Amid a Childcare Crisis, These Founders Offer a Solution

BY sagelazzaro | May 22, 2020

Welcome to She Leads, a series digging into the good, the bad, and the ugly of being a woman in business. In each piece, we chat with a different founder about her experiences, the issues women face in business, and how they’re powering through in the face of adversity.

Sara Mauskopf didn’t know she'd be launching a data-powered childcare platform when she left the tech giants for good. All she knew was that she, along with millions of other parents, had a big problem, and no one was trying to fix it.

“I had worked at a bunch of really awesome tech companies with great engineers,” said Mauskopf, who spent time at Google, YouTube, Twitter, and Postmates. “And I just saw that the amazing engineers I had worked with weren't really working on solutions for parents. Actually, no one was working on solutions for parents at the time.”

So Mauskopf, along with her Postmates coworker Anne Halsall, took matters into their own hands and launched Winnie in 2016. Mauskopf serves as CEO and Halsall as chief product officer. To date, they’ve raised $15.5 million to fund their venture. (And they now have two children each.) Childcare providers use their platform to fill their open spaces, build their wait lists, and get support and resources to run their businesses efficiently. Parents benefit from the platform’s detailed listings, which include descriptions, photos, tuition information, licensing status, availability, and more.

The founders’ belief is that childcare needs to be more accessible, and technology is the way to make it happen. Their mission is especially critical in the midst of the pandemic, when the chronic problem of unequal access to childcare in the U.S. has become a full-blown emergency. Mauskopf’s message is now front and center: childcare is vital to the economy, it’s an incredible amount of work, and it’s disproportionately put on women.

We chatted with her about the origins of her company, the blind spots of venture capitalists around women-led companies, and what the pandemic tells us about the state of childcare. Excerpts:

From Day One: The world still sees childcare as women’s work, including much of Silicon Valley. In my years of interviewing female founders, one thing I’ve heard time and time again is that VCs often question the ability of mothers to both run a company and have children, but never fathers. Have investors viewed Winnie as a company only relevant to women? 

Mauskopf: Everything you said has absolutely been my experience. A lot of investors said things like, "I'm already invested in the space." So we'd ask which company, and my favorite was an investor who said he just invested in a tampon company. I was like, "Well, that's not the space we're talking about. We're pitching a childcare company."

Oh my gosh. I’m speechless. 

In their minds, that company was the same because it was founded by two women like us. Tampons and childcare have nothing to do with each other. They’re as different as you can get, but I think that was the perfect example of how investors view a company in the parenting space started by two women. They were like, "This is a company for women. This is a company for moms," when really what we're doing is solving problems for all parents. We don't want women to take on the majority of the childcare burden. It's really important to us that this is accessible to both men and women, because childcare should be the responsibility of everyone.

I can't lie—my jaw is still slightly on the floor from that tampon comment, though I'm not surprised. Just yesterday I was just talking with someone about how investors often group companies that involve women together and consider them a niche. But women are diverse and they aren’t a small, specialized category; they’re half the population and drive 70% to 80% of purchases. 

Another surprising thing was that a lot of investors would ask, "Have you talked to X female investor?" Everyone wanted us to talk to Aileen Lee, who is a really prominent early-stage investor who started Cowboy Ventures and coined the term unicorn. She's an amazing person and we did talk to her, but she doesn't particularly invest in parenting companies. She wants to pick the most successful startups, whether they're founded by women or men. This was even way before she started All Raise [her non-profit dedicated to diversity in funders and founders]. Yet every investor was like, "You must pitch this woman because you're women."

After working at tech giants where diversity is lacking and the bro culture runs strong, how has becoming your own boss empowered you as a woman in tech?

When we started Winnie, it was very important to us that we started a company with a really different kind of culture. We wanted this to be a place where parents could work, where people of all backgrounds would feel comfortable, and most importantly, where we had work-life balance for not just us, but also our employees.

