When corporate America was called on to speak out in favor of same-sex marriage and racial justice, few hesitated. On the supremely divisive issue of abortion, however, corporate leaders face much tougher decisions. Despite the leak of the majority opinion in the Supreme Court’s hearing of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization almost two months before the official decision, employers are scrambling to understand what the reversal of Roe v. Wade and the removal of reproductive rights means for their employees.

The list of questions companies will have to address in the coming months is growing–and changing. For now, employers are thinking immediately about public statements, in the middle distance about health care coverage, and over the long term about whether they will contribute to the fight to regain reproductive choice. Among the most essential questions:

What Kind of Position Will You Take on Abortion Access?

Rather than condemning the ruling itself, most corporate leaders framed the issue as a matter of employee reproductive rights. “I believe CEOs have a responsibility to take care of their employees–no matter what,” Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff said in a tweet. “As a company,” Hewlett Packard CEO Enrique Lores tweeted, “we believe that it should be up to every single one of our employees to decide whether and when to start a family, whether that’s choosing who they love and marry, taking paid time off if they are having a child, and having access to health care.” But many other major corporations, including Walmart, Coca-Cola, and Delta Airlines, stayed mum on the issue.

As businesses consider their public message, Susan McPherson, who runs McPherson Strategies, a company that consults on corporate social responsibility (CSR), recommends considering this question: “Do our company values and giving align with the statement we are making? Align with our philanthropic and political spend?”

McPherson warned about inconsistency. “Making a public statement in support but not providing any tangible benefits to workers,” she said, is the first mistake employers are likely to make. “Words matter less than actions,” she told From Day One via email.

The second is being insincere. “If your company speaks out against something but you have donated to political campaigns or PACs that support it, workers and consumers will call out that inauthenticity, and the company will suffer the consequences.” For example, AT&T celebrates Women’s Equality Day, but is the biggest corporate donor to politicians behind anti-abortion “trigger laws” designed to ban abortion upon the defeat of Roe v. Wade, Insider reported.

Not every company will be able to make a public statement about access to abortion rights without losing customers and employees. “We recognize people feel passionately about this topic, and that there are teammates and athletes who will not agree with this decision,” said Dick’s Sporting Goods CEO Lauren Hobart in announcing financial support for employees who decide to travel to have an abortion in states where it remains legal.

Even if a company decides to neither publicly endorse nor condemn, “first and foremost, don’t pretend that this didn’t happen,” said Sarah Sheehan, co-founder and president of the employee-coaching platform Bravely. “I do think it’s possible to acknowledge in a very neutral way that this decision has repercussions and that there are a lot of feelings surrounding it that may impact how people show up at work,” she told From Day One.

Does Your Health Care Plan Cover Abortion Services in States Where It Is Legal?

Employers are examining whether their current health care plans cover abortion, and if not, whether they will make changes. Many high-profile companies including Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Nike and Starbucks have said they will cover travel and health care costs related to getting an abortion in a state where it is legal.

However, new abortion benefits won’t be available to most U.S. workers, according to a survey of 220 HR executives conducted this week by the Gartner consulting group, Bloomberg reported. A majority of the HR leaders in the survey said they don't plan to change their health care offerings, or are still considering options. This gap is likely to add to social inequality.

“To the extent that corporations are making any moves, they’re making moves with regard to the so-called talent—low-wage, hourly workers are not going to be getting these extra benefits,” Robert Reich, the secretary of labor under President Clinton, told Boomberg in an interview. “It’s a cover. It’s a sweetener. It makes people feel as if the right things are happening.”

Employers that have added travel costs to their health care offerings will, in the coming months, wade through the administration of such a benefit in a way that satisfies compliance requirements and protects the workers who use it. They will have to navigate state-by-state legal issues as well. Texas lawmakers have warned companies including Citigroup and Lyft that they may ban or sue companies that help employees travel out of state for abortions.

How Will You Protect the Confidentiality of Employees Who Seek Abortion Care?

