CEOs Like Their Chief Marketing Officers, But Want Them to Move Faster
BY Stephen Koepp March 26, 2025While CEOs tend to like and trust their chief marketing officers, they have declining confidence in the ability of the CMOs to drive business growth, according to a new report from Boathouse, a marketing-performance consultancy. The report asks: “Are CMOs too busy being popular and not enough of a profit driver?”The report, based on a survey of 150 CEOs from top U.S. companies, shows patterns from four years of data collection about the role and performance of CMOs. On one hand, 66% of CEOs view marketing as more relevant than three years ago, the report said. But the execution of their departments is often falling short. “While 79% of CMOs are now involved in financial goal setting, many remain on the periphery of growth strategy, limited by a focus on metrics that don’t directly tie to the metrics that CEOs prioritize. To elevate their strategic role, CMOs must deepen their financial fluency and align marketing metrics with business outcomes,” the report said.“Increasingly, we are seeing the CMO is in no-man’s-land,” said John Connors, CEO of Boathouse, as reported in Ad Age, noting the divergence between the CMOs’ grades and the understanding of what the department accomplished. “CMOs are getting smarter about how to build a better relationship with CEOs but marketing overall is losing credibility.”The report’s statistics make the point in showing rising relevance for marketing, but lack of confidence in results. “As CMOs align more closely with CEOs and Boards (e.g., 76% show commitment to the C-Suite, up from 44% four years ago), you’d expect this proximity to better channel CEO strategy to marketing teams. Instead, the gap between CMOs’ performance (45%) and marketing’s overall capability (37%) suggests a breakdown in execution,” the report said.In its analysis of how CMOs can do better, the report suggests that they can help bridge the gap between the CEO focus on financial results and the need to foster a corporate culture that can produce growth. “Data shows 87% of CEOs acknowledge their transformation strategies have not fully succeeded, with top private concerns including employee morale, culture, and reputational risk—areas which are often sidelined in favor of financial metrics,” the report said. “Marketing leaders have a unique opportunity to bridge this gap by aligning brand messaging with internal culture, fostering employee engagement, and brand integrity as pillars of sustainable growth.”In other findings, the survey found that marketing departments are missing the boat when it comes to AI because of an ambivalence about embracing it. “CEOs are enthusiastically adopting AI across their organizations, but marketing lags behind functions like customer service and operations,” the report said. “Marketing must leverage AI for efficiency, insights, and innovation—or risk losing ground to more agile functions. In a technology-led economy, CMOs who don’t lead with AI will watch others claim the spotlight.” Boathouse CEO Connors noted that many marketers are talking about pilot programs, but none are making “bold bets on AI,” he told Ad Age, which is leading CEOs to think their CMOs play it too safe.Stephen Koepp is From Day One’s editor in chief.(Featured illustration by Creatival Images/iStock by Getty)
From Day One Celebrates Its Fifth Anniversary
BY Stephen Koepp September 20, 2023Half 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.
Are You an HR Leader Who Can’t Say No? Then Maybe This Book Is for You
BY Stephen Koepp September 19, 2023If setting boundaries is the right thing for your mental health, then why is it so hard to do? With all the demands on HR professionals in recent years, burnout has become a major problem. With good timing, author and playwright Kara Cutruzzula has come along with Do It (Or Don’t): A Boundary-Creating Journal, the third in her series on personal motivation. The book is rich with insights about why we hestitate to say no, how to do it gracefully, and when to know when it’s probably the best answer. In an email interview, From Day One asked her about the key lessons in her new book: Q. Why are we afraid of saying no? Is it mostly about being superstitious about missing an opportunity, or FOMO, or just not wanting to hurt people's feelings?We don’t say no to certain opportunities or people because it’s either uncomfortable, we don’t want to disappoint someone, or we think our future selves are magically less busy than our present-day selves, and a new obligation will somehow be manageable. These are valid reasons! Yet I would argue, in nearly all cases, the few minutes of feeling itchy and anxious before saying “no” are vastly preferable to giving a reluctant “yes” and then feeling resentful. It's almost always kinder to give a quick “no” than a half-hearted “yes.”Q: What are the hardest invitations to say no to?A person with a full calendar says “no” faster than a person who can fit almost anything into their schedule. Sometimes we accept invitations or opportunities because that specific time slot might be open at the moment, but we shouldn’t consider our time as “free” simply because an offer is extended. Getting clear on where you prefer to spend your time before the invitation comes your way makes it easier to deliberate what’s worth that time–or isn’t.Q. Many people in the HR profession have been suffering burnout after all they’ve endured while leading people through crisis after crisis since 2020. Do you have any advice for them about not trying to solve everyone’s problems–or how to set limits?Can you look at what is actually being asked of you, and then at what you have decided to give? We all want to achieve and, often, overachieve, and can forget that going above and beyond is not sustainable. Giving exactly what you are able to give in the moment can be the answer, even if that changes day to day or week to week. It’s kinder to yourself and the people you are trying to serve.Q. Being a good team player is highly valued in business these days, but how can workers set limits and still be regarded as a collaborative colleague?Communication is the holy grail. If you’re not going to be available one afternoon, tell someone. If your colleague’s non-urgent 8 a.m. Slack messages cast a pall over your morning, tell them–or don’t look at the messages until you’re ready to respond. Respect your own boundaries and remember that you have a choice over what you let into your day. And when you are working with a colleague, give them your full attention–the goal is to continue giving an unequivocal “yes” to wherever you are and whatever you’re working on at the moment, so that we can all do our best work together.Q. It’s easy to say yes quickly, but harder to craft a suitable no. What’s your advice about not procrastinating with an answer?Faster is kinder. Consider all the times you’ve reached out to someone with a favor or request. Getting a quick “no” might sting for a moment–then you move on. Waiting to hear back, however, ratchets up anxiety and can affect your other plans. If you know it's a “no,” say so right away. And if you're debating whether it's a “no,” here’s a hint: It probably should be.Q. Could you give us an example or two of ways to say no, but in a way that doesn't close the door on a relationship?We all have many things on our plates, and sometimes it’s fine to simply say that: I'm sorry that it’s a busy time right now so I won’t be able to join you / take advantage of this opportunity / work together on this project, but I hope you’ll keep me in mind of the future. That’s it.I also love to recommend other people, friends, and colleagues for opportunities. While you're politely declining, take one minute to think, “Do I know anyone who would love to say ‘yes’ to this?,” and then pass along their name. Share the wealth.Q. A lot of times we might say yes to an opportunity, then have regrets as the obligation approaches, but then it turns out we’re glad we did it for reasons we didn’t expect. Does this familiar sequence of emotions tell us anything about how to figure out how to make decisions?This happens so often! We dread going to an event yet meet a new and interesting person or make a business contact. Though I’d say this happens rarely. There are events and opportunities that pull us in, and those that push us away. If you have to force yourself to do something, and it goes well–fantastic! But was it really worth the days of “Should I cancel? Can I rope in someone else to go with me?” Why settle for that feeling, when we have the option to actually look forward to what’s on our calendars, instead of hoping a few items will magically disappear?Q. You describe in the book how to set boundaries by establishing the priorities you want to fence off from interference. What’s a good way to get started thinking about that?In recent months, I found myself blaming a few culprits as reasons why I wasn’t “doing what I wanted to do.” But when I looked at the boundaries I had created–or rather hadn't–around certain projects, I noticed there were zero fences or borders. My day would get chopped up into slivers by others, and it was entirely my fault. I was boundary-less. So you must start by answering the question: Where do I actually want to spend my time? Chunk off a section of your day, whether that’s 15 minutes or four hours, and actually make it a priority. Your boundaries will become a lot easier to maintain.Q. Does it help to make some commitments for yourself that you just won’t allow to be interfered with, like an appointment with a friend, therapist, or physical trainer? How does that pay dividends larger than the appointment itself?Author and playwright Kara Cutruzzula (Photo courtesy of the author)When we go to the dentist, we’re at the mercy of the dentist. Your time becomes your dentist’s time. But you can and should treat commitments to yourself with similar diligence. This isn’t about being harder on yourself. It’s the opposite: you are giving yourself the same focus and concentration as you would someone else. They’re worth it, but you’re worth it too. Q. People flake out on other people all the time, but you offer guidelines on how to “flake with grace.” Why is this OK to do, and an example of how to do it?Flaking is sometimes unavoidable, but there are ways to make it hurt less. Do it quickly, and do it with kindness. The most uncomfortable part of flaking isn’t saying, “Sorry I can’t do this after all,” but rather the billowing silence that preambles the flaking. When you know you can’t follow through, just be honest and tell the other person right away. Q. To be good at boundary-tending, one needs to respect other people’s boundaries as well. Your book offers some good advice about making the now-notorious request to “pick someone’s brain.” What should we keep in mind when asking someone for that kind of favor?Imagine a person texts you and asks if you'd like to go to a concert somewhere in a nearby state at some point in the future. They don’t explain the type of music or when or where; it's a vague, open-ended question. You wouldn’t know how to respond because you don’t have details. The same thing happens when you ask to “pick someone’s brain.” The other person doesn't have enough information to respond with a “yes” or “no,” which is why so many brain-picking requests are met with silence or long-delayed responses. So get specific! Do the work for them. What do you actually want to know? Why might they have the answer to your questions? Layer in these details in your request upfront and the person on the other end will be able to evaluate their own boundaries–and give you their own definitive yes or no.Q. How does this new book fit into your trilogy of books?Do It For Yourself is designed to help you work through a big project with reflective prompts and strategies on getting started and overcoming obstacles. Do It Today has more intensive activities like embracing percolation rather than productivity, and sharing the gifts that only you have to share. Do It (or Don't) is pinpointing a major issue: the feeling in our lives that there is too much to do and not enough time in which to do all of it. It encourages you to draw new lines around your time and energy to, ultimately, make it easier to do your most meaningful work.Q. And finally, we all need to rest. But sometimes, it’s complicated. What’s your advice about being more deliberate about this?Honestly, I’m bad at resting! I just worked for most of the weekend. But giving yourself an end date is always helpful. Maybe this is a busy period of your life and you have to accept that. Yet there is always some time on the horizon that you can look forward to–maybe it’s next quarter, or next year or, miraculously, next weekend. Build that into your schedule as downtime and be as strict with that boundary as you are with your other boundaries.Steve Koepp is From Day One’s chief content officer.(Featured image by MicrovOne/iStock by Getty Images)
The Four Vital Ways for Managers to Be More Effective
BY Stephen Koepp September 14, 2023Would you enthusiastically recommend your boss to another worker? Would you say they’re an effective manager? Most people wouldn’t. In a survey, only 28% of employees said they would strongly recommend their managers to others, while 14% would not recommend them at all. This is a chronic problem for employers, since workers with effective managers measurably thrive on the job, while those with ineffective ones languish. The impact to the bottom line can be substantial. The good news is that managers aspire to be more skilled in their jobs. But companies will have to step up: Only 29% of managers say their company gives them the training and support to be a better people leader. The solution is for companies to invest more in understanding what makes good managers and investing in their development, according to Caitlin Nobes, the author of a new report, “The Foundations of Manager Effectiveness,” published by Achievers, an employee recognition and engagement platform. The report illuminates how manager effectiveness drives business results, identifies four factors of management effectiveness that provide the most beneficial effects, and suggests concrete ways to give managers the leadership development they need to do a better job.Why isn’t this all part of corporate culture already? “I think there’s a gap between what organizations are able to do to support their managers and what managers actually want and need, as well as a gap between what HR thinks they are giving, and what managers feel they are getting,” said Nobes, lead analyst for Achievers, in an interview with From Day One. “I think this report is really crucial for saying to HR and business leaders: We’re missing the boat.”Why Is This Problem So Pressing Right Now? “I think that being a manager has always been challenging. And I think that it has been underestimated because it has always been seen as just part of most career paths. When you get far enough in your career, you start managing people. That was the pattern,” Nobes said.Caitlin Nobes, lead analyst and senior content marketing manager for Achievers (Company photo)Insufficient training for managers was almost a tradition, but only recently did the effects become so glaring, thanks to the pandemic, the racial-justice movement, and other social factors. A study from Workday and Red Thread Research found that manager effectiveness has declined since 2020. “In the last four years, we have seen the world of work get a lot more complicated,” Nobes said. “Many managers suddenly had this remote-work piece added on, with your team in their own homes–and you have to manage them effectively from your own home,” Nobes said. “All of these are complicating factors for managers who are still under a lot of pressure to meet performance objectives. I think we have managers who are potentially more aware of some of those other factors affecting their teams, but aren’t always clear on how to help address them.”How Manager Effectiveness Can Be Measured The concept of a net promoter score (NPS), which measures the willingness of a customer to recommend a product or business, can be applied to managers as well. An mNPS survey asks workers whether they’d recommend their boss, with their sentiment ranked on a scale of promoter to neutral to detractor. That sentiment is a powerful indicator. “The performance gap between those that would recommend their managers and those who would not is huge,” the Achievers report said. The promoters, it turns out, are many times more likely to be engaged in their work, to have a strong sense of belonging, to feel committed to their job, and to say they’re productive at work. What Makes a Manager EffectiveManager effectiveness is the degree to which people leaders engage and motivate their team, as Achievers defines it. Four elements stand out in the survey data as being impressive drivers of manager effectiveness, the report says: •Contact: My manager supports my success through regular 1:1 meetings. •Recognition: My manager regularly provides me with recognition that makes me feel valued. •Coaching: My manager provides me with guidance that helps me to be more effective in my role. •Professional development: My manager supports my personal and professional development goals.When employees say their manager is good at one of these, it doubles the likelihood that they would recommend their manager. When all four are present, mNPS scores almost triple, the report says.Of those four elements, most managers can put the first three into action on their own initiative. But the fourth, professional development, “is probably the only of the four factors that a manager cannot do on their own,” Nobes said. “A great manager in an OK company–that great manager can give recognition, can be a coach, can have great one-to-one meetings, but they can’t provide career growth and professional development without buy-in from their own manager or from HR. So, I think that is really a key area of support.”The Training That Managers Need from Their EmployersTo become more effective, managers need a mandate to take the time to train themselves, as well as to pass along that value to their workers. The Achievers report recommends structuring manager training on a quarterly basis to provide a long-term framework. And companies should provide managers “with frequent touch points to remind them that part of their job is to upskill in this area,” Nobes said. “I think it’s very easy to get focused on metrics and to say, ‘Are we producing enough widgets?’ Or, ‘I really need to write that report this week, so I'm not going to do that LinkedIn Learning course that I bookmarked because I’m just too busy.’ We prioritize the short term, because that’s what feels urgent. So you need to have regular reminders to managers that a medium- to long-term view is also important–that you need to block out an hour a week, or two hours a week, to train yourself.”Middle Managers: Where the Impact Can Be Immediate“The idea of building a culture of recognition with managers first, I think is very powerful,” Nobes said. Achievers data shows that recognition can create a virtuous cycle: managers who recognize their workers frequently inspires their employees to do likewise, creating peer recognition as well. Robes describes this as a “middle-out” approach, rather than top-down. “Starting with your middle managers, they’re the frontline, the people who really can have an immediate impact on somebody’s day to day.”By contrast, “your CEO, your C-suite can make a decision, but it will probably take months for that to be felt at the frontline. But if you can get your manager to just think, ‘If I recognize every employee once a month, and start paying attention to that, I can have a pretty immediate impact,” Nobes said.No manager-effectiveness program is going to make every boss a dynamo of leadership, but just bringing the weak or average managers up to the next level can have a major impact on a workforce, Nobes said. “That’s huge internally. Those are more engaged employees. You’re getting discretionary effort, they’re not job-hunting as much. The ripple effect of investing in manager empowerment is so impactful.”Why a Sense of Belonging Is So ImportantAmong the four elements of manager effectiveness, “employees’ sense of belonging at work is the ultimate driver of individual and business performance,” says the report. Research by the Achievers Workforce Institute (AWI), the company’s research arm, has identified five measurable and actionable pillars of belonging: being welcomed, known, included, supported and connected. “Each of these pillars individually doubles the likelihood that an employee feels a strong sense of belonging and in combination, all five together triple an employee’s overall sense of belonging in the workforce,” the report said.“When people feel like they belong, it’s so powerful,” Nobes said. “It’s this feeling of acceptance and comfort and security. If you can create that experience for your employees, then you will have better business results on every metric that matters. When we think about how to drive belonging, we have these five pillars. The idea is that ‘belonging’ can sound very tenuous and eyebrow-raising, like, what does it even mean? So when you break it down to these five pillars that are pretty actionable, then HR and managers feel empowered.”The questions that managers should ask themselves about their workers include, Do they feel known? Are they sharing parts of themselves? And do people remember things about them? Nobes offered a personal example. “You know, I'm a big reader. And I have talked to a few people about books. Somebody on my team said, ‘I need a new summer read. What would you recommend?’ I felt so known. Like, ‘Oh yeah, I can help you, I would love to recommend a book for you.’”Glass Ceilings All the Way UpWhile the Achievers report diagnosed inadequate manager training across the board, it identified a particular support gap: gender discrepancies in manager empowerment. According to AWI research, men are 26% more likely than women to say they manage people in their role and men are 22% more likely than women to say they have a professional-development plan. Once women make it to an initial management position, they are less likely to be promoted beyond middle management, partly because of a lack of support that Nobes calls “glass ceilings all the way up.”“You break the glass ceiling, and you’re so happy and proud to have reached this level. And then you’re like, Okay, well, what’s next for me? And you look up, and there’s another glass ceiling.” Overall in corporate America, the result is that middle management has become more diverse, but the progress stalls in the higher ranks of leadership. Said the report: “If your pipeline to senior leadership is leaky, it’s time to step back and assess the overall process. How are succession plans developed and who gets shoulder-tapped for stretch assignments or fast-tracked promotion? … Remember, women in management are more likely than men to leave, whether for greener pastures or due to life pressures. Retaining managers from marginalized groups needs to be a top priority for companies focused on diversity, equity, and inclusion at every level of the organization.”Editor’s note: From Day One thanks our partner, Achievers, who sponsored this story. (Featured photo by FatCamera/iStock by Getty Images)Steve Koepp is From Day One’s co-founder and chief content officer.