We made it a priority from day one, and it's just been really helpful in a number of ways. We've been able to recruit really top talent who maybe didn't want that traditional work-all-hours-at-this-startup-and-give-your-life-to-this-company environment. Recently, it's also made us pretty adaptable to this pandemic, because we already have a remote-friendly culture that enables people to work from home when they want to.

What do you think this current moment in time with the pandemic says about our society's larger issues surrounding childcare? And can you tell me a little bit about what Winnie is doing to help?

Childcare is essential to a functioning economy, and I think we're all really feeling that firsthand now. This is the message I've been preaching for over four years, and finally, everyone is getting it because they can't work if they don't have childcare. And for the people who need to perform essential work, they can't work from home in the odd hours when their kids are napping. They just can't go into work at all.

We've responded by launching a portal to connect families who need childcare, either to perform essential work or because their state allows them to seek childcare with providers who have open spaces. Over half of the providers on Winnie are continuing to operate either to serve essential workers or to serve any families, and they need to fill their open spaces to continue to stay in business. It's really tricky to navigate, and so we've been spending a lot of time helping open providers operate safely and connecting them with the people who do need their services right now.

Do you think this will lead to a shift in the conversation about work-life balance, childcare, and the disproportionate role women take on?

On an optimistic note, there is definitely a conversation now about the importance of childcare. I'm glad that we're finally really talking about it in the media. There was just an op-ed in the New York Times that went viral and was about the toll it's taking on parents to not have access to childcare in this moment. But on a pessimistic note, I'm very fearful that when there's not easy access to childcare, it's women who take the hit. We’re already seeing that. Women are dropping out of the workforce, taking a step back in their careers, or taking leave from their jobs. How long will it take for their careers to recover from that? That worries me.

Is there anything else you want to add, or advice you’d want to give to other women looking to start their own company?

This is a great time to start a company. It feels like a terrible time, but I think it's actually a really good time. People who’ve had ideas but haven’t wanted to take the leap have now maybe lost their jobs. And the talent that they might recruit is now looking for opportunities. There may not be the same amount of venture funding, but there's certainly enough to get started. The world is changing, and people are rethinking companies that were successful without a second thought. Everyone is starting fresh. It's a good time to start something.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Sage Lazzaro is a New York City-based journalist covering tech, business, culture, women and diversity & inclusion. Her work has appeared in Refinery29, VICE, Medium, the New York Observer, and more. Follow her on Twitter here.

 