For companies that choose cover or reimburse the cost of travel for abortion care, confidentiality should be a concern. Employees may feel compelled to disclose the reason for their absence to their manager or HR director—information that could put them at risk of discrimination. “You shouldn’t have to tell your manager you're getting an abortion,” Aubrey Blanch, a senior director at the employee-survey firm Culture Amp, told the New York Times.

Whether such travel puts them at legal risk in states that have made abortion illegal is not clear yet, but suddenly digital privacy is a critical issue, since evidence of a crime may reside in a woman’s smartphone. The Dobbs ruling inspired many women to delete their period-tracker apps, which have become part of many corporate family-health benefits. One of the most popular apps, Flo, announced an “anonymous mode” to allow users to remove identifying details from their profiles.

One way to protect employee privacy is to make abortion benefits non-specific, said Janine Yancey, CEO of Emtrain, an employee-learning platform. The more generic the policy, the better. “Employers are doing it right by drafting a health care benefit that can be used for all health care situations, not just for abortion situations.” She continued: “Employers can provide a generic travel subsidy to all employees who need to travel for health care needs, and the use of that benefit is protected health care information, protected by HIPAA.”

Do You Risk Losing Employees Over Abortion Access?

McPherson said employers should be asking the question, “What are the ramifications, both in employee retention and financially, of not responding or taking a stand?” The American workforce is increasingly principled in its choices. Gartner reported in 2019 that 87% of employees say businesses should make a public stand on societal issues related to the business, and 74% say they should do so even when the issues aren’t directly related to the business.

In the case of access to reproductive care, it’s likely that no matter the position a company takes, some employees will walk. The workers with resources will have the means to leave, and those without resources and without social supports, will not. Salesforce and Google said they would move employees who want to leave states where abortion is banned. Despite such corporate beneficence, the Dobbs ruling puts a new geographical limit on women’s career choices, asserted Tressie McMillan Cottom, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, writing in the New York Times. “With Roe v. Wade toppled, we do not have the same rights in all labor markets,” she wrote. “In a global market, an empowered worker is one who can migrate. With Dobbs, women cannot assume that we can safely work in Idaho the same way that we can in Oregon or Washington.”

How Will You Protect Other Rights That Are Now at Risk?

The fall of Roe v. Wade raised concerns that the ruling conservative majority on the Supreme Court could roll back other civil rights as well, including same-sex marriage and contraception. Justice Clarence Thomas, in a concurring opinion in the Dobbs case, said the court “should reconsider” earlier precedents that affirmed such rights.

Given the court’s 6-3 conservative majority, employers should start thinking now how they will protect the rights of their employees–and respond to their fears. Employers need to be aware that overturning Obergefell v. Hodges, which guaranteed the right to same-sex marriage, would compromise “access to employer-sponsored health coverage and retirement plans, as well as adoption and fertility benefits, and would leave room for employers to redefine who would qualify as a dependent for employees seeking parental or caregiving leave,” said a report by Charter, an organization that examines workplace practices.

While last week’s decision was not a surprise, especially after the leak of a draft in early May, some employers waited to respond and are now racing to catch up with what is shaping up as a new battlefront in the culture wars. Companies should take the language in the official decision as a serious warning that other rights are now on the table.

How Will You Contribute to State and Federal Action to Protect Reproductive Health Care Rights?

Corporate leaders have been steadily taking a higher profile on social issues, typically with their stakeholders in mind. In the early 2010s, corporate America appealed to the Supreme Court in favor of same-sex marriage. Following the murder of George Floyd in 2020, employers pledged money to racial-justice organizations like Black Likes Matter and the NAACP. When the Russian government invaded Ukraine in February 2022, major companies, including McDonald’s and American Express, halted operations in Russia.

Part of the explanation is peer pressure, asserts Stephanie Creary, an assistant professor of management at the Wharton School. “What we’re seeing right now in many companies is a really strong response to external advice, recommendations, pressure to engage more intently around social issues,” she said last month in a radio interview. She has even noticed an increase in hiring of executives with the title “director of employee activism.”