The Great Resignation Is Over. Will Employers Take Workers for Granted?
BY Stephen Koepp August 16, 2023As the months of 2023 have ticked by, the Great Resignation has quietly lost something: its greatness. The worker resignation rate in June fell to 2.4%, essentially returning to where it was in June 2019. For employers who had been in a war for talent, the dramatic lack of turnover has brought welcome relief. But what does that mean for workers, who in 2020-22 enjoyed a wealth of new benefits, job flexibility, and employer concern about their well-being? Will employers start taking workers for granted?While HR experts say that most employers won’t be inclined to turn the clock back to 2019, workers will see a more miserly approach. In terms of total rewards, you could call it the Great Moderation. “Employee retention at all costs–in terms of very high salaries; PTO and other employee perks–is over,” Janine Yancey, CEO of the corporate-culture platform Emtrain, told From Day One. While she believes that job flexibility and pay equity are here to stay, “we’re moving into a time of scarcity, not abundance, which impacts the employee experience.”The Great Resignation’s obituary was written earlier this month, when the management professor who coined the term in 2021, Anthony Klotz, told Fast Company, “I believe the Great Resignation has largely come to an end.” Added Klotz, who is now a professor at University College London’s School of Management: “The backlog of quitting has certainly cleared, as has the turnover contagion and tight labor market it caused in its wake. People who had pandemic epiphanies and planned life pivots have enacted them; and in some cases, boomeranged back to what they were doing before.”Why They’re StayingEmployee surveys indicate that workers are motivated to stay in their jobs by a mixture of caution and the need for a calm stretch of time. The massive layoffs early in the pandemic, followed by the wave of austerity-inspired layoffs in the last year, have made workers less inclined to be job-hopping if they trust their situation.At the same time, they are overdue for some R and R for the sake of their sanity. “We are now in a time when stability and routine are supporting mental-health needs as many recover from the shock of unplanned life/work changes,” Laura Sewell, EVP of North American HR for the IT services consultancy Avanade, told From Day One. “It has only been in the past 12 to 18 months that more and more people have begun planning vacations, events, and other activities which were put on hold during the pandemic. As such, having access to paid time off through their employer offers them both the time they need and the financial backing to finally take those trips and plan the events. And you are less likely to switch employers when you are planning big, fun things outside of work in your personal life.”The incentive to switch jobs for higher compensation has eased as well, Sewell notes. “While the war for talent was raging, employees could often get 20%+ more by leaving their employer to join a competitor. Job seekers today may not find that same opportunity for significant increase in earnings, thus reducing a motivating factor for making that move.”Why Employers Are Tightening UpThe combination of high interest rates and slow economic growth have inspired companies to clamp down on spending as well as hiring. “2023 has been the year of massive downsizing across the board,” observes Yancey. “Capital is scarce and capital fuels business growth, so that will impact job growth. Businesses are focused on showing profitability first and foremost.”How will the austerity mindset affect employee benefits? That issue has caused tension between finance departments and HR leaders who just recently had been working overtime to create new incentives to attract and retain employees, including programs to support worker well-being and family caregiving. “We’re in this constant battle with finance,” said Ken Wechsler, VP of total rewards at Akamai Technologies, in a recent From Day One webinar on employee benefits. “We’re fighting for it, and I guess my colleagues on this call will also fight it. We might not get as much moving forward, but we will fight.”Benefits leaders are finding that they need to justify spending much more than they did in the recent past, said Todd Cowgill, VP of global rewards for Equinix, a digital-infrastructure company. “If you cannot tell what the return on investment of your program is, you will lose that program,” he said in the webinar. “You have to understand what the company as a business gets because of the program, what it costs, and what it gets back.”Which Workplace Improvements Will EndurePart of the reason for low turnover right now, Avanade’s Sewell points out, is the enhanced working conditions that were inspired by the hardships of the pandemic. “Over the past three years, inclusion and well-being have rocketed to the top of our people priorities. With this increased focus, employees are feeling better supported at work, have access to more resources and benefits to take care of themselves, and in general, most have greater flexibility in how and where they get their work done.”Despite well-publicized efforts by some major employers, notably in finance, to bring workers back to the office for a majority of the workweek, job flexibility is a value that has become well-embedded in the expectations of most workers. Asserted Emtrain’s Yancey: “I believe the need for job flexibility is here to stay and employer's obligation to create jobs with pay equity and a healthy, inclusive work culture is here to stay.”So is the inclination for workers to negotiate their terms. “Everything is in play now–things I had never even thought of when it comes to total rewards,” said Akamai’s Wechsler. “We give employees the choice of where they want to work, and 90% of them have said they want to work from home. They’ll self-select. We make the effort to do things in the office a lot–but now a lot means quarterly. We know that most will not want to come, and some folks will want to attend an event because they get to go to the office.” Trying to Reach an EquilibriumWhile turnover may be low at the moment, forward-looking employers know that future job shortages driven by an aging population and new attitudes toward work mean that they can’t forget the lessons learned during the Great Resignation. “It’s a new culture of work,” behavioral scientist Laurel McKenzie told Fast Company’s AJ Hess. “No one’s staying at organizations for years and years. The new culture of work is that people are willing to leave and find something better. There’s not a sense of loyalty to organizations anymore. People are more focused on taking care of themselves and finding organizations that will enable that.”Avanade’s Sewell says her company keeps close tabs on employee-engagement surveys to pick up on trends in employee sentiment. “We take nothing for granted. There will always be cycles, which can often be unpredictable. Our goal is to maintain the hearts and minds of our employees through all of the ups and downs and be prepared for what is ahead. By building loyalty now, we are creating a stronger foundation for whatever wave comes next.”In a book to be published next month, The Retention Revolution: 7 Surprising (and Very Human!) Ways to Keep Employees Connected to Your Company, workplace strategist and bestselling author Erica Keswin calls for a new paradigm in thinking about the relationship between workkers and employers. “The time is now to reconsider everything we know about the employee journey and why linear thinking is being replaced by the more human reality of cycles, revolving doors, and dynamic change.” Steve Koepp is From Day One’s chief content officer.
Why Corporate America Joined the Battle Over Voting Rights
BY Stephen Koepp April 05, 2021Compared with their swift responses to the Black Lives Matter protests last summer and the attack on the U.S. Capitol in January, America’s corporate leaders seemed hesitant at first to take a stand over the growing political fracas over voting rights. Even those who made declarations in favor of protecting the right to vote tended to be hazy in their language. A statement by the Coca-Cola Co., for example, “sounded as though of team of executives worked long and hard to make certain their comments were undecipherable,” Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin wrote early last week. Was the Fortune 500 hoping to sit this one out? Yet in a remarkable series of events that unfolded in just days, corporations came off the sidelines last week like athletes in a bench-clearing brawl. In particular, they were provoked by Georgia’s new elections law, passed by the GOP-controlled state legislature on March 25, which contains a host of provisions that Democrats and voting-rights activists say will have a disproportionate impact on Black voters. Two Atlanta-based corporations, Coca-Cola and Delta Air Lines, found clarity after coming under increasing heat from activists, customers, and dozens of prominent Black business leaders. Late one night last week, a reportedly sleepless Delta CEO Ed Bastian drafted a fiery memo of his own, which he sent to employees the next morning: “I need to make it crystal clear that the final bill is unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values.” He added: “The entire rationale for this bill was based on a lie: that there was widespread voter fraud in Georgia in the 2020 elections. This is simply not true.” Hours later, Coke CEO James Quincey issued a statement using similar language: “I want to be crystal clear,” he wrote. “The Coca-Cola Co. does not support this legislation, as it makes it harder for people to vote, not easier.” By week’s end, nearly 200 companies had signed onto a statement strongly criticizing not just the Georgia law but the wave of similar Republican proposals across the U.S. “There are hundreds of bills threatening to make voting more difficult in dozens of states nationwide,” said the statement, organized by Civic Alliance, a nonpartisan group of businesses focused on voter participation. The statement was signed by a Who’s Who of Corporate America, including Dow, HP, Salesforce, ViacomCBS, Twitter and Under Armour. Then the situation escalated from words to deeds: Major League Baseball took the dramatic step of relocating the 2021 All-Star Game away from the Braves’ home field in suburban Atlanta. In a statement, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred said the after consulting with many stakeholders, he “decided that the best way to demonstrate our values as a sport” would be to relocate the event. “Fair access to voting continues to have our game’s unwavering support.” While the move might have been expected from major-league basketball or football, which have been increasingly progressive on social issues, the protest from America’s Pastime seemed like a watershed moment. The move drew sharp rebukes from Republicans, including a culture-war salvo from Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp that signaled a long battle ahead: “Today, Major League Baseball caved to fear, political opportunism and liberal lies,” he said in a statement. “Georgians–and all Americans–should fully understand what the MLB’s knee-jerk decision means: cancel culture and woke political activists are coming for every aspect of your life, sports included.” The voting-rights fight is the latest turn in a historical realignment of business and political parties. Traditionally, big corporations have stayed out of the political arena unless the issues directly affected their bottom line. In the case of regulation and taxes, corporate interests mostly aligned with Republican and libertarian policies. But in recent years, corporate leaders have found themselves compelled to take stands on a growing list of issues that affected their employees, customers and communities: LGBTQ rights, gun control, climate change, and racial justice. As President Trump led the GOP into a deepening and divisive culture war, corporate leaders found they couldn’t go along without betraying their diverse stakeholders and their professed corporate values. “Republicans and corporate America are on the outs,” wrote NBC News political reporter Allan Smith. A Different Kind of Fight The battle over voting rights, however, is notably different from the earlier flash points. “An issue that both political parties see as a priority is not easily addressed with statements of solidarity and donations,” wrote New York Times reporter David Gelles. “Taking a stand on voting rights legislation thrusts companies into partisan politics and pits them against Republicans who have proven willing to raise taxes and enact onerous regulations on companies that cross them politically.” That point was demonstrated quickly in this case when the Georgia House of Representatives voted to revoke Delta’s state-tax break on jet-fuel purchases, a provision reportedly worth tens of millions of dollars annually. While the legislative session expired before the state senate could pass the bill into law, the threat was registered. If the polarization is greater and the stakes are higher over this issue, is this fight worth it for Corporate America? Harvard Business School professor Rebecca Henderson, author of Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire, makes the case that business can’t take democracy for granted and that business leaders need to speak up on issues like voting rights. Without good government, she argues, corporations wouldn’t be able to rely on free and fair markets, public infrastructure, and the other conditions they need in order to thrive. As she told From Day One via email last week: “Free markets need free politics!” The Battle Moves to Texas and Beyond In the aftermath of President Trump’s defeat, Republicans launched a campaign to change voting laws on a state-by-state basis. Legislatures in 47 states have introduced 361 bills that include voting restrictions as of March 24, according to research by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s Law School. While the rationale for the proposed laws is the Trump-inspired claim of election fraud, no systemic or substantial cases have been found. The real purpose of the blizzard of election bills, as Democrats have widely alleged and some Republicans have acknowledged, is to suppress the votes of people who tend to vote Democratic, notably people of color. While election analysts have argued that voter suppression is self-defeating for Republicans, the party generally fears that America’s demographic trend toward diversity is a long-term threat. Democrats hope to supercede the state-by-state battle with a sweeping voting-rights law at the federal level, known as the For the People Act, that would set a national floor for ballot access, defang many voting restrictions imposed by the GOP, among other measures. However, since passage is by no means assured given the razor-thin Democratic edge in the Senate, the individual battles in the statehouses will be waged as a parallel campaign. With the Georgia law decided, the spotlight has shifted quickly to Texas, the home state of 50 companies in the Fortune 500. As of late March, dozens of bills proposing election-law changes have been introduced in the state legislature, including restrictions on early voting, drive-through voting, and absentee ballots. To get the attention of corporations, activists have launched protests, including at AT&T’s Dallas headquarters. Texas-based corporate leaders, seeing the criticism leveled at Georgia corporations for failing to speak out strongly until the Georgia law was a done deal, have been more pro-active in their comments. In a tweet, Dell CEO Michael Dell said that “governments should ensure citizens have their voices heard” and that one of the Texas bills, House Bill 6, “does the opposite.” American Airlines said in a statement: “We are strongly opposed to this bill and others like it. As a Texas-based business, we must stand up for the rights of our team members and customers who call Texas home, and honor the sacrifices made by generation of Americans to protect and expand the right to vote.” Corporate leaders in other states spoke out against voting restrictions as well, including tech giants Amazon and Google, providing a sense of safety in numbers. But the fight will not be easy, given the potential economic impact of boycotts and other retaliation by either side. Baseball’s decision to move its All-Star Game from Georgia will cost the state $100 million in economic activity, a tourism official estimated. Even Georgia’s prominent voting-rights advocates acknowledged the sacrifice. “I can’t say that I like it, but I certainly understand it, and it is really probably the first of many boycotts of our state to come,” Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms told CNN. The Georgia law, she added, “is a horrible example for the rest of the country and people are going to show us exactly how they feel by keeping their dollars out of this state.” For CEOs, last week was a heads up that voting rights is yet another issue they can’t avoid. “If people feel like it’s a been a week of discomfort and uncertainty, it should be, and it needs to be,” said Sherrilyn Ifill, the president of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who has been urging companies to get involved. They need to pay as much attention to issues that affect Black Americans, she says, as they do to those affecting their other stakeholders. “Corporations have to figure out who they are in this moment.” Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time
A Year of Crisis–and Reinvention
BY Stephen Koepp March 11, 2021Do you remember what you were doing a year ago, when the world changed? I remember vividly. Our team at From Day One had just returned from our conference in Atlanta, where we hosted hundreds of business leaders at the Georgia Aquarium. Everyone was far more transfixed by a whale shark swimming lazily in its tank than the invisible threat circulating in the community. Back in our hometown of Brooklyn, we were planning to depart soon for our next destination, Chicago, when we heard disturbing news about a phenomenon we had never really considered: a super-spreader event, a conference in Boston eventually responsible for more than 100 new cases of the novel coronavirus. We didn’t want that happening to us and our From Day One community, so we scrubbed our live events. That was the responsible thing to do, but it raised a painful question: for a conference company with no conferences, does this mean we’re out of business? I’ll tell you how our story turned out in a moment, but the theme here is reinvention amid the crisis. In a pandemic year of death, suffering and economic devastation, it was also a time of transformation in the way we work, raise our kids, and think about the roles of government and business. We had no way of seeing last March 11, when the global pandemic was officially upon us, how many old ideas would be turned upside down. But lots of thoughtful people are striving to help put the pandemic year into perspective, including how we frame its place in the trajectory of our lives. In a sense, the past year was its own time, not like what went before, or what comes next. For a recent piece in the New York Times, writer Casey Schwartz was interviewing Sherry Turkle, the renowned thinker on human-technology interaction, about her new book when the topic turned to the meaning of the pandemic year, Schwartz wrote. “In many ways, Turkle believes that the pandemic is a ‘liminal’ time, in the phrasing of the writer and anthropologist Victor Turner, a time in which we are ‘betwixt and between,’ a catastrophe with a built-in opportunity to reinvent. ‘In these liminal periods are these possibilities for change,’ she said. ‘I think we are living through a time, both in our social lives but also in how we deal with our technology, where we are willing to think of very different ways of behaving.’” While many of our transformations have been well-documented–we learned to work from home, we absorbed a better understanding of racial and social injustice, we gained a new appreciation for mental-health care, we adopted more pets, and we learned to bake bread–some of the transformations were more subtle or unheralded. To find out more about those, we asked some of the people who’ve spoken at our events to tell us about their own experiences in their businesses and life. Striking Out on Her Own: Myla Skinner, who has moderated several of our events and has worked for organizations including the education-advocacy group OneGoal, decided to heed the advice of a mentor and friend who advised: “What you want to do doesn't exist, so build it yourself.” So that's what she did, launching her own consulting firm. “I wanted to do work that focuses on navigating complex and consequential change with care for people at its core. I wanted to do work that leveraged my experience to support businesses as they do really big things. And I wanted to do work that puts love at the center and foundation. So I built a business to do that. It's called Quarter Five (Q5), whose name represents an extra quarter in the year to focus on the things that most matter to your business related to change. The pandemic forced me to spend real time with myself examining how I wanted to both live and work. I had to sit in the still and silence that this awful virus created. I had to dig deep to find what would bring my life joy. I recognize my privilege in having the opportunity and I'm hopeful that this work will create opportunities for others to do their best work and be their whole selves.” Saving Young People from a Missed Opportunity: For more than two decades, the EXP internship program in Southern California has been the on-the-ground partner to schools and industries, helping young people gain experience, unlock doors to opportunity, and build confidence. During the 2019-20 school year, the program served nearly 6,350 students at ten high schools. But at the onset of the pandemic, “when those classrooms and companies shut down, we were terrified,” says Amy Grat, EXP’s CEO. “We had lost both halves of the circle that we seek to complete–youth and volunteers.” Yet in a dramatic shift, EXP’s team let go of its previous assumptions of what an internship should look like, distilled it down to the essentials, and created a virtual experience. Earlier this month, more than 350 high-school girls from across Southern California, along with nearly 100 industry professionals, logged into a virtual conference space for EXP’s fifth-annual Women in STEM career day. The pandemic crisis, says Grat, turned out to be “a huge catalyst for growth and innovation,” especially in expanding EXP’s reach. Discovering the True Nature of a Vacation: Deep Mahajan, senior director and head of people development at the tech firm Nutanix, said the year 2020 inspired her to reinvent what vacation means to her. “Earlier it meant finding and booking a fancy location, packing our suitcases, travelling by air or by road, clicking a ton of pictures, checking off all sight-seeing places–even if it meant cramming the schedule and heading back to wrestle with Monday blues and an inbox exploding with two weeks’ worth of emails,” Mahajan said. “Today it is different. Vacation to me today can be something as simple as taking a weekly hike with a loved one to a place that was always just a few miles away but was undiscovered till now. I consider taking a mindful walk after work in the evening too as my daily ‘vacation.’ It has helped me admire the change of seasons in the color scheme of my neighborhood. It amazes me how all those trees bursting with the season’s shade and the flower gardens in my neighborhood went unnoticed all these years. Perhaps because I drove past them thinking about a million other things. Walking has changed my understanding and awareness of where I live. You know the best part? After any of the above ‘vacations,’ I never have the dull feeling of ‘going back to work.’ I do not even have to take PTO for this!” Taking a Meeting Outside: Lisa Nichols, an SVP in HR at Citigroup, is a firm believer in being productive without having to sit at a desk for hours on end. “I think one thing that has stayed with me is trying to care for yourself and building movement into your day. One way many of our managers have accomplished this is by doing walking, one-on-one phone meetings where we are simply providing updates or reviewing strategies,” Nichols said. “It has allowed us to get a little exercise while also completing a meeting that did not require that we needed to be in front or our computer or a Zoom meeting. This has been a good way to break up the day and get some movement to clear our minds.” Building a Matchmaking System for Jobless Workers: “As we all were sent home a year ago, the enormity of the implications on jobs started to set in. If businesses are shut down, they can only carry their employees for so long,” said Kamal Ahluwalia, president of Eightfold.ai, which produces software for talent management and acquisition. “So we did what we usually do: organized a hackathon to repurpose our technology for the citizens.” The result was the Eightfold Talent Exchange, created in partnership with McKinsey & Company, which uses artificial intelligence to match unemployed workers to jobs. Ahluwalia shares the story of a Starbucks barista in Philadelphia named Joshua, whose hours were reduced because of the pandemic. As it happened, Starbucks was offering its workers some resources like the Talent Exchange, which Joshua used to land a manager position at a local Walgreens. “There are tons of stories like that, small but meaningful,” said Ahluwalia. “Makes me appreciate what we have a lot more, and try not to take things for granted.” Learning to Let Some Problems Solve Themselves: Rob Smith, executive editor of Seattle and Seattle Business, embraced a new time-management technique. “I found it easier to obsess around perceived issues and problems because of the inability to communicate spontaneously with colleagues. So I started writing down things I wanted to tackle, and if they weren’t major, I stuck them in a drawer and revisited them later. I initially did this every day, but then started looking at them Friday afternoons. I was pleasantly surprised that most had either resolved themselves or I had misjudged how important they really were. I will continue this new tool post-pandemic.” Getting to Know Each Other Better Remotely: Matt Orozco, organizational change consultant for the employee-engagement platform Peakon, said his company has committed to strengthening the ties among remote employees. As an example, “We improved the use of internal comms tools (in our case, Slack) by adding fields to ‘profiles’ so we can be more inclusive and share more about ourselves. Some fields we added were pronouns, name pronunciation (we operate in five countries worldwide), and a link to a ‘ways of working’ doc so each employee can share how best to work with them.” He described it as kind of a user manual, but for human colleagues. On the personal side, he said that, “as a film student by education, I finally started to channel my passion for writing and film into a creative outlet by contributing to a film website,” as well as coming to grips with “the manufactured pressure to be more productive with respect to personal goals and side hustles during lockdowns.” Keeping Employee Careers on Track: One of the biggest concerns among employees working remotely is that their career development suffers from being out-of-sight, out-of-mind at HQ. Larry McAlister, VP of global talent for the cloud-computing company NetApp, said the company launched a new, AI-enabled tool for setting goals and career paths. “We want everyone at NetApp to feel you can do the best work of your career from your kitchen table. We had a ‘career week’ a few months before launching the tool and we are now the vendor gold standard for adoption of the tool,” McAlister said, adding that the company keeps employee well-being in mind too: “We implemented Wellness Days, where the whole company has a day off each quarter. We have also implemented ‘No Zoom Fridays’ every month.” (Photo by Tolgart/iStock by Getty Images) Taking Control of the Calendar: Deep Mahajan, the executive who reinvented her idea of vacation, made changes in her schedule as well. “Unlike earlier, when all ‘house stuff’ used to happen strictly after and before office hours, today our schedules have become truly integrated. So you may be emptying the dishwasher between meetings and taking a meeting after office hours. It requires planning, without which it can be a mess. I re-invented the art of calendar-and-meeting management as I integrated my life into my work. Every Sunday I look at my calendar to mark the meetings that can be done walking, eliminate meetings which are redundant, add meetings for social interactions as needed, and eliminate those 30-minute ‘unproductive’ slots between meetings to be more efficient with my time. Family and house time has also come onto the calendar. Overall, I feel a better sense of control by organizing my time mindfully.” Learning to Say No, When Possible: Erin Hicks, a senior director of HR at Applied Materials, realized that the lack of work boundaries at home was unsustainable. “For me, 12- to 14-hour days are just a norm I have learned to live with over the last four to five years,” she said, attributing the trend to “increased responsibilities, while there are still only 24 hours in a day, and something in my DNA that requires me to never let anyone down. This past year began with the same unhealthy pattern. That is, until I came to the personal realization that that kind of ‘work ethic’ was not only unhealthy, but it was depriving me of valuable time with my family that I could never get back. So I have worked hard to reinvent the way I work. I stop working when my teenager comes to check in with me on a school break, or when my husband comes in to do the same. The payoff is a lot more laughter during my day. I have reinvented my approach by modulating the work I agree to take on–and setting realistic expectations.” Hicks added a broader observation on the issue: “From a work-culture perspective, I have really enjoyed seeing managers spending more time thinking about their employees’ physical and emotional well-being. The empathy factor has gone up exponentially. Teams have reinvented the way they interact, and not just from the use of new online collaboration tools. Leaders are finding myriad ways to bring their groups together on a human, social level that has been fun to watch. This forced reinvention of how teams interact as co-workers–and as people–in a virtual world will have a lasting positive impact, regardless of that the new normal or future of work looks like.” Testing the Limits of Personal Handiwork: Like many remote workers, Mikeisha Anderson Jones, VP of global inclusion & diversity in the Colleague Experience Group at American Express, decided to do some redecorating. “In addition to adjusting to the new ways of working from home, I also fancied myself a weekend and late-night creative by endeavoring to wallpaper my office. Clearly, I’d spent insufficient hours watching the experts on Property Brothers and Love It or List It. When I started on my wallpapering journey, I hadn’t realized that I’d see my handiwork daily for the next 365+ days via videoconference. Thankfully, I love the print and despite my novice-level wallpapering skills, the result is quite lovely. I also learned something about myself: I will never, ever wallpaper another room by myself.” While some of us may feel like this was a lost year, that might not be true in the long run. In a piece for Time, author and editor Joanne Lipman shared the wisdom of dozens of experts she has consulted for a book she’s writing on reinvention. “The types of transformations they study vary. Yet I’ve been struck by the one step that every type of reinvention has in common: it’s preceded by an in-between time, a seemingly fallow period much like the one we find ourselves in now,” Lipman writes. “The prolonged shutdown, by throwing us off-kilter, may help us reimagine our futures,” Lipman continues, citing the work of a psychologist who has studied survivors of trauma. After time, these survivors tend to “have a sense of fresh possibilities in life, an openness to following new pathways.” In the midst of all this reinvention, one of our speakers offers a reality check. Daniel Roberts, who did some of his own reinvention recently–he left his job as editor-at-large at Yahoo Finance to become editor-in-chief of the crypto-news site Decrypt–predicts that some workplace transformations will revert to the old ways because they had obvious benefits. “We've all certainly adapted for a year and in many cases I think some workplaces have been shocked to learn how well WFH worked. The news media, I believe, rose to the occasion of covering every aspect of the pandemic–from home or in a mask–and has been extremely resilient,” he said. But don’t assume work-from-home will be for everyone, forever, he said. “I think there are a number of companies that see advantages to having their people in person, and are going to tell people when the coast is clear, OK, come back now. I fear some people will be in for a rude awakening when that happens.” As for journalism, he said, “I am a big believer in the power of the newsroom, and in being able to bat around ideas in person in a lively room with your colleagues.” Finally, what about the From Day One team? On the personal front, two of our families reinvented themselves by having their first children. Babies can certainly be transformative. As for me, I took up yoga, faithfully attending my niece’s classes twice a week. And as you might have been expecting by now, From Day One reinvented itself. Considering the alternatives, we were left with one possible way to survive: We would go all-virtual. Three weeks after making that decision in March, we produced our first webinar, titled “Smart Ways to Manage a Newly Remote Work Team.” Since then, we have hosted nearly 60 webinars and virtual conferences. Thanks to the intrepid spirit of our speakers, sponsors, audience members, and our extraordinary staff, we are still very much in business–just not the way we were before. The experience has broadened our reach and taught us how to think outside the conference room. But we look forward to seeing you again in person just as soon as we can. Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time
Two Qualities Will Help Workers Face the Future: Agility and Resilience
BY Stephen Koepp March 11, 2021As the economy emerges from the pandemic, a workforce wracked by layoffs, job stress and digital transformation will need to have a second wind. What can employers do to help? Industrial and organizational psychologist Marinus van Driel, Ph.D., associate partner in the Human Capital Solutions practice at Aon, the professional-services firm, believes that companies need to foster two important qualities in their workers: agility and resilience. From Day One talked with van Driel about what that looks like, both in theory and in practice. Excerpts: In terms of their human capital, what are corporate leaders thinking about right now? Organizations are taking a hard look at what things will look like once we get out of the pandemic, making sure they have people in the right places to progress their businesses forward. That's a very high-level response, but I think it rings true in every industry. If you're in manufacturing, you're thinking about how you're going to have the talent to keep manufacturing cardboard boxes. If you're in banking, how you're going to have the right software engineers or the data-science talent. Another element is that we're seeing hugely elevated concerns around the career progression of women in the workforce–the likelihood of it being suppressed because of the pandemic. We are also seeing that organizations are concerned that their employee value proposition (EVP) is not aligned to what employees actually want. Companies are actively seeking ways to ways to support individuals within their workforce to grow their careers, thereby adding to the employee value proposition and creating a more agile workforce. When people hear the term agile, they might think about the famous software-development process. Are you talking about agility in a broader way? Yes, agility with a capital A is definitely a topic for most firms, but workforce agility in a bigger sense is about talent transformation, helping employees to get to the next step in their careers. That is, aligned to their own preferences and capabilities, but also in alignment with what the company needs. I'll share an example from the banking industry. A lot of banks right now are looking for programming staff, people who can do things like cloud native engineering, or they're looking for data scientists. Well, those skills exist at a premium in the open market. So banks can go out there and recruit that talent, but at the same time, banks also have more traditional roles in terms of business analysts and quality-assurance analysts. Those jobs are changing for a variety of reasons. But these people have skills that can be sharpened to then move into these other roles. And as a consequence of that, their employers can make a small investment by identifying the people that have these skills adjacencies or have the capability to make that shift. Yet is reskilling hard to sell–both to corporate leaders who might find it expensive, and to workers who might find it an insult to their current skills? I would couch it as an investment in your employees. And your employees have a lot of institutional knowledge that can help propel your business forward–if they are just deployed in a different way. From a financial perspective, there's a huge business case around reskilling your employees. In the work that we've done, in one case we saved the client about $150 million. When you tally up all the costs of hiring new workers–recruiting, onboarding, training, the market premium, plus the costs of retrenching the previous roles [i.e., a permanent job elimination], you're ending up somewhere in the one-and-a-half to four-and-a-half times the retrenched employees’ annual salary. We've run the numbers on it. Aon's Marinus van Driel: "What we've learned in our work with clients is that middle managers, in particular, are the glue that holds any kind of reskilling initiative together" (Photo courtesy of Aon) What’s the key ingredient in making these kinds of transformations? Ultimately, the common denominator to all of that is mindset. If employees have the mindset to make that shift, you can have an agile workforce. So one of the things that we preach a lot in our assessment practice is that mindset is forever and skills are temporary. If you have folks that are primed to learn, folks that are primed to adapt, and folks who that just generally curious–and have the baseline skills–you can move these folks in very interesting and impactful ways. What’s your definition of workforce resilience? I tend to think of it as the opposite of burnout, when you just can’t get up off the ground. Yes, it’s the ability to bounce back, but even beyond that it's the ability to thrive on change. A resilient workforce is a prerequisite to an agile workforce and agile decision-making to be truly activated throughout an organization. To foster resilience in your people, your approach to well-being needs to be employee-centric and aligned to the needs of your workforce, it needs to be well-communicated, and be within an environment at work that allows people to thrive in an ever-changing situation. At its core, there are three indicators of workforce resilience: a fundamental sense of security at work, a strong sense of belonging with the employer, and the adaptability and motivation you need to reach your full potential. Coming back to resilience, how do you foster those elements? How do you ensure that you support your employees that have very challenging home lives? The extent to which organizations can really and genuinely appreciate that, and meet people where they are, will allow them to retain the talent and move forward. For example, let's consider helping working parents. Organizations can provide assistance to working parents who work from home by allowing flexible schedules to accommodate their children's school schedules as well as work. Alternately, for employees who need to work onsite, organizations can offer tangible support for parents and their children. An example that comes to mind is a hospitality company that repurposed ballrooms as socially distanced e-learning venues for children of their hotel employees. If a company is doing its best to promote agility and resilience, what’s the best way to get that across to employees and prospective hires? The more concrete you can be, the better off your firm will be. If employees know what their options are, and how to exercise them, then they will exercise them. But if they don't, they won’t. We’ve been having loads of conversations with firms about employee experience and EVP. Some firms feel like they have the basic building blocks that differentiate them as employers in the market. But for one reason or another, those messages haven't been coalesced in a unified message that can go out to employees, or to external talent. I'm thinking about some of the firms in the hospitality world, an industry that was heavily impacted by the pandemic, and may not be as attractive to talent coming back in. So those firms have to totally reimagine their EVP and communicate that back out to the market. The other component is communicating your EVP to employees: Well, these are your career options. Now that you are remote, these are the things that you can continue to do within your career. Or if the expectation is for you to advance on a particular track, here are the developmental activities that are available to you. Firms should focus on ensuring every employee, including remote workers, knows equally what opportunities are available to them. In practical terms, who are the corporate leaders who can make this happen? What we've learned in our work with clients is that middle managers, in particular, are the glue that holds any kind of reskilling initiative together. For one, they need to be able to have those coaching conversations with their team members in a very action-oriented way. And two, they need to be willing to let folks go [to different roles], because if they're not, it's just not going to happen. You’ve written about how companies should update the “competency framework” of their employees. What are the key skills that need to be pushed up the priority list at this point? Having a learning mindset, a willingness to adapt and adjust, being just generally curious. So we advocate for selecting for mindset and training for specific skills. I think having that intellectual curiosity about work and life in general is incredibly useful when you want employees to have the capability to reimagine themselves in the future. Basically, people need to have the behavioral DNA to succeed in a professional environment and they need the technical skills to move into whatever the next area is. But the folks who do that the most effectively are the ones who don't look at it as a step backwards, but rather as an interesting challenge that they need to adapt and adjust to. The other thing that is a little more proximal to the pandemic are competencies that enable successful remote working. As people are working more remotely, self-management is crucially important: being diligent about how you manage your day, your priorities, and your home life. Another critical competency is effective communication: using all of your communication avenues to maximal effect, including email, video calls, regular phone calls, internal communication channels, message boards, and so on. Yet another critical competency, particularly for leaders, is goal setting. Setting goals for team members you don't see or talk to every day requires forethought, good communication, and a clear monitoring strategy. We’ve talked about the career journeys of workers in general, but what about your own? I'll share the story of how I got into this field. When I was an undergrad, I was pre-med, very gung-ho to go into medicine. And somewhere along the way, I had a bit of a change of heart. I knew I wanted to help people, in one way or another. And then I had an internship with a Dutch grocery company at a U.S.