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It’s now the skills that matter—and the assessment of them.Workforce demographics further complicate succession planning. During the span of 2024-27, more than 11,200 Americans will turn 65 every day. Retiring Baby Boomers are vacating a record number of senior positions. Identifying and preparing the next generation of leaders is a key exercise for HR.Artificial intelligence may be the answer. Overloaded HR teams are already employing generative AI agents to write the first draft of job descriptions and benefits newsletters, but the tasks AI can complete for HR are getting increasingly complex, like identifying attrition risks. Why not succession planning?Succession Planning for a Skills-Based WorkforceArtificial intelligence is a promising solution because it helps identify employees who have the skills necessary for the role, not only the right career history. HR is already using artificial intelligence to identify skills within an organization, typically to match current employees to open roles or new projects, but “you could easily extend that to succession planning,” says Chris Pinc, the director of product management at consulting firm WTW.Firms like WTW and other industry experts are spinning up their own AI-backed agents. For instance, the Josh Bersin Company launched its new AI platform for HR, called Galileo, in 2024. It looks a lot like ChatGPT; users type a query into a search bar and the tool returns an answer. Galileo can suggest prompts or help you find specific content related to HR expertise.Chris Pinc, the director of product management at consulting firm WTW (company photo)WTW released its own AI assistant, Expert, last month, while HR tech firm Visier has Vee, an AI agent specifically for people analytics. Google is working on its own AI-powered instance for its HR team. Like Bersin’s Galileo, the interfaces of Expert and Vee will be familiar to anyone who has used a generative AI tool. Why use tools like Galileo or Expert instead of ChatGPT? First, these platforms are closed environments, which means that the information employers enter about their workforce stays only within their ecosystem; it doesn’t feed the larger corpus underlying the tool. And second, these platforms are trained on data, research, and thought leadership from respected HR firms. Galileo pulls from the Bersin company’s own collection plus others, like research from Heidrick & Struggles. WTW’s Expert is similarly constructed, with the entirety of the WTW library backing the tool. Users can load in their own proprietary resources, like survey results, skills assessments, projects, plans, frameworks, processes, and original research. Amy Farner, Bersin’s SVP of product and member experience, said, “We’re not letting it go out there and troll the web.” These companies tell the AI what content to trust.Where AI Can Supercharge Succession PlanningLet’s say it’s time to start looking for a successor to your chief marketing officer, who’s likely to retire in the next three years. Let’s use generative AI to find a good fit. You might ask your tool: I need to find employees who have taken on several major, client-facing projects in the last year. Ideally, with the marketing team. They need to score high on our leadership assessment for innovation and creativity. They also need eight to 10 years of people-management experience.The tool returns a list of leaders matching the criteria. You’re surprised to see Kelly Kapoor, a senior manager from business development, on the list. You learn that last year she worked on a successful product launch and still attends regular meetings with the tech and marketing teams. Not only that, Kelly’s name appears on several proposals for new product features and she has created detailed presentations on original competitive research. Plus, her performance reviews are excellent.Amy Farner, SVP of product and member experience for the Josh Bersin Company (Company photo)It looks like she might be a promising candidate, but under the company’s traditional framework, she never would have crossed your radar. So you load the CMO job description into the AI tool and tell it to map a three-year development plan to prep Kelly for the seat. You learn that she hasn’t yet completed a few key leadership-training courses, and she has very little experience working with creative teams. Plus, she’s had only two or three direct reports at a time. Looks like Kelly has a ways to go before she’s ready, but now you have a new candidate and a plan.What Other Talent Have We Been Overlooking?This is a fictional example, but there’s real-world precedent. Pinc has seen it happen. Recently, one of his colleagues in IT was promoted to a senior finance role. “She took on a special project to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of our overall software-development function,” he said. “She learned a lot about finance, then became a logical person to be the finance director for the IT function. She understood the finance work from that project and she understood the IT from her previous role.” Use AI to fill a role like this, and it can be scaled for an entire organization. The success of so many nonlinear careers raises the question: What other great talent have employers been overlooking?AI can lower the cost of succession planning too, said Pinc, who worked closely on the creation of Expert. Companies have long used leadership assessments for succession planning to find people who are capable of climbing the ladder, but it’s expensive to interpret the results, present them to leadership, then work with HR to write development plans. “That’s human time that I think will be able to be taken over by AI,” he said.AI is still relatively new to HR professionals. This is due, in part, to privacy concerns. Companies can’t just throw employee data into a gen-AI chatbot, even if it is a closed system. And HR is not historically a tech-forward department, but that’s changing. For now, HR is primarily using AI for time-saving, says Farner, but that will expand over time. Organizations are beginning to move past tapping AI as an assistant completing admin tasks to tapping AI as a consultant that operates like a colleague.Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. 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Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza March 19, 2025

