Corona-crisis relief: What companies and others are doing to help soften the blow

BY Mimi Hayes | March 16, 2020

Our news roundup focusing on how businesses and other organizations are making purposeful efforts to provide help at a time of crisis.

Updated April 16

Amazon: Testing all employees for Covid-19

CEO Jeff Bezos announced that Amazon will be expanding efforts to test employees for the coronavirus. “Regular testing on a global scale, across all industries, would both help keep people safe and help get the economy back up and running. For this to work, we as a society would need vastly more testing capacity than is currently available,” Bezos wrote to shareholders. He stated Amazon would be testing all employees, regardless of whether they were showing any symptoms of the virus.

Starbucks: Some locations to re-open 

After closing a majority of stores in the U.S. and Canada on March 21, the popular coffee chain may re-open certain locations for drive-thru and to-go orders, depending on local health guidelines. The company will take a “monitor and adapt” stance, noted CEO Kevin Johnson, and will also be extending paid leave for employees and paying an extra $3 per hour to those still on the job.

Toyota: Teaming up to manufacture ventilators 

Like many manufacturing companies, Toyota has adapted to creating medical equipment, particularly sought-after ventilators. Nihon Kohden, a Tokyo-based manufacturer of medical electronic gear, is now working with Toyota to boost output of ventilators by fivefold, reported Bloomberg. Nissan and other car manufacturers may follow suit.

Office Space: This company has created an office-sounds generator 

Miss the office? Chances are you didn’t realize just how much you craved the sound of a copy machine. Kids Creative Agency, a culture design company based in Switzerland, just launched imintheoffice.eu, a simulator to bring us back to all the familiar and oddly nostalgic sounds of our offices.

Updated April 10

Twitter & Co.: Tech billionaires donate money and resources  

Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter, announced this week that he plans on donating approximately one third of his wealth, or $1 billion, to coronavirus relief programs. Other celebrities from Jeff Bezos to Oprah Winfrey are following the trend, contributing millions to food banks and philanthropic organizations. While this provides much-needed short-term relief, critics warn that it's no substitute for what the government can do to alleviate economic inequities. “It’s really important to ask why the crisis has hit us the way it has and the weaknesses it’s exposed,” author Anand Giridharadas told Recode. 

Restaurants: Becoming makeshift grocery stores

With empty shelves in grocery stores and worker strikes sweeping across popular grocery-delivery businesses, local restaurants are converting their closed locations into grocery stores. In San Antonio, dozens of businesses are pooling their resources to sell essential items, meal kits, and, of course, precious toilet paper. 

Movie Theaters: Finding unique ways to stay afloat

As movie theaters large and small have been shut down due to social-distancing orders, some local cinemas are finding ways to stream new indie films with a new stay-at-home option. Customers can buy a ticket online and will receive a one-time viewing link and an option to support a local theater with their purchase. “We really do think that we’re supporting small theaters and their staff,” says Erik Lokkesmoe, president of Aspiration Entertainment. 

Hair Salon: Founder makes emergency pivots to save company

Amy Errett, the founder of Madison Reed, a hair-color brand, taking drastic measures to adapt to the pandemic. After shutting down multiple stores in San Francisco, Errett has seen an increase in online orders by adjusting supply chains and giving hairdressers customer-service positions to help people color their own hair at home. “We quickly quadrupled the size of the Color Crew from 30 to 115 people to support increased customer demand, and got everyone set up in new jobs within a week,” Errett said.

Detroit Sewn: Local contractor starts manufacturing masks

A contract-sewing shop in Detroit is now working full-time making masks for healthcare staff, essential workers, and the elderly. Inspired by the "Arsenal of Health," a movement designed to pivot manufacturing, the company began work making 50,000 cotton reusable masks per  week for healthcare workers in desperate need of personal protective equipment (PPE). The company has since partnered with several other non-profit organizations to distribute and develop machinery to make N95 masks, which are more effective at stopping the virus than standard cloth masks. "What's important to know is these are not alternatives to N95 masks, nor are they alternatives for surgical masks, they are considered standard face masks," says Detroit Sewn CEO Karen Buscemi. 

Updated April 7

Tesla: Using car parts to make ventilators 

The electric-auto maker released a video this week breaking down a prototype of its Model 3-borne ventilator, made partly of Tesla car components. The company joins Ford and General Motors in rushing to build ventilators that hospitals need to help severely ill coronavirus patients breathe. "Model 3 parts used in the Tesla ventilators include a mixing chamber and vehicle controllers and several components of its Model 3 infotainment system, including the touchscreen and infotainment computer," Fast Company reported.  