-based operation in Greenville, S.C. My work during that internship was focused on developmental programs to enrich people's work lives. While I was working there, I had this lightbulb moment that as a working adult, one day in the not-too-distant future, I'll be spending a lot of time at work and would like to enjoy what I did for a living. I also realized that I could help others enjoy their work and careers. This seemed like a really neat thing to do, given my original premise for seeking a career that would be focused on helping others. That was the naive, seed idea for me getting into industrial/organizational psychology–that I can help people have more fulfilling careers. Thankfully, I've been able to achieve this. What I've learned over the years as a practitioner is that you can really help people have amazing careers, particularly when a mindful, evidenced-based approach is taken. Bringing a layer of data to career discussions, whether at the individual or organizational level, is what I've really enjoyed. I like being a scientist in the service of enabling people to have more career options. I also like giving organizations clear recommendations about shaping their talent-management practices based on objective data. By doing this, it is possible to shape career-development programs to support individual employees to have amazing experiences at work. By pursuing my initial idea, I really have been able to help people have better careers. It has been a neat thing to start with such a simple idea and see it come to life in some astonishing ways. Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this interview, the professional-services firm Aon. Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time
The Breakup: How Corporate America Finally Split With Trump
BY Stephen Koepp January 14, 2021They were warned, repeatedly. They saw all the evidence: the thousands of lies, the conspiracy theories, the racial divisiveness, the tendency to encourage violence, nearly three decades of well-documented misogyny, and the political exploitation of a pandemic. But despite all that, Corporate America’s leaders felt they had to do business with Donald Trump. “He is the president of the United States. I believe he is the pilot flying our airplane,” said JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, one of America’s most respected bankers, early in Trump’s tenure. “I would try to help any president of the United States because I’m a patriot.” The ensuing relationship between Corporate America and President Trump was bumpy at times, most dramatically when Trump declared that there were “very fine people on both sides” during the outbreak of white-nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Va. But for the most part, America’s business leaders went along for the ride. Trump became an ally in lucrative ways, rewarding corporations with major tax cuts and rolled-back regulations. Now they’re essentially done with him, provoked by Trump’s toxic myth of a stolen election and the Jan. 6 assault by his believers on the U.S. Capitol. In the days before Trump was impeached for an unprecedented second time, by a vote of 232-197 in the House for “incitement of insurrection,” corporate leaders began distancing themselves from Trump at increasing speed. First came the immediate statements of shock and dismay, echoing from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat said he was “disgusted by the actions of those who have stormed the U.S. Capitol.” Accenture CEO Julie Sweet called for elected officials to “bring to justice the perpetrators of today’s violent assault on our country.” Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, said in an email to employees that the events were “shocking and scary for all of us.” He added: “The lawlessness and violence occurring on Capitol Hill today is the antithesis of democracy and we strongly condemn it.” JPMorgan’s Dimon weighed in with his own strong condemnation. Even two of Trump’s billionaire backers, Blackstone Group CEO Steve Schwarzman and Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone, said they were horrified at the turn of events. Their support for a fellow businessman as the country’s CEO had ended in catastrophe. Langone told CNN that he felt “betrayed” by the Republicans who attempted to overturn the election. "Last Wednesday was a disgrace and should never have happened in this country and if it doesn't break every American's heart, something is wrong. It breaks my heart, for sure. I didn't sign up for that," said Langone, adding that he would “do everything I can” to support President-elect Biden. Then came the acts of separation. Trump’s internet empire collapsed as Twitter, Facebook and other social-media platforms shut him down. Trump’s business partners, ranging from the PGA Tour to the real-estate giant Cushman & Wakefield, terminated deals with him. His bankers started closing his accounts. The city of New York dropped him as the manager of ice rinks and a golf course. Major corporations halted their campaign donations, in some cases to all 147 Republican members of Congress who heeded Trump’s call to object to Biden’s victory. In an extraordinary move, the National Association of Manufacturers, long loyal to Trump, burned its bridge by calling for him to be removed from office. “This is chaos,” said the group’s statement. “It is mob rule. It is dangerous. This is sedition and should be treated as such. The outgoing president incited violence in an attempt to retain power.” All told, Trump fell practically overnight from a problematic partner to a full-fledged pariah. More importantly, the end of the Trump era raises a host of questions about how Corporate America moves past the effects of its relationship with a president who Slate described in 2017 as “a walking violation of a host of human-resources policies [who] stands in stark opposition to the corporate-style progressivism that permeates so many consumer-facing companies today.” Among the questions: What should corporations do to shore up democracy? Should they be taking more of a stand on social and political issues? How can they address the deep polarization that may divide their employees and customers? And how can they respond to the renewed shock of their Black employees who, less than a year after George Floyd’s death, witnessed an assault on the U.S. Capitol by rioters carrying Confederate flags? A closer look at Corporate America’s relationship with Trump and what lessons may have been learned: Enabling a Dishonorable Leader As corporate leaders ran away from Trump, business journalists were eager to ask what took them so long–and who should be held accountable. “There were many enablers–educated, smart, articulate, often wealthy people who were willing to ignore Mr. Trump’s threat to democracy in the name of economic growth, lower taxes, lighter regulations, or simply access and proximity to power,” wrote the editors of the Dealbook newsletter from the New York Times. “At a time when business leaders tout their ‘values’ and ‘social responsibility,’ how should those enablers–and the institutions they run–be considered after all this?” “This is what happens when we subordinate our moral principles for what we perceive to be business interests,” said Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation and a board member at Square and Ralph Lauren, in a conversation with David Gelles of the Times. “It is ultimately bad for business and bad for society.” Calling CEOs complicit in the Washington riot, Hank Gilman, editorial director of Newsweek, wrote: “You have to do business with politicians you don’t agree with. But you don’t have to check your morals at the door.” His prescription: cut off the money. He urged corporations to halt campaign funding for Trump’s Republican enablers in Congress as well as far-right Washington lobbying organizations. Disconnecting the Tweeter-in-Chief Before he was impeached a second time, Trump suffered nearly as consequential a calamity for a master of social media: he was de-platformed. Twitter, where the president had more than 88 million followers, first suspended his account temporarily after Jan. 6 and then made it permanent, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence.” Facebook, whose founder Mark Zuckerberg had declared at a White House dinner in 2019 that Trump was “No. 1 on Facebook,” banned Trump indefinitely, as well as on the company’s Instagram platform. “We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great,” Zuckerberg said in a statement. Trump’s use of social media had been a point of contention for years, pitting arguments in favor of free speech vs. alarms about the thousands of falsehoods he spread on issues ranging from the coronavirus to mail-in ballots. While the relationship between Trump and the platforms was stormy, it was immensely lucrative for both sides. The deadly rioting on Jan. 6, as well as Trump’s unrepentant statements afterward, finally tipped the balance. “The internet as most people know it has decided that Trump is no longer welcome. It’s a turning point for digital speech that was years in the making, but it took just a few hours to happen,” wrote David Ingram of NBC News. Trump supporters outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, when rioters stormed the building (Photo by Chris Kleponis/Sipa USA via AP) The sudden moves left Trump supporters wandering in the social-media wilderness. Other tech giants joined the clampdown as Trump fans migrated from the mainstream platforms to freewheeling, conservative-friendly sites like Parler, which has been accused of providing a venue for planning the Capitol attack. Amazon responded to the situation by kicking Parler off its cloud-computing service, leaving the platform at least temporarily homeless. (Parler has sued Amazon for the move.) Both Apple and Google had already booted Parler from their app stores. “It was the nuclear option,” given the “extraordinary circumstance” of the assault on the Capitol, said Columbia University First Amendment scholar Katie Fallow. In an internet environment dominated by the giants, the maverick site Parler will face a difficult road back, in part because it was so poorly constructed that a hacker says she was able to scrape 99% of the posts from the service, thus pulling back any presumed cloak of secrecy for its users. Have the events of January inspired social media to grow a conscience? To some degree. “What we’re seeing is a shift from the platforms from a stance of free-speech absolutism, towards an understanding of speech moderation as a matter of public health,” said civic-media professor Ethan Zuckerman of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, in comments to the AP. Yet more radical reforms may be necessary, especially since ascendant Democrats in Washington are contemplating a punishing wave of regulation. “Until social media companies are willing to fundamentally change their sites by making them far less attractive to people seeking to post divisive content, deeply troubling posts will continue to spread quickly and broadly,” wrote tech journalist Greg Bensinger in the New York Times. Washing Out the Stain of the Trump Brand In a movement that became a stampede, brand-name businesses and other organizations moved swiftly to disassociate with Trump’s businesses, which were already struggling during the pandemic. The PGA of America announced that it would terminate an agreement to play next year’s PGA Tournament at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J. Losing the PGA event, one of the big four tournaments on the pro golf tour, is a major blow to the Trump Organization’s golf businesses, which reportedly account for nearly half of the company’s revenue. Real-estate giant Cushman & Wakefield, which handles leasing for many of Trump’s properties, declared this week that it “would no longer do business with the Trump Organization.” Other business partners cutting off Trump were Shopify, which ran the president’s e-commerce stores, and Stripe, which processed payments for Trump’s campaign website. With a hint of relish, Trump’s former hometown of New York City terminated its contracts with him to run two ice rinks, the Central Park Carousel and a golf course in the Bronx. “Inciting an insurrection against the U.S. government clearly constitutes criminal activity,” declared Mayor Bill de Blasio. “The City of New York will no longer have anything to do with the Trump Organization.” Since it was Trump’s speedy 1986 renovation of the decrepit Wolman Rink that launched him as a media celebrity, the end of the contract is particularly symbolic of Trump’s fall from local hero to persona non grata. Bankers were deserting Trump as well. Deutsche Bank, one of the last of Trump’s institutional lenders, “is moving to distance itself from the President’s business and is unlikely to lend it more money,” a source told the Wall Street Journal. New York-based Signature Bank said it was closing two of Trump’s personal accounts and put out a statement telling him to resign. Since Trump has more than $300 million in personally-guaranteed debt coming due in the next four years–he has haughtily called it “a peanut”–he could be facing a financial crisis of his own before long. To raise cash, his company has been attempting to sell the long-term lease on his opulent hotel in the Old Post Office building in Washington, D.C., as well as his stake in two office towers in New York City and San Francisco. Essentially, by refusing to abide a peaceful transition to private life, the president sabotaged the potential recovery of the Trump brand. “Through his encouragement of rioters who ransacked the U.S. Capitol, Trump has made his company a pariah and driven away allies who could have brought it revenue and post-politics credibility,” the Washington Post concluded. Hitting Pause on Campaign Contributions A parade of companies moved briskly to suspend political donations to the 147 Republican members of Congress who objected to certifying the election results on Jan. 6. Among those was Walmart, which has 1.5 million U.S. employees and has become a bellwether on social issues in recent years. Other companies cutting off contributions were Marriott, Dow, Airbnb, and Morgan Stanley. (Hallmark went a step further, asking two Republican senators for its money back.) “This is spreading like wildfire,” Yale management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld told the Associated Press. “The U.S. business community has interests fully in alignment with the America public and not with Trump’s autocratic bigoted wing of the GOP.” While many other corporate donors shut off the campaign-finance spigot for now, some were more circumspect in doing so, pausing donations to both parties (even though that also penalized lawmakers who voted to uphold the election). They included Google, Goldman Sachs, Ford, Citigroup and Coca-Cola. The de-funding moves came surprisingly fast. “It looks like it is sincere for many of the corporations,” Craig Homan, a campaign-finance expert with Public Citizen, a liberal consumer-advocacy organization, told the AP. “There was no big public push or pressure to get Marriott and others to announce they would no longer make campaign contributions. They did it on their own–they shocked everyone in the campaign finance community.” The impact of these moves will be mostly symbolic, however, since corporate contributions make up only a fraction of total campaign donations–and are likely to start flowing again when the 2022 Congressional races heat up. (Major tech and media companies have donated to the Biden inaugural committee.) Even so, several groups intend to keep the heat on. The Leadership Now Project, a pro-democracy a coalition of business leaders, plans to encourage companies to withhold funding from elected officials and media channels deemed to have spurred the insurrection. Talking to Employees About Yet Another Crisis As they have done so many times in the past year in response to the pandemic, racial injustice and economic recession, business leaders were obliged to tell their employees where they stood. In one notable case, Visa CEO Al Kelly went beyond the standard condemnation of violence and addressed the misinformation that inspired it. “Absolutely no facts since the election have surfaced to suggest that Biden’s victory is not totally legitimate,” Kelly said in a memo to employees. “We at Visa stand 100% behind the result of the election and the collective voices of the citizens of this country.” Since workers tend to trust their employers for information more than other sources, business leaders have a potentially strong role in rebutting noxious myths and conspiracy theories. “When major events like this happen, with millions of people watching, the workplace spillover is inevitable,” noted three business professors writing last week in Harvard Business Review. Executives may be uncomfortable about addressing events that bring up strong emotions and opinions among employees–and wind up saying little or nothing. “Resist that tendency. You need to instead lean into this moment of disbelief, frustration, anger, fear, and anything else people might be feeling–not only today but from here on out,” they counseled, offering specific advice to managers about talking to their teams. “This is yet another opportunity for managers to put those corporate ideals into practice on the ground.” The fallout from Jan. 6 may apply in extra measure to Black employees, who not only saw a white mob assault the U.S. Capitol, but could plainly see racial inequities in how the law-enforcement response was much more restrained than the often brutal tactics used recently on racial-justice protestors. "No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesters yesterday that they wouldn't have been treated very differently than the mob that stormed the Capitol," Biden said in the aftermath. "We all know that's true–and it's unacceptable." Shoring up Democracy as a Business Value In the aftermath of the assault on democracy, which is likely to continue for some time, does Corporate America have a greater interest in repairing the damage? Yes, writes Harvard professor Rebecca Henderson, author of Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire. “This week’s events have demonstrated that we cannot take our democracy for granted,” she writes. Citing polls that suggest that 45% of Republicans approve of the assault on the Capitol, implying that they see nothing wrong with trying to overturn an election by force, Henderson contends that “this belief is a fundamental threat to the long-term health of our economy and the strength of American business.” Without good government, corporations wouldn’t be able to rely on free and fair markets, public infrastructure, and the other conditions business needs to thrive. She suggested three initial steps for business leaders to take: speak out in support of democracy, act collectively, and address the roots of the problem. In a post-truth era, can business help lead the U.S. back toward a fact-based culture? There’s reason for optimism about that, writes David Kirkpatrick, editor-in-chief of Techonomy. “Conspiracy theories undermine the landscape in which business operates. It is, by definition, grounded in the world of facts. There is, truly, a bottom line. Otherwise, CEOs cannot properly run companies,” Kirkpatrick writes. “It’s only possible to make progress as a business if you know what is going on. Understanding that helps explain why business leaders now recognize they must speak out to try to remedy the unhinged and haywire direction in American public debate, and the ascendancy of fact-free opinion and irrational action.” Asking fundamental questions about the role of business in a democracy would be a good thing to do even at the startup level, when companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are being launched. “The U.S. has a long history of racism and class division, both of which were rapidly accelerated by tech booms,” writes Brooklyn-based venture capitalist Charlie O’Donnell in a thoughtful post on Substack. O’Donnell proposes that before VCs pour money into a venture, they should feel obligated to consider how a disruptive new business will affect workers, consumers, and society. “Should this matter to venture capitalists? Aren’t we all just it in for the money alone?” he asks. “Well, it’s kind of hard to make money if the long-term consequences of your investments threaten the free and open democracy that underpins our society.” Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time