Corporate Empathy: Where It Went and Why It Matters

It certainly seems like a bleak moment to be a worker in America. Scroll the news or social media and a picture forms of an uncaring, turbulent, and miserly workplace.Why is this so striking? Empathy, or the ability to understand and be sensitive to others’ feelings and experiences, became a fashionable trait in business just a few years ago. For a while, employers were getting really good at responding to the needs of the workforce. Some companies even traded on it. Empathy, as well as its more active cousin, compassion, took many forms. As more attention focused on how some demographic groups were often left on the sidelines, employers said OK, let’s find ways to level the playing field, and they set hiring goals and stood up mentorship programs. When Covid lockdown closed schools and day-care centers and quarantined babysitters, companies told workers to take care of their families and welcomed Zoom cameos from kids. When employees needed a reprieve from expensive cities and long commutes, companies converted to remote work and hybrid work. When burnout and loneliness pressed on our minds, employers started footing the bill for therapy.The year 2025 feels really different. Much of change in the weather has to do with what the Trump administration and Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency are doing to the federal workforce, gutting it haphazardly and villainizing the civil service—and how companies in the private sector are playing follow-the-leader. Meta appeared to ingratiate itself to the incoming administration by axing its DEI programs. And when President Trump ended federal DEI programs, Google and Amazon ended some of theirs. When Elon Musk fired “low performers” from the federal government, so did Meta and Microsoft. Public sector followed private sector in ending remote and hybrid work. First Amazon, AT&T, and Boeing called workers back to the office in late 2024, and the president did the same on inauguration day. Underscoring the dramatic shift: All of this is happening as we arrive at the fifth anniversary of Covid lockdowns in the U.S. In some ways, all those revolutionary changes to the way we work seem to be dissolving. To be sure, many employers insist that employee well-being is still a priority, but surveys show that most workers aren’t feeling it. According to Gallup, the percentage of employees who believe their organization cares about their well-being plunged to 21% in early 2024. At its peak in May 2020, that figure was 49%.These stories and statistics certainly make it seem like employers are pulling the plug on empathy. But while the big tech and banking companies that have toughened up their workplace policies employ a lot of people, as does the federal government, they don’t employ everyone. Do these stories really reflect what it’s like to be a worker in 2025? Is corporate empathy dead? I started asking around.When the Reality Doesn't Match the MessageAs I was working on this story, Lauren Branston, CEO of the UK-based nonprofit Institute of Business Ethics, sent me an email. “I have been hearing people I trust saying they are seeing more and more ‘campaigns’ saying empathy is bad, etc. Which I find worrying,” she wrote. “People are campaigning against a core human value. We aren’t ready for this as an institution or in society because we have assumed these topics to be settled.”For decades, she later told me in an interview, people have operated with the belief that undergirds much of Western political democracy: that those with power can largely be trusted to use that power for good, and if they don’t use it for good, then accountability, in the form of ethics or regulations, will come for them. Now, it’s not clear whether either of those things is enough to stop the rolling tide.“It’s fundamentally challenging, she said. “It’s a moment where your values and beliefs are shaken, and it’s a moment where you have to sit and recalibrate what’s going on. What you see when people’s values are challenged is engagement and collaboration and connection. People organize and get organized. And I think that might happen.”As a reporter, I talk to senior HR leaders and executives every day, and some of them I know well. It’s clear to me that a lot of these people who work in HR are, as individuals, genuinely concerned about the well-being of their colleagues. And some are really pushing for change.In February, I moderated a From Day One panel of senior talent-acquisition leaders, and all of them were insistent on providing a good candidate experience even as they introduce AI into their hiring process and navigate an unwelcoming labor marketplace. 