that used Microsoft Windows and all hell broke loose.Around the world, operating systems gagged, including those of major U.S. airlines, bringing traffic to a near standstill. In the U.S., only Southwest, which seemingly still uses floppy discs to run its data systems, escaped the meltdown. With the CrowdStrike collapse, the scene soon became all too familiar: lines of people desperately trying to get somewhere, their options narrowing, their frustration widening as the hours passed. Some would be stuck for days.And among those carriers, Delta stood out for coming apart like a cheap suitcase tossed down a baggage ramp. The carrier canceled more than 5,500 flights, and at one point refused to board unaccompanied minors, creating major angst for lots of parents. Meanwhile, word got out that CEO Ed Bastian had jetted off—Ted Cruz-style—to Paris for the Olympics while his airline was frozen in place. Delta blamed CrowdStrike and Microsoft, and has threatened to sue to recover some $500 million in losses. Microsoft, in turn, blamed Delta’s outmoded technology. During the depths of the outage, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella emailed Bastian to offer assistance—talk about the ultimate Help Desk—but Microsoft says Bastian apparently didn’t respond. The carrier seemingly turned on its passengers, some of whom reported difficulty in getting hotels from Delta where they were stranded, as well as being low-balled by the refund offers being made to compensate them for lost flights and spoiled vacations. Delta’s service swoon seemed all that more severe given that the airline had reached cruising altitude in the post pandemic years, while rivals such as United and Southwest grappled more often with system freeze-ups.Using Technology to Supplant LaborYet Delta, as well as the other carriers, have been rolling the dice for years when it comes to matching people and technology. During the pandemic the carriers had to cut schedules (40% in Delta’s case) and jobs. As the nation and air travel recovered, they either didn’t—or couldn’t—rehire enough people who had left or were let go to match surging demand. (Remember “revenge travel”?) Increasingly, they relied heavily on technology to supplant labor. And they made us, the passengers, part of the labor force: encouraging carry on baggage by charging for checked bags, then introducing self-ticketing, self-check-in and self-bag-checks. Frontier even tried to eliminate its customer phone support.This latest air travel meltdown magnified an everyday incongruity that exists in the industry in that airlines are carefully configured to cope with the unpredictable—often to no avail. They try to plan for everything, from the catastrophic—a fatal crash—to the complex, such as a hurricane that threatens to spin the entire network into disarray. Then there are wars, revolutions, volcanoes, pandemics, strikes and assorted other calamities that are a regular threat to any global business, but to airlines in particular.At their vast flight operations centers, the carriers have teams ready for everything from a medical emergency on board to a rivet (or a door) coming loose on a 737 Max or a warning light on an Airbus 321 that won’t turn off. There are doctors, pilots, mechanics, meteorologists, Airbus specialists, Boeing specialists, avionics specialists, crew wranglers, airport and operations managers working 24/7 at the ops centers, and yes, people figuring out just who among us is going to get screwed when flights get delayed or canceled.Yet all of that preparation is no match for the way airlines are actually scheduled. They remain vulnerable to the phenomenon known as tight coupling, in which one unit in a system is highly dependent on the next. Cascading failure is almost a guarantee once the first fault is unleashed. Why can’t airlines prevent this from happening? The answer is that, despite the contingency planning, airlines are scheduled for optimum conditions, as though it’s always going to be sunny in Philadelphia, or Panama City or Paris. Which is not the case, of course. Worse, with load factors north of 85%, there’s little excess capacity, and little hope of a quick recovery once the system begins to implode.The contingency planning that airlines do can be undone by what they regularly come up against. Weather is by definition chaotic; technology is capable of catastrophic failure. Try building a service culture around that.Where’s the Service in the Service Economy?Although airlines are the most conspicuous examples of failing to balance people and tech, it seems to be creeping into all parts of the economy, as algorithms try to bring ever more precision to businesses. Especially in retail. The goal is to never have excess labor being employed for a single minute anywhere. In this frictionless world, there is always precisely enough help available to help you make your purchase or to get served.You know how that goes. We seem to live in a nation where there is always one fewer checkout lane open than needed (and don’t get us started on self checkout, which normally requires more than one self to operate). If you’re waiting in one of these lines, this understaffing can seem deliberate.Not too long ago, I was discussing airline operations with David Neeleman, founder of the highly successful new airline Breeze Airways (not to mention JetBlue, Azul, and WestJet) when he mentioned that he routinely passed by long lines of customers—or potential customers—at airport Starbucks. This frustrating level of service drove him to distraction—and this is a man who does not drink coffee. His point was that in an airport terminal, with scheduled flights, you can pretty much know how many people are going to be around your location at any given time. How can they not figure this out?, he asked, incredulously.Perhaps because they don’t want to: the obvious conclusion is that it’s better to be slightly understaffed than overstaffed, especially in businesses that ebb and flow during a day. In my nabe, the usual culprit is our CVS pharmacy, where the line gets 10 deep about the same time every day. Or at Chipotle, where 7 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. becomes a crap shoot as to whether your online order will be ready as the app promises. The problem? There are two hospitals nearby, and shifts are changing about then, something Chipotle’s scheduling software hasn’t seemed to have mastered. One more person-hour would do wonders, the difficulty being that you can’t schedule one person for one hour. So we wait.At Sephora, meanwhile, I seethed in a line on a Saturday afternoon with my wife as checkout terminals remained unpersoned even as the queue expanded. Spotting a manager, I asked, “Can’t you pull people off the sales floor? Isn’t everyone cross-trained?” She, of Gen Z, gave me that “okay, boomer” look before moving on. I’m still not sure whether she lacked the authority to shift salespeople to the front end, or the interest.Dissatisfied shoppers in brick-and-mortar stores are free to leave and not return, or to buy online. Dissatisfied fliers don’t have that option. How many times have I heard an angry passenger screaming, “I’m never going to fly this airline again,” at an agent and thought: Oh yes you are. And that includes Delta. The carrier may have burned some goodwill this summer, but there’s a still deep reservoir it can still draw on—at least for now.That includes its talent pool. As we have again experienced, when the technology chokes, the front-line workers bear the burden for the company, because software doesn’t hear you when you scream at it. The airlines, and many other companies, either need to invest in more dependable technology—or they need to stretch their people a little bit less.Bill Saporito is an editor at large at Inc. magazine, whose work has also appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post. Previously, he worked as an assistant managing editor at Time magazine and as a senior editor at Fortune. He has written for From Day One on the power gap among labor unions and the myth of the “woke” corporation. (Photo by Panama7/iStock by Getty Images)

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Why a Software Glitch Sent Delta into a Tailspin: The Perils of Getting Technology and People Misaligned