Even so, the abortion issue may be a bridge too far for most companies. The June poll by Gartner found 20% of HR executives don’t feel compelled to respond in any way to the official Dobbs decision. Thirty-six percent said they aren’t sure. Yet polls consistently show that a majority of Americans oppose the court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Among women and college graduates, the majorities are even larger.

Those majorities will notice employer timidity on the issue, McPherson told From Day One, and it won’t be long before many consumers do too. “Now more than ever, companies are being challenged to take a stand publicly on social issues that matter,” McPherson said. “Younger workers, in particular, want to know that their company’s values align with their own. This isn’t an issue that’s going away. Businesses are going to continue to be held to account for their speech or silence on things like reproductive rights and LGBTQ+ rights. It’s past time to have a plan in place to take a stand.”

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance writer based in Richmond, Virginia. She writes about the workplace, DEI, hiring, and issues faced by women. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, Fast Company, and Food Technology, among others.

In Women’s Health, a New Coalition Aims to Keep Up the Progress

Women’s health care, long neglected by medical researchers and tech innovators in the U.S., is starting to get its due. A new coalition of digital health companies aims to harness the energy around women’s health to boost the accessibility and affordability of their care by working with employers to improve corporate benefits and workplace support.The group, called the Women’s Health Coalition for Digital Solutions, combines the mental-health platform Talkspace and the family-health company Ovia Health with other startups aimed at everything from fertility to menopause to nutrition and fitness.In its first year, the collective is focused on awareness and de-stigmatization efforts as well as using its members’ influence to advocate for workplace health equity. In future years, the coalition’s founders say they would like to encourage more investment in women’s health technology and enhance the patient experience by exploring integration among their many services.The idea for the group came about when Talkspace, which has expanded its business-to-business offerings in the last few years, was looking for partners, and executives saw a growing customer need in the realm of women’s health.“Women are busy. We manage our homes, we manage our work life, we’re managing our own personal happiness,” said Natalie Cummins, chief business officer at Talkspace. “What we’re hearing from our customers is that three barriers that still exist are stigma, access, and affordability.” She and other coalition partners are quick to note stats that show while women live longer than men, they spend 25% more time in “poor health” and they pay $15 billion more per-year in out-of-pocket health care costs than employed men. So Talkspace sought out other virtual health providers who shared their goal of helping people access care remotely, and intentionally put together a group that serves each point in a woman’s life cycle. In addition to Talkspace and Ovia Health the founding members include Conceive, which offers fertility and pregnancy support; Evernow, which offers menopause care; Nurx, a telehealth company that prescribes birth control, acne treatment, and other medications; FitOn, a fitness app; and Nutrium, which provides nutrition counseling. The coalition is part of a growing trend of employers prioritizing fertility and other family-building benefits in the last few years. The percentage of U.S. organizations offering such benefits increased from 30% in 2020 to 40% in 2022, according to the International Foundation of Employee Benefits Plans. The focus has expanded to include menopause, which has been poorly understood and little-discussed in the workplace. About 15% of companies surveyed by Mercer in 2023 provided menopause-specific benefits—up from just 4% in 2022. “We