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We want you to do this thing that you have a personal passion for, even though it’s during work hours,’” Osborne told me. But behind closed doors, the same leaders debated whether to promote employees who went on lunchtime runs or left early to make the school play. Taking them at their word was a trap. But this didn’t happen in the new, colder environment, it happened years ago, when it was in vogue to be a support-everyone kind of company. Which tends to confirm the worker suspicion that many companies never believed in empathy at all.What It Feels Like When the Vibe ShiftsEven so, I found employees who wanted me to know that they don’t believe corporate empathy is dead. One of them works in product development at a large, U.S.-based tech company. He wanted me to use a pseudonym—we’ll call him Terry—so he could speak candidly.Terry likes his work, which he says is creative and challenging. He also likes that expectations are clear and good work is rewarded. There have been two rounds of layoffs and a reorganization since he arrived, but Terry believes the matters were handled as well as they could have been.Primarily, he told me, empathy is evident in the fact that executives are so accessible. For two years, and especially lately, employees have asked executives during town hall meetings whether they’ll stick with DEI. The answer has always been yes. They ask whether workers will be called back to the office. The answer is no, remote and hybrid work will stay in place. As far as ratcheting up productivity expectations, the company now attaches bonuses to performance, but Terry doesn’t believe that’s meant to hector workers. It’s just what happens when revenue flattens out.But something weird happened. Recently, Terry’s new boss told him to provide weekly status updates, a requirement that sounds suspiciously close to Elon Musk’s ominous email to federal employees, ordering them to list five accomplishments for the week. I asked Terry, does that give you pause? It does, so he’s going to ask his manager why. Is he not trusted? Many workers may be harboring the same concerns, but aren’t confident enough to speak up. “Senior leadership can’t make people ask questions,” Terry told me, “but they can create an atmosphere where you can ask questions in front of everyone, or silently Slack the leadership.” So that’s what he’s going to do.What Does Empathy Have to Do With Business?It may be worth asking ourselves where we expect empathy in the workplace to come from: the executives in the C-suite who represent the business, or the colleagues we interact with on a daily basis?One employee who was recently let go from the Department of Education wrote on LinkedIn about how her colleagues went out of their way to help when she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. One tech worker told me how much their manager was a mentor. Federal workers at the Federal Trade Commission and the Department of Commerce have told me how they’re banding together to share resources and support. Go looking for empathy, and you’ll find it.What some employees are getting from their employers cannot be dismissed: bullying and badgering, threats and ultimatums. Really big sticks and no carrots to speak of. People are really angry about layoffs. Most people would agree this is really bad humanity. Some would argue really bad business too.Business Insider’s Aki Ito reported on how Meta’s harsh performance reviews may backfire and damage productivity rather than improve performance. “CEOs may think they’re creating a meritocracy,” Ito writes. “but in reality they’re marching their companies straight into a trap of sunken morale, high turnover, depressed profits, and reduced innovation.”There’s evidence that corporate empathy really does affect dollars and cents. Among my favorite examples is a study by a group of researchers in Switzerland and the UK. They examined 510 CEO conference calls by 448 U.S.-based companies on the Russell 3000 stock index that took place in the earliest stages of the pandemic. They found that the more CEOs made statements, even vague ones, that signaled their human concern for employees, customers, or clients, the better those companies’ stock prices fared when overall share prices plunged in March 2020. The researchers call them “human care statements.”We’ve seen the opposite happen in 2025. Tesla’s stock price has been dropping precipitously, for nine straight weeks. Much of that may be politically inspired, but Musk’s gleeful lack of empathy for workers hit by DOGE cutbacks, with references to wood chippers and chain saws, gained viral infamy.The opposite kind of behavior appears to be demonstrably beneficial and stabilizing. “Follow-up explorations unveiled a negative association between CEO human care statements and stock volatility, meaning that market participants discounted these companies’ future earnings less,” the study reads. “Our explorations suggest that it pays off for CEOs to go beyond mere financial information and show some humanity.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is an independent journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about business and the world of work. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Inc., and Business Insider, among others. She is the recipient of a Virginia Press Association award for business and financial journalism.(Featured photo by Miniseries/iStock by Getty Images)