Can Companies Ignore Politics? Not Anymore
BY Stephen Koepp October 20, 2020The volatile fumes were building up for months. Formerly freewheeling tech companies Facebook, Google and Pinterest had all clamped down on employee speech in response to a rise in social activism. But the match was lit late last month, when Brian Armstrong, CEO of the cryptocurrency platform Coinbase, issued a proclamation that his company would be a politics-free zone: no political debate in the office, and no social activism on the company’s part. Coinbase would focus instead on its core mission. If workers weren’t comfortable with that, they could take severance packages. At least 60 of them did, about 5% of the workforce. In a follow-up memo, Armstrong said he was fine with that: “I think it will result in us having a stronger and more united team.” In making such a black-and-white declaration, Armstrong kicked off a pitched debate among business leaders and workers struggling to navigate an increasingly difficult grey zone in a polarized America. Some Silicon Valley investors and executives welcomed the Coinbase CEO’s statement, which came after a season of employee activism, including a walkout at Coinbase. “Enough is enough. The pendulum swings and it swings back,” tech investor Cyan Bannister told the Washington Post. “Sometimes people just want to have a safe place to go where they don’t have to think about this stuff anymore because it’s literally everywhere.” Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo took the opposite stance, pointing out that Silicon Valley’s culture used to “welcome lively debate about ideas and society,” he tweeted, condemning the clampdown. “This isn’t great leadership. It’s the abdication of leadership. It’s the equivalent of telling your employees to ‘shut up and dribble.’ Which position will prevail? As an indicator, the backlash against social activism probably shows which way we’re headed: forward. Corporate America can’t turn back the clock on diversity, whether that applies to people or opinions. And America’s multiple crises–pandemic, economic and social–have cast a bright light on inequities that can’t be ignored. Here are some of the different ways that’s taking hold: Listening to Stakeholders “Companies have stepped up on a number of issues in recent years, particularly on topics that affect their employees and customers–gun safety, marriage equality, access to reproductive healthcare and immigration policy,” corporate-responsibility expert Susan McPherson, founder and CEO of McPherson Strategies, told From Day One. Ignoring those issues doesn’t cut it anymore, especially in a time of upheaval. “While companies have historically leaned heavily out of talking politics, the fact is that politics is unavoidable this year, and impossible to separate ourselves from entirely. It would be a mistake for leaders not to prepare for and lean into the conversation,” according to Sarah Sheehan, president and founder of Bravely, an employee-coaching firm. Focusing on Fixing Society Only days after the Coinbase commotion, JPMorgan Chase, the largest U.S. banking company (2019 assets: $2.7 trillion), took a leap in the other direction. The bank said it would commit $30 billion over the next five years to address racial inequity though loans and other programs. Chase is not alone–giant businesses including Microsoft and Kaiser Permanente have made similar commitments to affordable housing and other issues. What prompted such a focused effort on JPMorgan’s part? “The murder of George Floyd was a sea change, I think, in the attitude of Americans and people about the injustice that has taken place here,” said CEO Jamie Dimon at the LBJ School of Public Affairs 50th Anniversary Forum. A coalition of pro-immigration activist groups blocked the entrance to a Microsoft store in New York City in 2019, demanding that the company cancel its contracts with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (Photo by Gabriele Holtermann-Gorden/Sipa USA via AP Images) The failure until now to address the problem, Dimon said in an interview with journalist Pattie Sellers, is symptomatic of America’s inability to come to a consensus on how to fix things, from health care to public education to infrastructure. “We have failed as a nation. We’re no longer good at public policy. Our incompetence has become a little bit of a joke around the world … We can’t keep up,” he said. “Public policy takes analysis, details, understanding. To me, this is the single most important thing that Americans have got to do in the next 20 years.” Backing Democracy Corporate leaders can figure out how to deal with either four more years of President Trump or a President Biden, but the prospect of a contested election and a loss of confidence in election integrity is bad for business. Michael Porter of Harvard Business School says there is “an essential role for business in addressing political dysfunction,” citing data showing that political gridlock is causing “a disastrous decline” in U.S. competitiveness, the New York Times reported. Business leaders have responded swiftly. “What we're seeing this year is an enormous focus on protecting our democracy and promoting civic engagement, from Old Navy's decision to pay employees to be poll workers to the recent Leadership Now Project statement calling for civility and patience ahead of the election,” McPherson wrote in an email to From Day One. “Business leaders understand that the health of our economy depends on the strength of our democracy. With so much at stake this year, every company should do their part to encourage employees to vote (safely!), instill confidence in our elections, and promote patience until every vote is counted.” Making Promises–But Keeping Them? Responding to the Black Lives Matter movement, many companies were held accountable for commitments that didn’t reflect their earlier behavior–or seemed unlikely to be fulfilled. They need to tread carefully here. “Social-justice issues are macro illustrations of pretty standard corporate values of integrity, respect and inclusion,” Janine Yancey, founder and CEO of Emtrain, a workplace-culture platform, told From Day One. “Look at most companies' values and codes of conduct and you'll see these values reflected. And employees are watching to see if company leaders are ‘real’ about these values and they actually mean something within the organization. Or conversely, whether they're just inauthentic window dressing for PR, lawyers and regulators.” Picking Their Battles While the Coinbase position was at the extreme end of the spectrum, there is probably a point of peril if business leaders forget they have a business to run. “As a founder, I want to build a company that contributes to positive change in the world. And to attract top talent and to understand and serve a wide customer base, a business can’t simply ignore all the social issues employees and customers are reckoning with,” wrote Jessica Lessin, founder of the tech website The Information. “Still, I don’t think a company should be forced to be on the front lines of every major social issue. Leaders have to strike a balance, define a culture and stick with it.” How to approach that challenge? “While it is not necessary for corporations to take a stand and invest in every social issue, employees and consumers are no longer willing to accept companies who haven’t taken a stand at all,” Melanie Newell, SVP of Rocket Social Impact, told From Day One. “Companies must dig deep to understand what is currently most important to their stakeholders and in alignment with their brand values to determine where to invest their time, resources and dollars. Determine your priorities, define how to invest in them and share that plan.” Editor’s note: Bravely, Emtrain and Rocket Social Impact have been sponsors or partners of From Day One. Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time
Advice for Virtual Leadership: ‘Listen and Be Courageous’
BY Stephen Koepp August 27, 2020How can business leaders practice classic methods like management-by-walking-around, engaging closely with workers, when everyone has to keep their distance? Can “remote leadership” be as effective as the in-person kind? We are finding out. Managers are adapting as fast as they can. Tacy Byham, CEO of DDI, heads a global leadership-consulting firm that helps organizations hire, promote and develop leaders. From Day One talked with her about the keys to success in virtual leadership. Exceprts: From Day One: In this vast new experiment we're having with remote work, what are some of the new challenges for leaders? Tacy Byham: Leaders need to understand how to optimize leadership in a virtual environment. They need to understand how to maintain morale and engagement. They need to understand how to help their teams stay strong under pressure and under stress and avoid burnout. Employees will have a variety of responses. On the one hand, some workers can be exhilarated because they don’t like to meet to people face to face. But on the other hand, you can have loneliness, isolation, difficulties communicating and collaborating, and then a ton of distractions. So it's quite a pivot that leaders have to do. It's very different from walking down the hall and being able to interact with people. The good thing is technology. We certainly never could have done this five years ago. The more you dive in and use all the features and opportunities that technology can provide, the easier the transition is going to be. You mentioned burnout. Who are the prime candidates for that, and what are the prime causes? It’s increasing demands on individuals, particularly if you're a in a high-performing role or in a function like technology. That’s where people can be burnt out–and on their way out. Back in 2018, Gallup did a survey and found that two thirds of full-time workers experienced burnout on the job. Wow! And that was in 2018. What it comes down to is both individual factors and organizational factors. On the individual side, we have the overachievers, the Type A's, the people who say, ‘I'll just fit that in.’ And they're more likely to burn out than others. One the organizational side, we’ve worked with a researcher and found the top stressors. No. 1 is poor leadership. No. 2 is lack of organizational caring. No. 3 is the negativity of coworkers. This just gives you an idea of the top three. Another one is poor communication. Since we’re all working virtually, that one is probably rising up higher on the list. Besides the challenges of remote work, what are some of the advantages of what we’ve discovered about people’s adaptability, as well as the new tools and techniques for working? One of the advantages that I'm seeing is that we are breaking up the preconceived notion that an individual had to be geographically located near your office to be on a team. So the talent pool is broader and richer than it's ever been. It just breaks up and takes down barriers. We've proven that we can do things virtually. Another advantage is employee development and a focus on growth. Which, of course, for an individual, is an engagement factor: What's my career path? Where am I going? How are you helping me grow with respect to assignments and opportunities? Informal learning does not need to end in a virtual world. Tacy Byham, CEO of the global leadership consulting firm DDI (Photo courtesy of DDI) A big part of our business has been helping new leaders step up to take on new roles. In fact, we pivoted 12 years ago to offering training in a virtual environment. I would say pre-COVID, about 20% of our leadership training worldwide was in the virtual classroom and 80% face-to-face. Now those numbers have completely flipped. Is the virtual classroom as effective as live training? In fact, we have recent success stories that people are more engaged and got more from learning in a virtual environment than when we were still doing it live. I would say it’s because we've designed virtual learning to require focused attention. You're actually very much engaged and involved. We make sure that we follow the principles of behavior modeling. Let’s say you're learning to delegate. You will see some positive and negative examples associated with that. We break down what delegation is: recognizing the opportunities for you to delegate, having the delegation conversations, making sure that you follow up and provide the right support. And then we actually have people practice. Anytime people actually practice something, it helps them to gain confidence and competence in that skill. I equate it to my son learning to drive the car when he was 16. He passed the written test. He played video games about driving. But you don't just hand him the car keys. You get in the car and help him practice. You’ve also developed a virtual-reality inclusion experience. What is that like? You go through the experience, you're trying to pitch your idea and other people are talking over you. Other people are interrupting you. You can see that there's an in-group and an out-group. It's full of microaggressions. If you just listen to the whole thing, it is amazing, the memorability of it. You could talk till you’re blue in the face about how women don't always have a voice at the table. But when people experience it, they get it. We call it the empathy-generating machine. Because when you step into that, you really understand what it feels like. We’ve had men who said, ‘I know I've done that, and I am now so remorseful and apologetic,’ and it's a wake-up call around that. We've had women who've said, ‘I never realized I realized that was happening to my peers, I will do better to help them.’ But we've also had underrepresented women who have said, ‘Oh, my God, that is my life,’ and they broke into tears. So it's the experience itself–and then what do you do with it? So after that, we teach what inclusion really should be. We teach what ally roles are associated with that. We help people practice. It's very powerful. And it's really safe. You're able to simulate the conversation and the feelings and all of that, but you’re doing it on your own. It’s okay to make mistakes. Once people have those insights, now can they put inclusivity into action? Technology is an incredible way to help with inclusivity. Virtual facilitators can work in ways that help quiet people have a voice at the table to share their incredible ideas. Also, I love things like virtual whiteboards, such as the Miro Board, to share and develop ideas as a team. It takes preparation to be inclusive. Facilitators need to plan time for interactive discussions. For example, each participant would draw a pitch deck for an idea, then they would import their ideas right into the virtual white board. After that, the facilitator offers a voting exercise for the team to share which ideas they like and ask questions. This gives structure to the team’s discussion. It removes situations where someone is put directly on the spot. Instead, you’re collecting everybody's best ideas. It really creates a sense of inclusivity, which is vital because people want to feel like they have a voice. How can a remote leader strike a balance between providing support for workers and maintaining expectations on productivity? You know, it's funny, I was having a social-distancing walk with a friend and she said that before COVID-19, she was only able to get approval to work at home once a week, on Fridays. Her commute was not easy. She said, ‘I loved being home on Fridays. And I was always accountable on my team and all that, but it was literally a fear of management that people would not be productive if they weren't able to see them.’” And we flipped all that. As a leader with your team, you need to have a clear set of OKRs [objectives and key results] that cascade down to your team members. Then, if you as a team member are meeting the results, I am able to give you the freedom you need to get your work done. And I think that's what people are craving. My chief legal officer has two little kids at home. She has to help them with online learning for the next nine weeks, so there is going to be times where she is going to have to step away. Yet I know what her objectives and key results are, so I don't really care how she manages her day. And that makes her super happy to know that she has that much trust and freedom. You can give people the freedom and that will help lead to their gratitude and engagement. And take away some of the burnout, by the way. What advice would you give to new leaders taking the first steps in management in a workplace that's virtual? If you're a newly minted leader, I would make sure you're clear on what you want to accomplish in the first 90 days. And it starts with a discussion with your manager who has promoted you. I would want to frankly know, ‘OK, you looked at a number of individuals and you selected me. What do you see as my strengths? What do you see as my watch-outs?’ Because you want to know that what you're bringing to the table and understand your responsibilities and accountabilities directly from your manager. We included a helpful interview guide in our book Your First Leadership Job: How Catalyst Leaders Bring Out the Best in Others, for you to have that conversation with your manager. Once when I was newly promoted, I decided to write a one-pager on me, a personal mission statement to share with the team. I had made several moves within the organization, but coming back to supervise my old department, there was a fixed image of me from eight years ago. I got the idea of the one-pager from Doug Conant, formerly the CEO of Campbell Soup. My one-pager included how I like to work and what you can expect from me. For one thing, I want a pulse of what's happening with people around the office. So I had to make people on my team aware of that, so they didn't read anything into it negatively. How have your own leadership methods evolved during this multi-faceted crisis? Technology has helped us so much. I don't think I have ever used the team chat as much as I have done. And you've got multiple channels open. For example, I found out that Annie on our team, who is just a rock star, had moved from Toronto to Montreal and she’s super busy. So I just reached out to her and suggested we have a virtual cocktail some night. In the past, I might have sent an email or whatever, but I think the instant gratification that you can get from this creates a way to for people to have those good social connections. One other tip: the best, best meeting practice is that I've set my meetings to be 25-minute meetings and 50-minute meetings. It used to be because I needed walking time to get back and forth between meeting rooms. Now we still need a break. With overlapping crises in terms of health, economy and social justice affecting workers, how would you advise leaders to talk about these things with their workers? Now more than anything–in fact, Michelle Obama said it–we need empathy. But you need to get comfortable with the uncomfortable and actually have the conversations. So, step into it. Facilitate an open dialogue. You can actually bring in an external facilitator if you don't feel up to it. But not talking about something makes it worse, in my opinion, so I would step in and have those conversations. Also, as leaders you need to open your minds. You have to look at things from a different perspective. I'm listening to White Fragility, which I can't believe I never did before, when I take my walks around the neighborhood right now. And man, that's eye-opening. Talk to your teenagers. College-age students are so tapped into the challenges today. You can learn from them. Even if you don't feel like even channeling your own concerns with the people you lead, you could say, ‘Well, my son thinks this,’ and that's a safe way to step into it. So again: broaden your thinking, listen and be courageous–and have the conversations. Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time
Can Corporate America Help Solve the Parenting Crisis?