are seeing people respond to us in a way that is really taking menopause seriously as they should,” says Donna Klassen, a clinical social worker and co-founder of advocacy group Let’s Talk Menopause. She is particularly eager to see efforts aimed at changing the culture and policies around menopause in the workplace, as research has shown that menopause symptoms–and the stigma around them–can negatively impact both women and employers. Researchers at Mayo Clinic found that menopause symptoms cost the U.S. $1.8 billion in lost work time per year, for example. “When people have support at work, they are less likely to feel that they want to leave,” Klassen said. She emphasized the importance of trusted information as more women and their employers address menopause publicly. “People want their questions answered, and doctors don’t always have the time,” she said. “So let’s make sure you’re getting your information from credible sources.” Let’s Talk Menopause offers workshops and other educational programs to individuals and companies seeking to learn about menopause.That kind of education is key to the new coalition’s goals too. It’s “really an opportunity to drive some of the thought leadership with people who have been in this industry for a while and who are invested in improving the lives of women,” said Corrinne Hobbs, general manager and VP of enterprise and strategic partnerships at Ovia Health.Corrinne Hobbs, general manager and VP of enterprise and strategic partnerships at Ovia Health (Photo courtesy of Ovia Health)As the group develops, Hobbs says she sees the coalition companies being in a good position to provide services, advice, and research for companies that want to improve their benefits or policies in ways that support women’s health. Their effort comes as the U.S. continues to see the consequences of the Supreme Court’s decision overturning the federal right to abortion, which has led to other restrictions on reproductive health around the country. Cummins, Hobbs, and other coalition partners say they are not wading into national politics, but are focused on enhancing access to women’s health care for as many people as possible. They were pleased to see President Joe Biden’s executive order expanding research on women’s health earlier this year, for example, and are hoping this is a sign of progress. “For many years, women were thought of as tiny men and weren’t really required to be in clinical research,” said Lauren Berson, CEO and founder of Conceive, the fertility-support app that’s one of the coalition’s founding members. As part of the effort from the federal government, the National Institutes of Health will focus new research on menopause and an array of other health issues that affect women, including Alzheimer’s and conditions like endometriosis and fibroids.Conceive is especially focused on equipping its users with the science and information they need to navigate the experience of getting pregnant. “There’s just so much more we can do together when we think about the lack of research and the lack of infrastructure,” Berson said.The members of the new coalition say they have already heard from companies who want to join the group, but they know there is still a long way to go. Some first steps for employers looking to support women’s health, they say, are to design benefits plans that reduce the out-of-pocket costs for women, remove barriers to seeking care, and ensure benefits cover the full spectrum of employees’ experiences. “Ensuring that your workplace supports women is crucial,” says Hobbs of Ovia Health. “So what does that look like? Improving the parental leave policy, flexible work initiatives, ERGs to really understand the needs of employees and then also minimizing the caregiver burden at home.” Abigail Abrams is a health writer and editor. Currently she is the senior manager of content operations for Atria. Previously, she was a staff writer on health and politics for TIME magazine. Her freelance work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Guardian, and other publications.(Featured photo by SDI Productions/iStock by Getty Images)

