An affordable-housing crisis has hit many big cities in the U.S., but for tech hubs that have experienced rapid expansion, the shortage has hit much harder. In an almost unprecedented move, Microsoft has stepped up to the problem by pledging $500 million toward affordable-housing development in the place it calls home, the Seattle area.

The housing shortage has been a side effect of tech-hub growth from the Bay Area to Brooklyn, where tech companies attract many well-paid workers, who drive up the cost of housing. At the same time, many middle- and low-income workers have seen their income failing to keep pace with the rising cost of living.

The crisis has raised expectations that the tech giants need to get involved in responding to it. “This is a big problem. And it’s a problem that is continuing to get worse," wrote Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, and Amy Hood, its chief financial officer, in a corporate blog post last week. "It requires a multifaceted and sustained effort by the entire region to solve. At Microsoft, we’re committed to doing our part to help kick-start new solutions to this crisis.”

Microsoft plans to lend $225 million of the total to public and private developers to build middle-class housing, $250 million towards low-incom

e housing, and $25 million in philanthropic grants to local organizations that fight homelessness. As the loans are repaid, Microsoft said it would lend it back out again.

By spreading the money across many projects, the company hopes that the initiative will produce tens of thousands of units. The new housing isn't intended only for Microsoft workers, but for the community at large. "Of course, we have lots of software engineers, but the reality is that a lot of people work for Microsoft. Cafeteria workers, shuttle drivers. It's is a supply problem, a market failure," Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told a meeting of journalists last week.

Other tech giants have taken different approaches to the problem, sometimes producing intense public-policy debates. Last year, Seattle-based Amazon successfully lobbied against a proposal to tax large businesses to help pay for homeless services and housing, on the grounds that it would put a damper on job creation. But in November, voters in San Francisco approved a similar measure, an initiative supported by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff but opposed by Twitter chief Jack Dorsey.

In getting involved in the housing market, Microsoft is stepping in where government has stepped back in recent years, as uban-policy journalist Emily Badger writes in the New York Times:

"...The fact that a tech company has to step in to help ensure the development of affordable housing points to a long-building reality nationwide: The federal government has largely retreated from this role.
The government spent about three times as much on housing programs in the 1970s as it does today, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition. ...

Over this time, federal resources have increasingly shifted away from subsidizing the construction of affordable housing to subsidizing renters who find housing in the private market. And now most new below-market-rate housing is built not by public agencies, but by nonprofit developers leveraging tax credits."

As Microsoft's Smith and Hood wrote in their blog post: “If we’re going to make progress, we’ll all need to work together as a community. We recognize that Microsoft is in a unique position to put the size of its balance sheet behind this effort. But we believe that every individual and every business, large and small, has a responsibility to contribute."

Rachyl Houterman is a reporting intern at From Day One and attends journalism school at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire. In her free time, she enjoys exploring national parks, hiking, and reading

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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