BY Stephen Koepp August 27, 2020Parents of school-age children are sharing uncharacteristic feelings for this time of year: despair, anxiety and anger. In normal times, this would be a season of pleasant anticipation, with kids about to head off to a place of learning and supervision. This year, it’s a full-on social crisis. All the scenarios for going back to school during a pandemic–remote schooling, hybrid schedules, or a return to the classroom–feel risky or nearly impossible to manage. “All the choices stink,” Kate Averett, a University of Albany sociologist who has been interviewing parents, told the New York Times. “Parents tell me about not being able to sleep because they’re so anxious, or tell me they’ve been crying a lot.” Times columnist Michelle Goldberg is one of those perplexed parents: “When I lie in bed struggling to figure out how to balance physical risk, economic sustainability and emotional well-being, I can’t make the equation work. And If I can’t do it, I’m not sure how parents with far fewer resources are doing it either.” Parents say they feel abandoned by government. This presents an urgent question for employers: In the absence of a normal system, what can they do to help the parents who work for them? The issue is not just a humanitarian one, but a practical matter. In a nationwide poll by the Washington Post-Schar School, “50% of working parents said it would be ‘harder’ or ‘impossible’ to do their jobs if their children’s schools provide only online instruction this fall,” a number that rose to 66% among parents of younger children. In another poll of parents, four out of five said they would have no in-person help educating and caring for their children at home. Those are ominous statistics. In fact, solving the parenting crisis looks like a prerequisite for jump-starting as the U.S. economy. To see how businesses are responding, From Day One consulted HR executives and other business leaders who have spoken at our conferences. The overview: Companies are assessing the programs they have and considering what they should add. Among the solutions in play: flex time, additional paid days off, increased back-up child care, tutoring discounts, nanny stipends, help with forming learning pods, and information-sharing forums on how to cope with the situation. Currently, only a tiny fraction of U.S. companies offer subsidized child-care centers or programs, but now many large employers are scrambling to explore their options. Megan Neumann, a consultant at Mercer who focuses on employer health and benefits choices, told the Washington Post she is getting four times as many inquiries from client companies about child-care and educational help as she did before the pandemic began. “Employers really haven’t ever been focused on [the needs of school-aged kids]” she said. “People have depended on the school year to provide for watching children and fostering a learning environment.” In June, the Cincinnati-based Fifth Third Bank began offering employees 30 days of subsidized child support this year, either in-home or at a care center, the Chicago Tribune reported. RELX, a global information-analytics company, has increased its offering of backup-care days provided to employees through Bright Horizons, the largest provider employer-sponsored child care, according to Amy Noelle, RELX’s global benefits leader. Working with Bright Horizons, the company also offers “the ability for parents to engage with the Sittercity website to find an instructor to lead a learning pod,” Noelle told From Day One. The reality is that most of the burden of solving this crisis will likely fall on women, which will cause them both immediate stress and potentially a long-term setback. “I have concerns looking at data that showcases how women are more impacted by child-care and elder-care constraints and what it may mean for retaining and attracting female talent long-term if we do not all take a more progressive stance in this space,” Annalisa Esposito Bluhm, head of executive and strategic corporate communications at General Motors, told From Day One. “Here at GM, empathy is everything. It's difficult for so many and we have to provide flexibility for those juggling work with family-care issues,” she added. Bluhm offered a snapshot of the situation in the Detroit metro area and her own coping challenges: “Our district started the school year virtually and will assess at the end of October. We cannot find child care for our kids–all centers are at capacity. Nannies and tutors are in high demand and difficult to come by. Those who are available are commanding a weekly cash price north of $700 per week. There is no reality where I can find support and the only option I will have is to modify my work day to help my kids from 8:30 am to noon and then work from 1 pm to 6 pm and after they go to bed to make up the difference.” What Are the New Boundaries? One of the biggest ways for managers to help their employees, including parents, is to set forth work-from-home guidelines for managers and employees. Adi Ignatius, editor in chief of Harvard Business Review, praised the “work from home pledges” formulated by IBM and said his organization would be adopting them too. The guidelines include pledges to “be family sensitive,” “support ‘not camera ready’ times,” and “to set boundaries and prevent video fatigue.” “This is a time when organizations can truly demonstrate what it means to have an inclusive culture,” Reneé Konzelman, VP of HR at Honeywell UOP, told From Day One. “Employees have to be agile and adapt to the challenges that these stay-at-home orders bring, and managers need to be flexible and understanding that the workday is no longer 9-to-5 given remote schooling obligations during the school day.” Several experts emphasized to From Day One that corporations will need to develop a host of solutions to fit different needs. “This is new territory and there will be no ‘perfect’ answer,” according to Mikeisha Anderson Jones, VP of inclusion & diversity in the Colleague Experience Group at American Express. “Teaching (and remembering) about flexibility, creativity, resiliency, and agility will become even more important.” “There is no magic bullet, rather a range of steps to help employers manage the stressors for employees,” according to Rich Maiore, president of Rocket Social Impact. “This includes flex-time and collective child-care, to mental-health apps and wellness coaching.” His firm has provided each employee with a $250 stipend to create a more functional home office or play space at home. He added: “I myself have turned my office into a panic room designed to keep pesky children out. It won’t win me Father of the Year, but may preserve my sanity.” Appcast, a talent-recruiting platform, established a set of principles focused on fairness, flexibility and clarity about goals and expectations, Leah Daniels, SVP of strategy, told From Day One. Among the most important: “Clear communication between managers and employees about each employee’s unique situation and how the employee plans to manage through it.” Promod Vohra, chief talent strategy officer at the IT firm ACS, agreed that managers need to listen carefully to employees as they decide on new procedures. “I feel that in addition to developing broad policies, most of the employees may need individual attention, as everyone’s needs are different. We must have patience and time to hear them out. That will solve half of the problem. These are unprecedented and unpredictable times and no standard policy can cover all bases. I hope this will result in better relationships and loyalty,” he told From Day One. Where Do Parents Need Help? When it came to discovering employee needs, Robin Schroyer, health and well-being manager for CommScope, conducted a virtual listening tour. “We have a global employee population, and to understand more of what our employees are facing with their children (focused on 10 and younger), I held a series of focus groups, connecting with people around the world. I am still working to complete my qualitative analysis, but there are a few themes I have identified: vacation time, network connectivity issues in the home, quality of child learning, impact on youth psychological and social growth, health, money (childcare vs private schools), productivity, communication strategies and mental health.” Schroyer is working on solutions to many of the issues. Managers need to make sure that in adjusting schedules and workloads to respond to the needs of some, they don’t let bias creep in. Appcast’s guidelines warn of this kind of thinking: “Don’t assume that primary parents or parents of young children are working less hard or that our employees with older children or no children are picking up the slack.” Daniels mentioned a few other current necessities: “A sense of humor, empathy and recognition that the best-laid plans can go south when there are small children involved.” At a time when uncertainty and ambiguity are rampant, some companies have tried to bridge the information gap by creating a forum for sharing tips, resources and other information. At Zillow Group, where the company has been offering flexible hours to their staff, managers have also “set up parents groups and have brought in speakers to provide guidance on home schooling,” according to Scott Moore, the company’s senior manager of early-talent recruiting. Fortive, an industrial and tech giant, asked parents to share their own tips with each other, curated the information, and circulated a flyer across the organization, according to Shinder Dhillon, the company’s VP of inclusive and diversity. Since the parenting crisis overlaps with a pandemic health crisis, companies have been considering both simultaneously. At Hewlett Packard Enterprise, “We’ve been focused on building our internal communities–parents, caregivers, those living alone,” according to Samanntha DuBridge, the company’s VP of global benefits and culture/engagement. “We are also providing additional days if needed for COVID and in the U.S. expanding our backup childcare. We’ve continued to add to our mental-health offerings and added Headspace,” the meditation app. At Southern California Edison, the company has offered 10 additional paid days off, on top of already existing vacation and sick time, for COVID-related care of the employee or any member of the family. The utility is also offering a stipend of $500 for home-office gear including ergonomic support, according to Liji Thomas, the company’s head of diversity and inclusion. A new corporate charitable program that has been growing in popularity in recent years, the employee relief fund, could be a helpful source of funding to mitigate the child-care crisis. Such funds were inspired mainly by the need to help victims of natural disasters, but they can be used for other kinds of personal emergencies as well. Since March 15, E4E Relief, a nonprofit that administers these programs on behalf of employers, has awarded nearly $70 million in 100,000 grant awards to employees at its partner companies. In a time of COVID, such financial grants have helped families avoid personal crises like missing a rent payment or losing their child care, according to Holly Welch Stubbing, CEO of E4E Relief. While many employers are rushing to address this crisis, only big and prosperous companies are likely to be able to pay for substantial solutions. A more sweeping response would require a philosophical sea change in how the U.S. deals with child care, which is exactly the demand of a new cohort of political activists: the “rage moms” who are sick of being expected to do it all. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who made child care a priority issue in her Presidential campaign, told the New York Times she has experienced a new surge in support for her position. “Right now, I think women have just had it up to their eyeballs. They no longer feel isolated and one-off in how they couldn’t figure out how to make the system work, and recognize the system is broken, and nobody’s making it work,” she said. “They’re fired up. And I love it.” Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time
Corporate America Wakes Up to Systemic Racism. But What Happens Next?
BY Stephen Koepp June 18, 2020The NFL takes a knee. Juneteenth becomes a corporate holiday. NASCAR bans the confederate flag. The stereotypical product mascots Aunt Jemima, Uncle Ben and Mrs. Butterworth are suddenly retired. The Oscars promise to be not-so-white anymore. Band-Aid says it will start making bandages in darker shades. A parade of corporate press releases announces that companies will spend hundreds of millions of dollars to fight racial injustice and inequality. And at companies with widespread complaints about toxic workplaces for people of color, heads roll. All of these things could have happened over the course of decades, but they unfolded in a matter of days. Suddenly, Corporate America was promising to make the well-being of Black America a top priority. It was not necessarily a matter of courage. After the horrific police killing of George Floyd and the waves of protest that circled the globe, corporations could see which way the wind was blowing. According to many recent polls, a two-thirds majority of Americans support the protests against policy brutality and racial discrimination. Almost overnight, Black Lives Matter has gone from marginal to mainstream, from argument to consensus. The corporate turnabout began earlier this month with a flurry of statements offering contrition about past neglect and support for the BLM movement. Many were filled with promises to “do better” and “do more,” with some offering pledges of money and proposing changes in corporate and public policy. Adidas, under pressure from employees of color and their allies, committed $120 million to programs that support Black communities. As the company announced on Twitter, “First, we need to give credit where it’s long overdue: The success of Adidas would be nothing without Black athletes, Black artists, Black employees, and Black customers. Period.” Johnson & Johnson CEO Alex Gorsky, whose company pledged $10 million to fight racism, wrote in a LinkedIn post: “As the CEO of the world’s largest health-care company, I must state unequivocally that racism in any form is unacceptable, and that Black lives matter. And as a white man, I also need to acknowledge the limits of my own life experience and listen to those who have faced systemic injustice since the day they were born.” From IBM came a letter to Congress by CEO Arvind Krishna, who said the company would like to work with lawmakers “in pursuit of justice and racial equity, focused in police reform, responsible use of technology, and broadening skills and educational opportunities.” IBM, as well as Amazon and Microsoft, said they would back away from selling facial-recognition technology, at least for now, bowing to concerns about its misuse or abuse by law-enforcement authorities. While some of the declarations took flak for being disingenuous or too-little-too-late, they were generally welcomed as a potential turning point. “I think the statements and the additional efforts are extremely valuable,” Marion Brooks, VP of diversity and inclusion at Novartis Corp., told From Day One. Yet as dramatic as it all was, skepticism abounded too, given that “many of the same companies expressing solidarity have contributed to systemic inequality, targeted the black community with unhealthy products and services, and failed to hire, promote and fairly compensate Black men and women,” wrote David Gelles in the New York Times. “Corporate America has failed Black America,” said Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation and a member of the board of PepsiCo, and who is Black. “Even after a generation of Ivy League educations and extraordinary talented African-Americans going into corporate America, we seem to have hit a wall.” Indeed, while African-Americans constitute about 13% of the U.S. population, their representation tends to be in the low single digits on corporate boards, at the C-Suite executive level, and in technical roles. Facebook has just a 1.5% black tech force, compared with Apple at 6%. Yet this inequality represents just the top of the income pyramid. Overall, since 2000, the wage gap between Blacks and whites has grown significantly. That feeds the huge wealth gap. On average, white households have nearly 6.5 times the wealth of black households, reports Bloomberg. Inequalities in wealth and access to health care have contributed to the vastly disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on people of color. As Corporate America began to reckon with these realities, here’s how the responses unfolded: Statements and Gestures One of the earliest statements, on May 29, came from Nike, which posted on social media a simple black square with a saying in white letters protesting police brutality and racial injustice: “For Once, Don’t Do It.” Alluding to its trademark motto, the statement was in keeping with the company’s voice on social issues, including its ad campaign in support of Colin Kaepernick with the line, “Believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.” Before long Nike’s white-on-black design became the default format for corporate statements, as dozens followed the template, diluting the impact. It became an exercise applying corporate branding to popular sentiment. “Unfortunately, the reality of the groupthink, even if backed by the best of intentions, transformed these messages into homogenous–and largely meaningless–wallpaper,” opined Jeff Beers in Fast Company. (Nike, for its part, followed through by committing $40 million to social-justice organizations.) Other companies attempted more original statements. Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, the largest U.S. bank, knelt with staffers in a branch office, wearing shorts, sneakers and a mask. Chase says that it’s making multibillion-dollar investments to address racial and economic inequality, “particularly for the Black community.” Even so, advocates of social equity want to see results more than symbols. “There’s a lot of performative allyship going around,” Y-Vonne Hutchinson, CEO and founder of diversity consulting firm ReadySet told the Washington Post. “Nobody’s asking for a CEO to take a knee. You take a knee after you change your policies.” Well then, at historic moments like these, what are the most important words and deeds for companies to get across? Business Insider, with the help of a PR veteran, analyzed 27 memos from business leaders responding to George Floyd’s death. The conclusions: “The strongest memos acknowledged where leaders and their organizations had fallen short. They confronted discomfort head on, and invited difficult conversations. And they outlined concrete plans for cultivating diversity and inclusion, both in the workplace and in the U.S. more generally.” Many companies hurried to embrace a prospectively more durable gesture by recognizing Juneteenth, the day commemorating the end of slavery in the U.S. Nike, Twitter, Target and Spotify were among the small but growing number of companies designating June 19 as a paid company holiday. Changing Positions and Products The NFL, which has fought with its players for years over their rights to protest police brutality by taking a knee during the national anthem, did a complete 180-degree turn. “We, the NFL, admit we were wrong,” the league tweeted in an official statement. In a video accompanying the tweet, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell said, “Without Black players, there would be no National Football League. And the protests around the country are emblematic of the centuries of silence, inequality and oppression of black players, coaches, fans and staff.” The turnabout had resonance far beyond sports, given how President Trump had exploited the controversy as a wedge issue, painting Kaepernick and fellow protesters as unpatriotic. Shunned by teams as too controversial, Kaepernick has not played professional football since 2016. Other organizations decided quickly to change policies that seemed discriminatory, culturally unaware, or dismissive of the different needs of diverse customers. Walmart said it would no longer place “multicultural hair and beauty products” in locked cases, which it had been doing in about a dozen stores. “Predominantly African-American people are buying those products, so the assumption is we’re thieves,” a customer told NBC News. NASCAR, a bastion of the white working class, said it will no longer allow the Confederate flag to be displayed at events and properties, while driver Bubba Wallace, the first full-time African-American NASCAR driver in decades, earlier this month raced in a car with a Black Lives Matter paint scheme. The moment proved a catalyst for change in products that for more than a century had continued to display mascots that seemed to endure from the plantation era, despite complaints over the years. Aunt Jemima, Mrs. Butterworth, Uncle Ben and the Cream of Wheat chef were all retired or placed under review by the companies that produce them. Where did these stereotypical characters come from? “The images of placid, smiling Black Americans on commercial products were often created during times of racial upheaval. Characters like Aunt Jemima, who was first depicted as a mammy, followed Reconstruction when white people were scared of what it meant to live alongside newly freed slaves,” reported the New York Times, citing an interview with Kevin D. Thomas, a professor of multicultural branding in the Race, Ethnic and Indigenous Studies Program at Marquette University. (The Frito Bandito, by the way, made his exit in 1971.) Band-Aids, a Johnson & Johnson product, have been made since 1920 in flesh color, which was fine as long as your color was a kind of soft pink. Earlier this month, the company announced that it will start offering “a range of bandages in light, medium and deep shades of Brown and Black skin tones that embrace the beauty of diverse skin.” Commented Ishena Robinson in The Root: “A whole damn century from the time it was first introduced, Band-Aid brand has finally come to the realization that Black people exist, have skin, get boo-boos, and need bandages.” Some companies started out on the wrong foot in their policy declarations. Starbucks, which in 2018 had closed its 8,000 U.S. stores for a day of anti-bias training after the misguided arrest of two Black men, responded to the current upsurge in protests by stating in a memo that their baristas and other employees were forbidden to wear shirts or accessories declaring support for Black Lives Matter. When a backlash ensued, the company not only reversed itself, but for good measure said it will produce 250,000 corporate T-shirts promoting Black Lives Matter to be given to employees and sold to customers. That may have been a well-meaning gesture, but this company too was criticized for engaging in performative allyship rather than concrete measures to boost employees and community members. Going Beyond Words Investing large amounts of money to create equity and new opportunity for Black Americans is a welcome measure. Apple pledged $100 million, while companies including Walmart, Target, Home Depot and Levi’s were among the name brands promising financial support. Less recognized were employees taking advantage of already-established corporate matching-fund programs to help maximize their donating power. In the week following George Floyd’s killing, the matching-fund management company Benevity saw more than $100 million donated through such programs to civil-rights and related causes. Even more direct efforts were shown by companies launching programs to train more young people of color for the skilled jobs of the future. Techtonic Group, a Boulder-based software developer, plans to add 100 black and Hispanic apprentices to its Techtonic Academy program, a paid, 14-week course sanctioned by the U.S. Department of Labor, the Denver Business Journal reported. “We came to the conclusion that everybody’s putting up platitudes on social media and that doesn’t really do anything for anybody,” said CEO Heather Terenzio. “So we starting talking about our apprenticeship program and what we could do to help.” What other measures should companies pursue, beyond words of good intent? "Social statements mean nothing without real actions and investments," Elizabeth A. Morrison, VP of diversity & belonging for Live Nation, told From Day One. "I’m speaking specifically of commitments to increasing workforce diversity, tactics to drive equality and inclusion with clients (like diversity riders in contracts and supplier diversity), donations to social-justice organizations, and supporting legislation for equal justice. Ideally companies are doing many of these, and/or taking other action that is equally powerful and sustainable. Long-term commitment and partnerships are needed for this not to become the flavor of the month." Indeed, the Black Lives Matter movement strongly suggests that corporations need to get used to a new dynamic of social activism. Jim VandeHei, co-founder and CEO of the news organization Axios, calls it a "bottom-up revolution" that presents a stark new reality for American CEOs. "Doing good is no longer a niche. It's a necessity," he wrote on Axios. "The judgment CEOs feared most in the past was pesky reporters or regulators. The judgment they should fear the most now is idealistic employees on the inside and the social media warriors on the outside." While this presents a new peril, there is a potential upside to embracing this change: "We have found the new generation will work as hard or harder than we did if we provide this clarity of purpose and rolling, unvarnished dialogue." Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time
New Study: How Many Jobs Can be Done at Home?