The Google Firings: a Signal of a ‘Course Correction’ on Corporate Dissent

Corporate America’s historic experiment in free speech appears to be reaching a turning point. For a time, big employers showed a growing tolerance of workers speaking out on social and political issues–with even company leaders making bold pronouncements on emerging issues.In 2017, for example, workers spoke up about sexual harassment as part of the #MeToo movement. In 2020, they made their opinions known about racial justice after the murder of George Floyd. In response, many employers made changes to the status quo, updating hiring policies, investigating misconduct, setting up employee resource groups (ERGs), and holding discussions on world events. Some even formed “social issues working groups” to respond thoughtfully to emerging controversies.But the latest cultural flashpoint, the Israel-Hamas war, has not settled in quite the same way. Rather than spurring policy changes and public forums, the tension around this issue has prompted in-office protests and arrests. The politics that moved into the office in 2017 never moved out, but the tenor of today’s conflict–at least in the workplace–is different.In a signal event last month, Google fired 50 employees who took part in sit-ins to protest the company’s contracts with the Israeli government. Nine of them were arrested for trespassing. Google CEO Sundar Pichai sent out an email to staff declaring that work is not a place to “fight over disruptive issues or debate politics.” In another high-profile case, long-tenured National Public Radio reporter Uri Berliner accused the platform of imbalanced reporting on the conflict in a published essay. Berliner was suspended and later resigned.One implication of the corporate response is that the organizational embrace of dissent, especially on polarized issues, is reaching its limits. John Higgins, who researches and writes about employee activism, believes employers are giving the public an “X-ray” of their corporate culture. “I find it fascinating how [Google] created a corporate culture where a sit-in was the only way that the employees thought they could be heard, and the only management response they could imagine was to fire everybody,” Higgins told From Day One. “Everybody’s been talking about dialogue in organizations for decades, and that is not dialogue. That is a straight power play. The question is, where will this end?” The trend so far, notably among tech companies who earlier made a point of projecting their progressive values, is that “we’re seeing a course correction across the board,” Fortune editor-at-large Michal Lev-Ram told CNBC this week.Confrontations in corporate America are mirrored on college campuses, where disagreements have turned violent to the point of stealing media attention from the underlying crisis in Gaza. As students and faculty members demand that universities divest from their interests in Israel, as well as cut ties with organizations that do business in Israel, several universities have responded aggressively, which has affected not just students but also the people who work there.Nadia Abu El-Haj, a professor at Barnard College and Columbia University, believes that by asking New York City police to intervene with pro-Palestinian protesters on campus, Columbia’s administration lost the confidence of its own faculty. “That decision was the last straw: it galvanized faculty who otherwise not only had no involvement in pro-Palestine politics but in some cases actively disagreed with the students,” she said in an interview with the New York Review.There have been reports of faculty arrests at Stony Brook University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Virginia Tech, Washington University, and California Polytechnic Institute, not to mention student arrests across the U.S., which now number in the thousands. At Emory University, at least one professor was handcuffed, while a teacher at Dartmouth College described her arrest as “brutal.”Where Will the Crackdown Lead?“The firings at Google, I think, are a sign of the zeitgeist,” said Alison Taylor, a clinical associate professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business and author of the new book Higher Ground: How Businesses Can Do the Right Thing in a Turbulent World. In 2024, companies don’t need workers as desperately as they did just a few years ago. Job openings in the U.S. sank to a three-year low in March and quit rates declined as well. As power shifts from employees back to employers, many companies are clawing back power.Overall, the evidence is mounting that it doesn’t benefit companies to get involved in public discourse that’s going to split their stakeholders, Taylor told From Day One. “My strong impression is that people running companies are somewhat regressing because [getting involved] looked very convenient when it was Trump and climate change and immigration, but when it’s reproductive rights and Gaza, it is much less convenient.”“How quickly the pendulum swings,” wrote journalist and author Joanne Lipman in a post on LinkedIn. Lipman, who is currently a lecturer in political science at Yale, underscored the marked change in employer-employee relations. “Just a few years ago, in the wake of #MeToo and George Floyd’s murder, companies accommodated and sometimes supported protesting employees. Contrast that with today, when companies have had it with restive workers, and are cracking down on them instead.”Lipman has been a front-line witness to the about-face. As she continued on LinkedIn: “I happened to be at Google’s headquarters to give a talk on Nov. 1, 2018, the day of an historic company walkout to protest sexual harassment and workplace culture. The crowd was massive, permitted to assemble, and the company ultimately met some ... of its demands. A very different vibe last week, when Google fired 50 employees involved in a far smaller protest.”Of course, an exact comparison can’t be squarely drawn. The case could be made