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza March 19, 2025

5 Priorities for 2025: How HR Leaders Plan to Meet a New Wave of Change

In 2025, HR will be at yet another inflection point. With high levels of employee detachment, anxiety about the arrival of AI, and a huge demand for new skills, corporate CEOs are saying to their chief people officers (CPOs): We need you to fix these things. And by the way, restructure how your own HR operations run–and keep spirits high too!It’s a lot, but chief HR officers are gearing up for another wave of change, even after the incessant disruption in the five years since the pandemic arrived. The consulting firm Heidrick & Struggles interviewed 70 chief people officers around the world about what it takes to do the job. Jennifer Wilson, the co-head of the global HR-officers practice at the firm, wasn’t surprised by the substance of their findings—artificial intelligence, generational changes, and the need to adapt to a stream of curveballs are all priorities they expected to find. What surprised her is the urgency that CPOs expressed, and the evidence that CEOs are leaning so heavily on them for answers. CPOs are super-connectors, the report says, with demands on their attention coming from all sides. As a result, “progressive organizations are playing with their HR functional models,” Wilson said.From Day One spoke to HR leaders and the consultants who work with them about their plans for the new year. Among the myriad responsibilities on their plate, what will they focus on in 2025? This is what they told us they plan to do.Renew the Focus on Company CultureSpeculation about the future of work once conjured images of workers zipping around the office on hoverboards, said Dan Kaplan, senior partner at consulting firm Korn Ferry. Now, futurists train their focus on culture. “It should be the guiding light for companies,” he said, but “they’ve gotten away from that.”The percentage of U.S. workers who say they’re thriving in life has hit a record low: Just 50% of workers Gallup surveyed in 2024 are feeling good about their current life and future prospects, a figure that has declined in the past decade. Gallup also found that employees are detached from their jobs. The chief culprit: rapid organizational changes and the persistent uncertainty around flexible work schedules. If CPOs are still fighting with their CEOs and boards about workers returning to office in 2025, “then you’ve lost,” Kaplan said. The HR leaders who will win are those that can push executives closer to their employees, and inspire them to deliver.Elaine Becraft, the SVP of HR at global medical-tech company Siemens Healthineers, believes that company culture must connect workers to each other and to the mission of the business. Long gone are the days of clocking in and clocking out to collect a paycheck. In 2025, she’s going to focus on holistic employee care.Workers need a new relationship with their employers, and that responsibility has been handed to HR. “There is a recognition that the workforce overall is tired,” said Wilson at Heidrick & Struggles. “We’ve been through a lot over the last few years. The nature of work is changing. Mental health issues in the western world are more prominent than they’ve been in the past, and that’s really become a reality for chief people officers.”Get to the Next Steps on AIArtificial intelligence is unavoidable, but there’s a gap between expectations by CEOs and the actual embrace of AI by workers. “So far, employee adoption of AI in the workplace is lagging behind the hype,” Gallup reports. If your company isn’t an early adopter, it’s probably trying to catch up. Among the innovators is media agency VML, where the global head of organizational development, Loren Blandon, is prioritizing AI upskilling. “In our industry, it’s really critical that we position ourselves as a leader in integrative use, application, adoption, and innovation of AI. We need people fully embracing and using it,” she told From Day One.How do you get world-class creatives to adopt technology that poses an immediate threat to their jobs? “You have to show them that it’s going to amplify their work,” Blandon said. “Then you get them to understand that whether you accept this or not, it’s coming, and it’s in your best interest to start using it rather than fighting yourself into being obsolete.” She’s found that many who dig in their heels just haven’t experimented with AI yet. But when you invite them in and show them how to play, the wheels start turning, and suddenly it’s cool.Ninety-one percent of early-adopting firms report positive results with AI, including increased productivity and cost-savings, according to a report from the Institute for Corporate Productivity, or i4cp. And companies that operationalize AI will outpace their peers.Workforce concerns about AI will continue, with employees anxious about their being displaced or replaced. “That has landed in the CPO’s lap,” said Wilson. HR executives are responsible for equipping the workforce with AI skills, but with no precedents for use, it’s still not always clear when, where, how, or why they’re meant to apply those skills–at least not yet. Of course, HR has its own misgivings about AI encroaching on its territory, and CPOs will have to quell concerns from their own teams at the same time they upskill their colleagues.Invest in the Skills-Based WorkforceForget the traditional concept of a job. It’s a skills-based world now, with much more malleable definitions of roles and projects. And “until companies shift their cultures, efforts to scale skills-based marketplaces will stall,” i4cp’s report says.In a skills-based workforce, employees flow from one assignment to the next, pick up skills in fractional roles, dip into new teams with temporary projects, and volunteer their expertise in new departments. Ideally, all work is promotable and company tenure is no longer a deciding factor.  