Car-insurance companies: Giving customers a break 

As motorists around the U.S. shelter in place, Allstate and American Family Insurance are cutting drivers some slack. Allstate will be giving 15% of its monthly premiums back to customers and American Family will send $50 for each vehicle registered with a policy. With fewer cars on the road, fewer accident claims are being filed, so companies are returning some of the windfall to customers. Not all auto-insurance companies are on board yet.

Grocery delivery: More ethical options 

In response to worker strikes over hazard pay and workplace safety during the pandemic, a new company is empowering small shopping-and-delivery companies to compete with the big platforms like Instacart. Dumpling, a new shopping platform, allows users to hire local delivery-business companies to shop for their groceries and essential items. Founder and co-CEO Joe Shapiro stated that personal shoppers using the platform are earning a take-home pay of $33 per job, “an order of magnitude higher than the average that you see on other online delivery apps,” Fast Company reported.

Uber: Helping out-of-work drivers find jobs

Impacted tremendously by the coronavirus, 3.9 million hourly drivers are now looking for alternative means to make ends meet. This week Uber launched Work Hub, a platform to connect drivers to new job opportunities such as warehouse, food production, and customer-service positions. Uber will also connect drivers to opens outside of the company and will not collect commissions from partner companies.  

Updated April 1

Kohl’s: Launching curbside pickup tomorrow 

In an email to customers this week, Kohl’s CEO Michelle Gass announced that the 1,200-store chain would begin a new "drive-up" feature that allows shoppers to order items online and have them placed in the back of their cars upon arrival. The stores will remain closed to the public. Participating locations are to be announced on the company's website kohls.com starting tomorrow.

Facebook: New feature to encourage neighborly behavior

The social-media giant announced a new “Community Help” feature that allows users to volunteer to help neighbors in their area. Within a 50-mile radius, volunteers can help deliver groceries, medicine, and run errands for sick or elderly neighbors. The feature is set to roll out this week in the U.S., U.K., and France.

Crocs: Donating shoes to frontline health-care workers 

The company's CEO Andrew Rees is donating 10,000 shoes for nurses and doctors across the U.S. Workers can have the shoes, known for their comfort and easy clean-up, delivered to their homes by going to crocs.com/freeforhealthcare. "These workers have our deepest respect, and we are humbled to be able to answer their call and provide whatever we can to help during this unprecedented time," said Rees.

Dallas Mavericks: Owner supports arena workers 

NBA team owner Mark Cuban has put into place a program to continue to pay hourly workers who are now out of a job. With the league unsure when games will resume, thousands of workers are now left empty handed. Cuban also plans to work with organizations to provide day care for frontline health workers.

Bloom Energy: Fixing up old ventilators

While many companies are starting from scratch, a California-based company called Bloom Energy has taken to refurbishing thousands of old and broken ventilators to send out to hospitals in need. “This is a really good reminder and representation of the power of American manufacturing, and Americans coming together to support the community,” said Susan Brennan, Bloom’s chief operating officer. 

Updated March 30

Yum Brands: CEO forgoes salary to help restaurant managers

CEO David Gibbs, who oversees brands including KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, announced today that he will give his 2020 salary to restaurant general managers in the form of one-time, $1,000 bonuses. His expected $900,000 will also be used to fund the Yum Brands Foundation Global Employee Relief Fund to help employees directly impacted by the pandemic. 

Facebook: A pledge $100 million to news media

News publishers, particularly the print media, are taking a hit during this pandemic and Facebook is offering its help. From the promised $100 million total, $25 million will be given to local media, while the remaining $75 million will be spent in marketing for global news organizations. Both Facebook and Google, whose dominance in the market for online advertising has exacerbated the decline of American newsrooms, have earlier pledged hundreds of millions of dollars to assist local media.

Johnson & Johnson: Making progress on a coronavirus vaccine 

With a $1 billion investment from the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority, a federal agency, Johnson & Johnson announced it is getting closer to a vaccine for the COVID-19 virus. Human testing could begin as early as September, with use possibly by early 2021. The company is also partnering with other countries to speed up manufacturing capacity. 