that employers can exert a greater impact on sexual harassment or discriminatory practices in their own workplace than on war overseas. The Economist made the case that even if major universities were to divest from their interests in Israel, the effect would be largely symbolic and have little to no effect on the actions of the Israeli government, Google’s Nimbus Project being an obvious exception.The events on college campuses and in tech-company offices reflect the coarser political climate writ large. Polarization in public is bleeding into polarization in the workplace. “The inability to seek out compromise and to seek out dialogue within Google is in itself a parallel process with the wider political discourse within the country,” said Higgins. ‘It Was Clear That Things Were Going to Get Pretty Messy’As early as 2018, Taylor was warning that the corporate-activism trend would not end well. “Scapegoating is inevitable,” she wrote for Quartz. By being outspoken advocates of one thing or another, companies were casting themselves in the role of public officials–and, alongside public officials, were blamed for polarization, terrorism, privacy violations, racism, and extremism. The problem is that businesses can’t necessarily do much about, say, terrorism.At the time, “short-term controversy around a political issue [was] a small price to pay for overall approval from the public and media,” she wrote. That’s no longer true. Backpedaling from overt involvement in public discourse, companies are now more likely to comment only on matters they can directly influence. But the precedent has been set, and workers are taking out their frustration on businesses. Transparency, once the mantra of companies and their publicly charismatic executives, has often been their undoing, especially when words do not reflect actions.How inevitable was this clash? Precipitating events, like the Oct. 7 attack in Israel, aren’t necessarily predictable, at least by business leaders. But if it weren’t this particular event, it would be something else, Taylor argues. “Once companies have opened up this avenue of activism, an avenue of leaders speaking up, an avenue of leaders taking positions on things, then it was clear that things were going to get pretty messy, pretty quickly,” she told From Day One.How Companies Might Better Handle Differences of OpinionBy firing the sit-ins, the message was clear, Higgins said: Don’t tell us anything we don’t want to hear in a way we don’t want to hear it. “What Google has reinforced is very traditional command-and-control.” In his estimation, the company would be better served to ask, How can we all live with our disagreements?“Businesses do not operate in a vacuum,” Higgins said, and they should stop behaving as if they do. Unless they are willing to engage with their workers–sans terminations and law enforcement–leaders will trap themselves in their own echo chambers and ultimately drive discontent underground. “People will become extremely skilled at telling senior management what they want to hear. Meanwhile, they will get on with doing what they need to do.” As the leadership team grows increasingly out of touch with its workforce, discretionary energy will be funneled into maintaining a placid façade rather than innovating. Volcanic activity, of course, begins underground.Taylor doesn’t envision a return to an earlier time in which battles over politics were fought only in the political arena, no matter how much employers may want it. “Younger generations do not see the world this way, and then [companies] opened up Pandora’s box. It’s pretty hard to go back to the way things were.”Companies would be ill-advised to dismiss the agitations of younger generations, who are the harbingers of change. “They tell you about what’s shifting in social attitudes, and that tells you what your customers are going to value,” said Higgins. Instead, workers and employers must become comfortable with disagreement.“If two people never disagree, it means at least one of them is not thinking critically or speaking candidly, and that means both of them are failing to learn from the exchange that might happen between them,” organizational psychologist Adam Grant told Anne McElvoy on The Economist Asks podcast in 2022. “I think a lot of us are taught to argue to win; I think what we ought to be doing is arguing to learn.”Coloring the culture wars is “binary bias,” in which the people who agree with you are good and those who don’t are bad. “I think that’s really interfering with progress,” Grant said on the podcast. Where there are only good guys and bad guys, compromise is as bad as capitulation—and neither side wants to be defeated.In his Free Press essay, Berliner lamented that “diversity of thought” was unimportant in the NPR newsroom. This, he argued, has cost the institution the trust of the public.It could end this way, Higgins estimates: Companies continue to sort themselves into “red” companies and “blue” companies and workplaces will become more homogenous and further entrenched in their beliefs. “By and large, people will increasingly join companies that align with how they view organizations fitting in the world: those companies which see themselves as having a social role and those that say, ‘We are explicitly not going to play that game.’”But the only way out, he said, is curiosity. “How this will end, I hope, is that if people are serious about engaging with collective intelligence, if people are serious about taking organizational agility seriously, they have to double down on learning how to walk toward contention and difference.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business, work, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, the Washington Post, Quartz, and Fast Company.[Featured photo: Tech workers from Google, Meta and Amazon protested against Big Tech supplying Israel with intelligence tools outside Google offices in Manhattan on April 16. Photo by Cristina Matuozzi/Sipa USA via AP Images]