There’s a large share of the workforce that may be attracted to the fluidity of skills-based work. Sixty-five percent of workers feel stuck in their current roles, according to a Glassdoor survey, a situation that can breed resentment. “It used to be that you stepped into a defined job with tasks, and that was your role all the time. Now it’s more project-based,” said VML’s Blandon. For one team you might be the brand leader, and for another you’re the project manager. “I think jobs need to be fundamentally redesigned to tap into people’s ‘gig desires.’ They want to bring more skill sets to the table. They want to explore more things, and I think we can be savvy in leveraging that.”Maintain a Commitment to DEI, But Change the LanguageDespite recent high-profile changes in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs by the likes of Walmart and Ford in the face of anti-DEI activists, the overall corporate commitment to DEI’s principles isn’t dead. “Activists are overstating the surface-level changes many companies are making to get rid of the heat,” CNN reported this week based on a review of company policies. “Nearly all the largest companies in America still say they are committed to promoting DEI.”Companies are motivated to persist with the principles of DEI because, in an increasingly diverse population, it has been proven to be good for the bottom line, as well as employee retention and motivation. That said, companies still want to avoid the political flak, so they have shifted the emphasis of their language, focusing more on inclusion and belonging. The values have already been operationalized and, in some cases, leaders have asserted that they have not abandoned those values, but are waiting to see what the temperature will be under a second Trump Administration before speaking out more.How can HR make sure thier companies evolve their practices, and not just the labels? The NeuroLeadership Institute’s DEI Impact Case recommends three actions that organizations can take to maintain their investments in DEI, no matter what they’re calling it, as Fast Company reports: “prioritize diversity by aligning it with specific business goals, habituate inclusion through targeted learning and performance tools that integrate it into daily practices, and systemize equity by examining policies and procedures to embed and sustain fairness throughout.”Reshape Organizational StructuresThe new skills-based economy is shaking up corporate structures, and companies are “delayering” their organizations, removing expensive middle managers believed by some to stymie productivity, while companies are also trying to teach managers to be more effective. Blandon says we’re due. “When was the last time we truly thought about reframing that? Manager, subordinate. It hasn’t been really tweaked in a long time, and people are questioning it.”Some companies are delayering to usher in the next generation of executives. Baby Boomers in the C-suite are retiring, and “you’ve got to get that next layer ready,” Wilson said. As vacancies open en masse, “how do you make sure that you don’t have business disruption from that newness?”Kaplan hopes that a shallow hierarchy will shrink the distance between the CEO and the rank and file–and motivate the workforce. “The CEO should be the most inspiring leader in the company,” he said, and by bringing workers closer to their leader, they may feel more connected to the company.At many comppanies, the HR department is getting a reorganization of its own. The traditional “centers of excellence” model, in which HR segments specialize in narrow disciplines, is on its way out, and a cross-functional model, in which HR teams are multi-skilled and capable of working with all departments, is gaining popularity. People ops no longer waits for requests, but goes problem-solving on its own. “We’re seeing agile teams form and disband for specific organizational issues,” said Wilson.Experiments abound. Some companies have moved all administrative tasks to a general shared-services center, leaving HR to “focus entirely on talent, leadership, succession, bench strength, organizational design, and [organizational development].” And, according to Wilson, this could be “a smart way to get HR out of the administrative chains that it’s been under for so many years.”Maybe it’s time for HR and people operations to get a new name? “Talent operations,” Wilson suggested, but then paused. Even that suggests the team is doing more admin than it really does, and the discipline continues to grow. “Maybe talent advisors?” Whatever the name, she said, it should demonstrate that talent is at the center of its responsibilities.“We’re like the lookout on a boat,” Becraft said about her team at Siemens Healthineers. “We see issues, challenges, and opportunities coming toward the company, and it’s our responsibility to bring those to the right people and make sure they understand what’s going on out there.”Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a freelance journalist and From Day One contributing editor who writes about work, the job market, and women’s experiences in the workplace. Her work has appeared in the Economist, the BBC, The Washington Post, Quartz, Business Insider, and Fast Company.(Featured image: Photo by Kobus Louw/iStock by Getty Images)

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza December 18, 2024