Amazon: Alexa voice assistant now offering triage 

The company has added a new feature to the popular Alexa voice assistant to help users gauge their risk level for coronavirus. The AI-bot will respond with questions about symptoms and travel history, while offering expert health guidance from the CDC about how to get help if they are at risk. Alexa will also sing you a song for 20 seconds while you wash your hands, the minimum washing time advised by health experts.  

Medical drones: taking flight in the U.S.?

Zipline, a medical drone delivery service launched in Rwanda, is now working to bring its devices to the U.S. In Ghana, the company has already used the drones to deliver emergency masks and gloves to regional hospitals. The startup is currently brainstorming ways to use the drones for prescription delivery as well. 

Updated March 27

Walmart: Waiving rent for essential partner businesses

For the month of April, Walmart will offer rent relief to more than 10,000 businesses housed in their stores such as hair salons, veterinary clinics, banks, and eye doctors. The company has seen a boom in sales since the coronavirus pandemic and has also announced it will give $500 million in bonuses to hourly workers.

Apple: New CDC-approved screening app and website

The company announced a new website and iOS app that allows users to take a questionnaire to screen for possible symptoms. The app and website include information from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about the virus and what to do if the app indicates that a user may be positive for COVID-19.

Instacart: Hiring as demand escalates

As more Americans stay home and avoid grocery stores, Instacart has announced it will seek to hire 300,000 independent contractors over the next three months, nearly doubling its current workforce. "The last few weeks have been the busiest in Instacart's history and our teams are working around the clock to reliably and safely serve all members of our community," said Instacart founder and CEO Apoorva Mehta.

Dyson: Founder designs new ventilator in record time

In response to an order from UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is suffering from coronavirus himself, the vacuum-cleaner company announced that it has designed a ventilator that will be ready to distribute to hospitals as soon as April. The devices will meet National Health Service requirements.

Columbia University: Putting 3D printers to good use

Madiha Choksi, research-and-learning-technologies librarian at Columbia University, put the school’s 3D printer to work this week by printing face shields for health workers. With help of volunteers, she has turned a local New York community center into an assembly line for the equipment.

Updated March 25

Snapchat: New games encourage staying at home

Zenly, the Snapchat app that allows you to share your location with friends, is now releasing a Stay at Home leaderboard to challenge users to help contain the coronavirus outbreak by staying at home. Zenly also offers a coronavirus lens, which allows users to see the number of confirmed cases updated on a map three times per day using data from the World Health Organization and Johns Hopkins University.

Restaurants: New food automation and 100% contactless production

Creator, a restaurant in San Francisco, is innovating with automated food production and a new pressurized “transfer chamber” that allows workers and delivery workers to eliminate the passage of germs during pick-up. “We can’t restart the economy until retail and restaurant workers are protected,” says Creator founder Alex Vardakostas. “They’re some of the most important people to keep virus-free.”

Neiman Marcus: Partnering to ship protective gear to health-care workers

Luxury retailer Neiman Marcus and Jo-ann Stores, the fabric-and-craft chain, are joining efforts to provide masks, gloves, and scrubs in several facilities across the U.S. The materials are not fully medical grade, but will follow health guidelines from the Providence Hospital System in Washington, reported the Dallas Morning News.

3M: Ramping up N95 respirator mask production 

Creator of Post-it Notes, Scotch tape, and various office supplies, 3M has been refining its response to health emergencies for nearly two decades. The company doubled global production of N95 masks and is shipping them to the hardest-hit areas in the U.S. The company is also announcing a partnership with Ford Motor Co. to produce air-purifying respirators for severely ill patients.

Updated March 24

Nike: Top Athletes promote new coronavirus PSA

The company known for the message “Just do it” is campaigning a new one: “Play inside, play for the world.” Among the famous athletes to endorse the message are LeBron James, Michael Jordan, and Cristiano Ronaldo.

Ford: new ads and expedited ventilator and mask production

Instead of a scheduled March Madness-themed campaign, Ford released a new ad with the tagline “Built to Lend a Hand,” encouraging those struggling to make car-loan payments to contact them if they need help, Fast Company reports. The company is also teaming up with 3M, GE, and the UAW to produce 100,000 face masks and disposable respirators using a 3D printer.

Kraft-Heinz: donating $12 million to

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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)

Abigail Abrams | July 17, 2024

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] 

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | May 03, 2024

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. 

Stephen Koepp | September 20, 2023