BY Stephen Koepp April 02, 2020As the coronavirus pandemic has suddenly forced tens of millions of Americans to work at home, plenty of practical issues have arisen, ranging from WiFi capacity to home schooling. But there are larger questions for society as well: How many jobs can actually be done remotely? What is the total share of wages for those jobs? And, after the crisis passes, how many of those jobs will continue to be done remotely? Two economics professors at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business ran the numbers from job surveys, including information from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and reported their findings in a white paper on March 27. Their classification suggests that 34% of U.S. jobs can plausibly be performed at home. They reached their estimate partly by the process of elimination, identifying job characteristics “that clearly rule out the possibility of working entirely from home,” the economists said. However, their estimate includes jobs that would in some ways be difficult to do entirely from home (teaching school, for example), so they consider it “an upper bound on what might be feasible and greatly exceeds the share of jobs that in fact have been performed entirely at home in recent years,” the authors write. They cited a pre-pandemic poll, the 2018 American Time Use Survey, which found that “less than a quarter of all full-time workers work at all from home on an average day, and even those workers typically spend well less than half of their working hours at home.” Most jobs in finance, corporate management, and professional and scientific services could be performed from home, the authors noted, but that applies to very few jobs in agriculture, hotels and restaurants, or retail industries. The prevalence of work-from-home jobs varies greatly by region, the economists found. They abound in tech and education hubs like Silicon Valley, Durham-Chapel Hill, and Austin, Texas. They’re most scarce in manufacturing centers like Grand Rapids, Mich., and agricultural hubs like Bakersfield, Calif. The white paper highlights the socio-economic divide that has been starkly visible during the pandemic, as salaried professionals work from the relative safety of their home, while many hourly workers in the retail, delivery and health-care industries are manning the front lines. “Work-from-home and telework are now seen as a privileged activity and for a privileged class,” said Amy Liu, director of the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution, told the Wall Street Journal. What's more, the University of Chicago economists wrote,“Workers in occupations that can be performed at home typically earn more. If we assume all occupations involve the same number of hours of work, the 34% of jobs that can plausibly be performed at home account for 44% of all wages.” What are the implications of these findings? For one thing, identifying the jobs that can’t be done from home “may be useful as policymakers try to target social insurance payments to those that most need that,” the authors wrote. At the same time, the numbers of jobs that can be performed effectively from home is an important measure of how the economy might perform when another crisis like this comes along. The economists add a noteworthy caveat about the future: just because jobs can be done from home in a crisis doesn’t mean that they should be done that way in normal times. “An individual worker’s productivity may differ considerably when working at home rather than her usual workplace,” they note. Indeed, after the crisis passes, work will tend to flow back to the office, in part because of human nature. “While much of the focus has been on the rush to remote work in the early stages of the pandemic, the longer-term consequences of COVID-19 may have more to do with how we keep ourselves healthy than how we work,” writes Axios future correspondent Bryan Walsh. As futurist Amy Webb told him, "Any time a new change is foisted upon us, very quickly there is a bias to thinking that the new present is the future. That is almost universally never the case." She added: "Most societies are not set up to support the daily productivity tasks you need as a remote worker or student," she said. (Telemedicine, however, is likely here to stay.) While the WFH moment seems likely to open up new possibilities for job flexibility, human proximity still matters when it comes to teamwork, wrote management researchers Ethan Bernstein and Ben Waber last year in a Harvard Business Review piece on what they called the anatomy of collaboration. “Remote work, while undeniably cost-effective, tends to significantly inhibit collaboration even over digital channels,” the authors wrote. “While studying a major technology company from 2008 to 2012, we found that remote workers communicated nearly 80% less about their assignments than co-located team members did; in 17% of projects they didn’t communicate at all. The obvious implication: If team members need to interact to achieve project milestones on time, you don’t want them working remotely.”
How Movies With a Social Message Became Good Business
BY Stephen Koepp November 21, 2019Hollywood has taken a lot of heat, lately from none other than Martin Scorsese, for its obsession with superheroes, sequels, and special effects. All this has raised a nagging question about the soul of the film industry: Does it care about real people and their struggles? Just in time for Oscar season comes an answer: Tinsel Town might have a conscience after all. Hollywood is producing a new wave of movies, many of them based on true stories, that tackle some of the most difficult and important issues of the day, from threats to the environment to racial justice. The best of them pose a triple threat: they’re artfully entertaining, they have a real impact on society, and they can make money. The latter, especially, is the kind of sustainability that Hollywood can celebrate. Dark Waters, which opens tomorrow, is emblematic of the trend. Starring Mark Ruffalo, Anne Hathaway and Tim Robbins, the movie tells the chilling story of a lawyer who crosses over from representing corporations to challenging one of the biggest of them all on behalf of a community stricken by long-term chemical pollution. Its heroes have no capes or special powers. The movie has garnered strongly positive reviews, not just for its own entertainment value, but the kind of storytelling it represents. “Dark Waters, in its stunningly real and intricately crafted way, restores some of the original shock and awe to the journalistic genre of The Conspiracies Around Us That Are Truly Happening,” wrote Owen Gleiberman, Variety’s chief film critic. “[Director] Todd Haynes has made the first corporate thriller that’s a call to action because you’ll emerge from it feeling anything but safe.” Dark Waters is the product of a relative newcomer to Hollywood’s elite, Participant Media, which was launched in 2004 by Silicon Valley tycoon Jeff Skoll, the first president of eBay. Participant soon made waves with the Al Gore documentary An Inconvenient Truth and has steadily built itself into an Academy Award magnet, garnering 73 nominations and 18 Oscar statues. Among its recent films: Roma, Greenbook, and Spotlight. Propelled by their Best Picture awards, Greenbook and Spotlight respectively pulled in nearly $322 million and $100 million in box-office revenues. Contributing to the movement are indie studios like A24–which produced the human-size dramas Moonlight, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, and The Farewell–as well as streaming powerhouses like Amazon Studios, which is distributing The Report, starring Adam Driver as the U.S. Senate staffer who wrote the 2014 report on the CIA’s interrogation methods after 9/11. Citing films like The Report, Ann Hornaday in the Washington Post wrote that they “might be called accountability filmmaking: fact-based movies that treat audiences not just as spectators but as citizens, hoping to engage them enough to take action or at least question the systems that condition their lives.” “Human stories, compellingly told, have an amazing value,” Participant Media’s Holly Gordon told an audience at The Atlantic’s Power of Purpose conference this week. “I think pop culture has a huge role in bringing social change.” Participant hired Gordon in 2017 as its first “chief impact officer,” which Gordon joked that her mother said “sounds dangerous,” but means that her mission is to leverage the story on the screen to bring social change in real life. “If the movie is the ‘What,’ the impact campaign is about the ‘Why,’” Gordon said. In the case of Roma, the story of a live-in housekeeper for a rich Mexico City family, Participant sought to bring a spotlight on the struggles of domestic workers. “We launched a campaign in the U.S. with Ai-jen Poo and the National Domestic Workers Alliance (NDWA) and in Mexico with the Center for Support and Training of Household Employees and their leader Marcelina [Bautista] to advocate for workers’ rights for domestic workers,” Gordon told the Stanford Social Innovation Review. “This spring, a bill was passed by the Mexican legislature, [which] for the first time in Mexico’s history protects 2.5 million domestic workers across Mexico.” In the U.S., Participant worked with the NDWA to host screenings and panel discussions, as well as working with lawmakers in Washington to push for a Domestic Workers Bill of Rights. Participant will follow Dark Waters with the release on Christmas Day of Just Mercy, the fact-based drama of lawyer Bryan Stevenson’s fight against the racially-charged, wrongful Death row conviction of a rural Alabama man. The film, starring Michael B. Jordan, Brie Larson and Jamie Foxx, drew outpourings of emotion from the audience at a pre-release premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. “The crowd at the Elgin [Theatre] erupted in ecstatic ovations through large parts of the film’s closing moments, most of the credits and part of the question-and-answer session,” the Washington Post reported. Can the impact of such movies actually be quantifiable, like when citizens light a fire under elected officials? Quite possibly so, according a report issued today by Bank of America Merrill Lynch, which projected the “risks from potential legislative action” in the wake of Dark Waters, as CNBC reported. The company targeted in the movie was DuPont, which in real life paid around $670 million to settle a class-action lawsuit based on about 3,550 personal-injury claims for dumping toxic chemicals known as PFAS compounds in landfills. (In the settlement, the company denied wrongdoing.) But the company singled out by Bank of America for a potential financial impact is 3M, because it too deals in PFAS compounds, which are known as “forever chemicals” because they don’t biodegrade–and thus find their way into humans. So far, dozens of legislative bills have been introduced to deal with PFAS, Bank of America said. (“… the materials used by 3M have been tested and assessed to assure their safety for intended uses,” the company says on its website.) Participant’s next giant-tamer is Slay the Dragon, to be released in March 2020, focusing on America’s confounding system of gerrymandering. Well-timed at the kickoff of an election year, Slay the Dragon will take on “a rigged system getting in the way of democracy,” said Gordon. Stephen Koepp, a co-founder of From Day One, was previously executive editor of Time and Fortune. Along the way, he and his brother David co-wrote the movie The Paper
What Is Business for? Not Just Profits Anymore, Corporate Chiefs Declare
BY Stephen Koepp August 20, 2019“Society gives each of us a license to operate. It’s a question of whether society trusts you or not. We need society to accept what it is that we do,” IBM CEO Ginni Rometty told Fortune for its September cover story. It was a notable statement of humility for a Fortune 500 chief—and it marks a turning point in the stated mission of Corporate America. For nearly a half century, big business has operated with a singular focus on delivering profits to its shareholders, with the rest of society taking a back seat. The result has been an era of massive profit growth, soaring CEO compensation, merger mania—and growing income inequality. But in a groundbreaking declaration published this week, the Business Roundtable, an association representing 200 CEOs of America’s biggest corporations, issued a new declaration of purpose that turned the old rule on its head. In a 300-word statement, the business leaders said they will embrace a new accountability to the larger community of stakeholders, pledging that they will deliver value to their customers, invest in their employees, deal fairly with their suppliers, and support the communities in which they work. Generating long-term value for shareholders was relegated to the last bullet point on the new agenda. While drafting the new declaration, “there were times I felt like Thomas Jefferson,” Alex Gorsky, CEO of Johnson & Johnson, who heads the group’s governance committee, told the New York Times. (The principles outlined by the CEOs happen to be the primary focus of From Day One, which was launched last year.) JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, the Roundtable’s chairman, said the statement “is an acknowledgment that business can do more to help the average American.” The new statement of purpose was driven by forces that have been building to a crescendo in recent times. “Capitalism, at least the kind practiced by large global corporations, was under assault from all sides, and CEOs were getting the message loud and clear,” Fortune chief Alan Murray wrote in the publication’s cover story, which broke the news of the Business Roundtable’s new code. The September cover of Fortune magazine, which was the first to report on the new CEO manifesto Why is this happening—and why now? The reckless financial engineering that sparked the Great Recession, the rise of socially disruptive tech platforms like Facebook and Uber, the scandals involving once-revered institutions ranging from Boeing to Wells Fargo—all contributed to a populist backlash against big-business-as-usual. It helped fuel the candidacies of not only President Trump but also his challengers from the left, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, who’ve proposed a dramatic increase in government oversight of business. CEOs don’t need a weatherman to know which way sentiment is gusting. Meanwhile, young people have professed a growing interest in the virtues of socialism, suggesting that this is not a short-term fad, but generational. “And here we are. Americans mistrust companies to such an extent that the very idea of capitalism is now being debated on the political stage,” observed Times columnist Andrew Ross Sorkin. Yet as much as corporations are mistrusted, trust in government is even worse, thanks to the era’s painfully polarized politics. By default, people are looking to business to get the job done. In the 2019 Edelman Trust Barometer, a global survey, 75% of respondents said they trust “my employer” to do what’s right, a significantly higher show of faith than in other institutions or business in general. In part, business is feeling compelled to have a social conscience because their employees and customers demand it. “We are in a transformational moment,” Seth Green, executive lecturer at Loyola University Chicago’s Quinlan School of Business, told From Day One. “Trust in government to solve major social issues is declining rapidly. Increasingly, people expect and seek to work for companies that are committed to delivering social impact alongside shareholder value,” said Green, founding director of the Baumhart Center on Social Enterprise and Responsibility. Ironically, what the corporate chieftains are now proposing looks like a U-turn back to values espoused by big business before the shareholders-first religion took over. Corporations of the mid 20th century, as Sorkin observes, “for the most part, were run for all stakeholders. It was a time defined by organized labor, corporate pension programs, gold-watch retirements and charitable gifts from companies that invested heavily in their communities and the kind of research that promised future growth.” Even in the emerging Silicon Valley culture of that era, the pioneering tech company Hewlett-Packard espoused “the HP Way,” which codified a deep commitment to employees and society at large. All that changed in the go-go, deal-focused business era of the 1970s and 1980s. As often cited this week, the guiding manifesto was a 1970 essay in the New York Times by the influential free-market economist Milton Friedman, who argued that corporations should focus purely on delivering value to shareholders. “What does it mean to say that ‘business’ has responsibilities? Businessmen who talk this way are unwitting puppets of the intellectual forces that have been undermining the basis of a free society these past decades,” he wrote. However, after several decades during which shareholders and corporate chieftains thrived while workers fell behind, some forward-looking business leaders started sounding alarms that the system of shareholders-above-all was not sustainable. More than a decade ago, at the 2008 World Economic Forum in Davos, Bill Gates called for a new “creative capitalism” that would have “a twin mission: making profits and also improving lives for those who don’t fully benefit from market forces.” In his Fortune piece, Murray ticks off a progression of business leaders calling for a new system, from Whole Foods cofounder John Mackey propounding “conscious capitalism” to Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff writing a book on “compassionate capitalism.” More recently, Larry Fink, the CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest money-management firm (to the tune of almost $7 trillion), has been issuing annual letters imploring CEOs to put purpose on the same footing as profits. “Purpose unifies management, employees, and communities. It drives ethical behavior and creates an essential check on actions that go against the best interests of stakeholders,” he wrote in his 2019 letter. Well before the new approach was itemized in this week’s declaration, many CEOs have been acting as if guided by a new code. CEOs have spoken out on issues ranging from discrimination to gun safety to immigration. Corporations including Google and Microsoft have made major financial commitments to respond to housing shortages in their home regions. “In the past few years, it has become clear to met that something fundamental and profound has changed in the way they approach their jobs,” observed Murray. To be sure, the Roundtable’s new statement of purpose met plenty of skepticism from many camps, who variously found it appallingly late in arriving, or frustratingly vague, or a transparent attempt to pre-empt the politics of reformers like Sanders and Warren. “They’re responding to something in the zeitgeist,” Nancy Koehn, a historian at Harvard Business School, told the Times. “It’s an open question whether any of these companies will change the way they do business.” Sanders and Warren adopted a show-me attitude. “I don’t believe what they’re saying for a moment, said Sanders. “If they were sincere, they would talk about raising the minimum wage in this country to a living wage.” Said Warren in a statement: “Without real action, it’s meaningless.” For journalists reporting on the Roundtable statement, the go-to skeptic was Anand Giridharadas, author of the bestselling Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World. In his view, all the corporate do-gooding is just for show unless companies (and elected officials) take stock of the real impact of their businesses on society. For example, when companies lobby the government on behalf of practices that promote economic inequality or pollute the environment, it may be “overruling the good effect you’re having on the world, maybe by the factor of a thousand,” Giridharadas said in June at a From Day One conference in Brooklyn, observing the increasingly contrite CEO class. Also scoffing loudly at the Roundtable’s declaration, but from another angle, was the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, which saw the new code as an abandonment of shareholders. The CEOs “know they are political targets,” the editors wrote. “The CEOs no doubt want to get out in front of this by showing what splendid corporate citizens they are. Yet these CEOs are fooling themselves if they think this new rhetoric will buy off Ms. Warren and the socialist left. It may even embolden them…” All of which seems likely to bring the role of big business into the thick of the political debate in the coming election year. Wrote Sorkin: “The fight for corporate identity is just beginning.” Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time