From Day One Celebrates Its Fifth Anniversary

Half a decade ago, the news was erupting daily in an avalanche of headlines about Corporate America. A lot of those headlines were about scandals. About mistakes and injustice. These were not just mainstream media headlines, but also major stories emerging from digital media and social media. In fact, it seemed like for the first time everyone suddenly had a voice, and many of these voices were shouting. Many people within these companies were already committed to making positive change. But corporate values issues are often complex. They are typically interwoven with other business priorities, history, or plain old inertia. “Companies were being held accountable for their behavior in new and important ways, and it seemed like there was real, and possibly permanent change happening,” recalls From Day One CEO Nick Baily. “But then what? Even once you agree on a new set of values, there’s a lot of work to do in making them real.” This was the historical turning point the three founders of From Day One were contemplating when they launched, exactly five years ago this month, the organization’s very first event, a one-day conference of hundreds of business leaders at BRIC House in Brooklyn, a place not previously known for business conferences. From the start, it was designed to be something different.The idea was that the country needed a “forum on corporate values,” a gathering of professionals to talk about the relationship between companies and their employees and communities. In other words, their stakeholders, rather than just their stockholders. The founders–Baily, Erin Sauter, and me–felt certain that we didn’t know the answer to these pivotal questions, but we felt equally certain that there were many people with inspiring, practical insight on these topics, and that bringing them together into the same room would be a positive first step.The first event was a hit. Speakers from companies including IBM, NBCUniversal and Condé Nast offered fresh ideas on “building a more purposeful team” and “setting your values and following them.” Sponsors ranged from AT&T to Con Edison to Eileen Fisher. Attendees, for their part, asked: What will you be doing for an encore?The three founders decided to bring the Brooklyn-bred idea to Chicago, Boston, and beyond. Five years later, From Day One has hosted 45 one-day conferences from Seattle to Miami. The pandemic produced an existential moment of doubt for the company, but necessity proved inspirational. From Day One has hosted more than 60 virtual conferences and 220 webinars. All told, more than 72,000 professionals in HR and related fields have attended From Day One’s events. This year, Inc. magazine recognized From Day One as one of America’s 5,000 fastest-growing companies. The audience at a From Day One conference in Atlanta; featured photo: a panel onstage in Seattle (Photos by From Day One)Since the company has taken a journalistic approach to its conversations, it has never lacked for topics. History-making events of the past five years provided fuel for conversations that From Day One’s founders never could have expected. To start with, the pandemic brought the remote-work revolution. As Harvard professor Tsedal Neeley told our virtual audience: “I am 100% convinced that, if we do this hybrid right and with courage, and we set our policies based on need and not fear, we’re preparing for the digital revolution that’s right around the corner.” She was prophetic about the challenge of getting it right.The murder of George Floyd inspired a push for racial justice in Corporate America that would prove to be fitful, but the conversation was groundbreaking. “All of a sudden, I was talking about this, and our employees’ eyes were opened. We’ve never really talked openly about racism before at work,” Hoai Scott of NBCUniversal told our audience in Los Angeles. As the pandemic eased, the pent-up demand for more rewarding and meaningful work triggered the Great Resignation that sent companies into a frantic search for talent, which has only somewhat eased. “Comparing where we are now to where we were pre-Covid, I think the employee is going to retain a lot of power,” AT&T executive Ben Jackson told our Dallas audience last year. In turn, the need to retain workers inspired a major push among companies for better learning-and-development programs. “Our vision is–and it’s very lofty–we want to redefine what education means in this country, full stop,” Walmart’s head of L&D said in a From Day One fireside chat.What may be the most consequential development of From Day One’s short life is a debate about not only the future of work, but the meaning of work in our lives. To be sure, our colleagues at Harvard Business Review, which celebrated its 100th anniversary last year, have been at this awhile. But recent years have turned this philosophical question into a competitive news beat for business reporters and thinkers like Anne Helen Petersen, who has spoken to From Day One’s audience about both of her recent work-focused books. She was early in raising the prospect that a flexible approach to work arrangements “could actually help us decenter work, just slightly, from its place of prominence in our world.”To offer such a vigorous schedule of events to talk about these issues, From Day One now has a team of 18 full- and part-time employees who’ve developed diverse areas of expertise in finding inspiring speakers, developing an engaged audience, staging well-run events, and helping sponsors grow their businesses.What’s next? From Day One is planning a rich assortment of live and virtual events for the rest of 2023 and all through 2024, including a conference next week in our neighbor borough of Manhattan. We hope you’ll join us for the next chapters of our story.Steve Koepp is From Day One’s chief content officer.

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