How a Giant Consulting Firm Opened Its Eyes about Gender Diversity
BY Stephen Koepp June 06, 2019McKinsey & Co., the prestigious management-consulting firm, takes pride in giving advice to the world’s largest corporations about the smartest business practices. But a few years ago, McKinsey discovered it had a blind spot in its own workplace. At a time when companies are valuing diversity more than ever, the firm had a notable gender imbalance: far too few female hires and promotions. McKinsey resolved not only to bring its own practices up to date, but also to become a leading authority on the issue. Since 2015, working with LeanIn.Org, the firm has published Women in the Workplace, a benchmark study. (For the 2018 report, 279 companies and 64,000 employees were surveyed.) A champion of McKinsey’s crusade for gender diversity happens to be a male executive, Kausik Rajgopal, the managing partner for the western U.S., whose office leads the firm’s work on the issue. He spoke with From Day One about the firm’s progress on the issue and the life experiences that made him an advocate. Excerpts: Kausik Rajgopal is the Managing Partner for McKinsey & Company’s Western U.S. Region; his office leads the the firm's work on gender diversity FD1: When did the firm’s recent path to gender diversity begin? Rajgopal: We were having conversations about how do we grow the representation of women in the partnership. And I remember many years before that, one of my mentees was a woman who came to me and told me that she was leaving the firm. And she said something that stuck with me because she was about to become a mother. She said, “Management consulting and motherhood are mutually exclusive.” I just remember being shocked by that. And that led me and several others to think about how we can build a profession, and certainly an institution, that not just attracts women but retains them at greater rates. But then you fast forward to 2012-13, that’s when we started looking at the questions of representation systematically. And we said—quite logically, right?—if you want greater representation, you need to have it in our incoming recruiting classes. And we found that it was actually quite a bit below where we needed to be. So that conversation on recruiting classes was probably the catalyst for a lot of the work that we’ve done on this. Once you realized the situation, what were the next steps toward action? I think three big ones. One was to get our recruiting teams to be aware and make this a priority reach out to women more systematically. So, for example, at Stanford, instead of just doing a single information session, which we had done historically, we said, “Why don’t we go do an event as well with the with the [dual-degree] women engineers?” So you reach out in a much more intimate, narrowcast way, as opposed to, “Here is a big company and show up to a single session and apply,” which has more of a factory feel to it. And so that was one: using multiple venues to reach out to women who might be interested. The second thing was to understand our own unconscious biases in recruiting. As an example, after interviewing candidates, we have a decision meeting where the partners who conduct interviews discuss all the candidates together. We began designating one of the partners in the room as the “debiasing advocate.” So everybody else in the room then expected them to push back on the questions. If somebody said, “Well, I found Jane to be very sharp and her resume’s impressive, but I’m not sure about her presence,” the debiasing advocate would then say, “Are you saying that because she’s a woman?” And that led to a much more overt discussion, putting the bias on the table and being able to do that without judgment because we all have unconscious biases about lots of things. It doesn’t mean that we’re bad people. But having the awareness and giving someone else the permission to name it and tease it out, and then have a discussion about what that means for what we’re trying to accomplish, was very powerful. It was a real unlock for us. The third factor was in reflecting on the face we present in recruiting, like who shows up from the firm to recruit. Getting that to be much more gender-balanced was a key part of that. Do you look like a firm that welcomes gender diversity? So we encouraged women to be ambassadors, to be more visible in the cultivation of candidates. When did you start to see tangible results, to feel like, “Okay, we’re getting traction”? I would say it took a couple of years for all three of these pieces to come together. But once it did, the power of all three of these integrating created a multiplier effect, a sort of virtuous cycle. This year, the incoming class has reached virtual gender parity. Along the way to that milestone, did your clients help push you in that direction? Quite early on. I would say culturally we are a very client-centric firm. We kind of wake up in the morning with benefits for them on our minds. I think culturally it’s very anticipant and appropriate, whenever we’re starting out to do something new and different, to get our clients’ advice and feedback. And for many of our clients, better diversity was already a priority. So we were already starting to get feedback like, “In your team rooms, we’d like to see more women, like in the teams that you bring to serve us.” So our clients are typically not shy about giving out that feedback and when we posited the idea of doing the research with them, their advice to us was, “If you’re going to do it, just make sure that you are also institutionally committed to this as a priority and making that [representative] of your own commitments.” How did you decide to go about making this report—and making it a definitive one? Three quick thoughts on that. One is we quickly said we can’t do this on our own. So we do this in partnership with LeanIn.Org and the Wall Street Journal. And Lean In, independently, obviously, had been thinking about this and advocating for gender diversity and parity in the workplace. So that was a natural notion. The second thing we said was that we need to make this a multiyear commitment. This can’t be a one-and-done. So we expect it will be an indefinite commitment, really, which was our clients’ early feedback to us. And then the third piece was we wanted to make sure that it was grounded in real data and not in anecdote. So the methodology of the report is very much empirical. We go out, we now survey more than 300 companies in Corporate America. We get data from them at every level, on everything from recruiting to performance evaluation to promotions, representation at different levels. It’s a pretty exhaustive look. We’re very thoughtful about privacy of personal information, but on our blinded database we actually get a pretty detailed and rich dataset that we can then look at for patterns and trends year over year. And over time, as we build that methodology and approach, we’ve also overlaid on it specific questions in areas of interest. For example, the most recent report goes quite deep into women of color and their experience in the workplace, the particular challenges they face. And in each report. I think we’ll do something like that, where we go deep on a particular question. What trends have you found over several years now? Longitudinally we see very little movement in the percentage of women who rise to the top. So when we look at representation of women in the C-suite, that number doesn’t really raise significantly over time. The other thing that’s quite striking is there is, I think, a loose cultural assumption that some of the lack of representation is actually a choice by women. That women, for example, after they have children, become less ambitious. Or they don’t want to make it to the top. And we found quite recently in our research that that is not true. That they want to progress, they want to make it to the top. So those were striking assumptions. The most recent report shows that the first promotion is actually quite significant. Women are falling behind early, because first promotions are most inequitable. Women are 21% less likely than men to be promoted to manager. Black women are particularly disadvantaged, as they are 40% less likely than men to be promoted to manager. Then you can imagine how it compounds from there. What other kinds of connections that you were able to make? One of the critical things that the report validated is the importance of sponsorship. And we often talk about the distinction between a mentor and a sponsor. A mentor is somebody who may occasionally give you advice, who sort of cares about you. A sponsor is somebody who really creates opportunity for you and is committed to your career and to your success. We saw quite frequently in the research that women who had been successful in rising to the top had a much greater and more consistent preponderance of sponsors—and not just mentors. As somebody said to me, advice is cheap. Consistent support is what matters. The other really striking observation, which is a little sad, is that a stunningly large percentage of men believe that this is not a problem. In a company where only one in ten senior leaders is a woman, nearly 45% of men think women are well represented in the leadership. Even more stunningly, a significant percentage of women, 28%, agree. To us, that suggests a little bit about the anchoring bias and the visibility bias, when you look at a leadership team and say, “Oh, there’s ten people there and there’s two women on there, so clearly women can make it.” So that was kind of an eye opener for us. The mindset was much more pervasive than we expected. One other one: We’re doing a fair amount of research on what I call the “only” phenomenon, which is often in a room, or a team at any level, there’s only one woman in the mix. And that can be a lonely experience. So far, a lot of what we’ve talked about [in Corporate America] is diversity. The more powerful and more important bit over time is inclusion. And this dynamic where we’re going to have one woman at every level can actually a quite isolating experience for the woman. Have experiences in your life inspired you to feel strongly about this issue? It’s very personal for me. I’m the only child of an Indian mother who has a college degree. She graduated from college in 1962 and she’s one of the smartest, most thoughtful, most proactive people I know. And for cultural reasons she stayed home to take care of me and raise me. It would be a mistake to say she never worked—she worked a lot—but she never worked in the workforce. And I always thought that that was a stunning waste of human capital for the world. My wife, I’d say, is another role model for me. She’s a software engineer, has worked in Silicon Valley for most of her career. And I remember when I shared with her some of the insights we had on unconscious bias, kind of in the early days of the journey that I was describing to you, she said to me, “It’s great that you are now admiring the problem. Are you actually going to solve it?” I think both of those are quite personal motivations for me. So I’ve personally been a pretty active sponsor and supporter of women. Another part of your job is co-leading the firm’s global efforts in financial technology. What patterns do you see regarding the role of women in technology? Around the world, there’s a stunning lack of adequate female representation in the workplace. In my travels globally, yeah, there are cultural differences, some nuance. But in general the patterns that I describe, which are based on research in an American context—I think they’re all true. This is a global issue. Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time
Why Big Companies Are Wading Into Heated Political Issues
BY Stephen Koepp June 05, 2019Coming from the CEO of the Walt Disney Co., the political statement about one state’s new law had an impact far beyond the place he was talking about. “I think if it becomes law, it will be very difficult to produce there. I rather doubt we will,” said Disney’s Bob Iger about the state of Georgia, where a stringent anti-abortion law is due to go into effect on Jan. 1, 2020. Iger gave practical reasons for the company’s position, but the issue is unavoidably divisive nonetheless. “I think many people who work for us will not want to work there. And we’ll have to heed their wishes in that regard,” he said. Disney has plenty of company in its peer group. Major corporations including Microsoft, Delta Air Lines, Starbucks and Salesforce have recently taken positions on the most polarizing of issues, including gun control and immigration. This is a major change in corporate posture. When it comes to political issues, big businesses have traditionally tried to be like Switzerland: steadfastly neutral. But as customers increasingly prefer to align themselves with companies that reflect their personal values, companies increasingly find themselves taking a stand. Surprisingly enough, it can be good for business, even if it alienates some groups. “A virtuous cycle between social and financial performance is especially strong when it helps to deepen relationships with customers, employees, investors, or other stakeholders by helping them understand the values and motivations of the company,” wrote management experts Daniel Korschun and N. Craig Smith last year in the Harvard Business Review. “It’s time to stop treating political issues as a third rail.” Georgia’s abortion law, which will prohibit abortion as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected, is similar to new legislation in several other states aimed at overturning the Roe v. Wade doctrine. The reason Georgia became such a high-profile target for a business boycott is that the state, which offers lucrative tax breaks for video production, now outpaces even California in its output. Filmmaking is a $9.6 billion industry in the state, creating more than 90,000 jobs last year. Netflix, AMC Networks and WarnerMedia have suggested that they too would avoid doing business in the state if the law survives court challenges and goes into effect. The prospective boycott is already drawing heat from the other side, with Lou Dobbs of the Fox Business Network calling for a counter-boycott of Disney and Netflix. Even the tactics for opposing the Georgia law is a matter of debate. Stacey Abrams, the Georgia Democrat who nearly won the state’s gubernatorial election last year, has urged Hollywood to stick around and support efforts to challenge the law, organizing a coalition under the name #StayAndFight. Just as radioactive an issue is gun control, which several companies have publicly supported, typically pointing to America’s epidemic of mass shootings as the reason. While Congress has avoided new restrictions, companies have imposed their own. Salesforce, the business-software giant, recently told its customer Camping World and other gun retailers that they should “stop selling military-style rifles, or stop using our software,” as the Washington Post reported. Earlier this year, Dick’s Sporting Goods stopped selling guns and ammunition entirely at 125 of its 720 stores; last year Walmart raised the minimum age for buying guns and ammo from 18 to 21. Can a position by a business made a difference? One notable case was Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act in 2015, which was condemned by civil-rights groups as likely to foster discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. After the law prompted a clamorous backlash from organizations ranging from Apple to the NCAA, then-Gov. Mike Pence signed a revision of the law to “make it clear that business owners will not be allowed to discriminate when providing services,” the IndyStar reported. (Photo by Stephen Koepp) One company recently made news just by trying to avoid politics altogether. An official of Dunkin’, formerly known as Dunkin’ Donuts, said in a private meeting with about 30 academics at a trade conference that the company doesn’t want to take sides, an obvious comparison to its more activist rival. “We are not Starbucks, we aren’t political—we aren’t gonna put stuff on our cups to start conversations,” said Drayton Martin, the company’s vice president of brand stewardship. “We don’t want to engage you in political conversation, we want to get you in and out of our store in seconds. It’s donuts and ice cream—just be happy,” said Martin, whose remarks were promptly tweeted by University of New Hampshire law professor Alexandra Roberts, who was in the room. The tweet quickly drew thousands of likes. “It was really surprising to me, frankly,” Roberts told the Boston Globe. “I wouldn’t have expected a message about a brand choosing to be apolitical to be perceived as so political.” Navigating the political waters is a skill that many companies are still learning, especially when it comes to social media. One notabler example emerged from Britain’s wave of milkshake protests, in which liberal activists have doused supporters of Brexit and other divisive politicians with milkshakes they have conveniently picked up at chain stores. A Burger King representative apparently decided to capitalize on the controversy, “seeming in response to the news that a McDonald’s near the site of a [Nigel] Farage rally in Edinburgh had been asked to halt sales of milkshakes and ice cream,” the Washington Post reported. Burger King mischievously tweeted, “Dear people of Scotland, we’re selling milkshakes all weekend. Have fun. Love BK #justsaying.” While the tweet drew its share of likes, others protested, saying the tweet could incite violence. Burger King quickly backed off its cheeky approach, tweeting: “We’d never endorse violence—or wasting our delicious milkshakes! So enjoy the weekend and please drink responsibly people.” Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time
How to Fix Big Tech? The Debate Heats Up
BY Stephen Koepp May 17, 2019The 22 year old who emerged from the elevator early one morning in the late summer of 2006 didn’t look like he would soon become one of the most influential people in the world. He was dressed like a college kid, which until recently he had been, and seemed kind of sleepy. But he was a young man on a mission. He had arrived to show a handful of journalists at Time, where I was an editor, a transformative new feature of his two-year-old website, Facebook. “Mark?” I asked, having never met him before. He perked up as we walked to a conference room, where his Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, his sandy hair nearly covering his eyes, was standing by with a laptop for a demonstration. Facebook already had 10 million users at that point, but the website was still a fairly static experience. The new feature, News Feed, would change all that, our guest, Mark Zuckerberg, declared, by connecting people more closely to the world around them. World domination and harmful side effects were not part of the conversation that day. Thirteen years later, that’s what everyone is talking about, including Zuckerberg’s erstwhile colleague Hughes, who last week published a passionate manifesto calling for the dismantling of the social-media behemoth he helped create: “It is time to break up Facebook,” he wrote in the New York Times. “I’m disappointed in myself and the early Facebook team for not thinking more about how the News Feed algorithm could change our culture, influence elections and empower nationalist leaders.” Facebook, now with more than 2 billion users, draws the most heated criticism amid a global backlash against Big Tech, but it has plenty of company among its peers. The very thing that Silicon Valley worships—scale—is now problematic for the industry’s behemoths. Amazon, Google and Facebook totally dominate e-commerce, internet search, and social media. “If you try to run up against Amazon directly, it’s like going up against Usain Bolt in the 100-meter race,” said Chieh Huang, founder and CEO of e-commerce site Boxed, at a Techonomy conference this week. Because of their outsized economic power, the giants have increasingly become engaged in public conflicts when they try to push into even more lines of businesses, coming off as bullies. “Amazon is embroiled in controversies over the use of its facial-recognition software, the treatment of both its warehouse workers and its delivery drivers, whether its talking speakers violate child-protection rules, how much it is really lowering prices at Whole Foods, and whether or not its Ring doorbell-camera subsidiary is protecting users’ privacy,” said the Wall Street Journal last week in making a case that “Amazon’s size is becoming a problem—for Amazon.” Photo by Bryan Angelo on Unsplash Not all big tech companies face the same criticisms, of course. Facebook and Google take the most flak as privacy invaders, since their business models depend on what author Shoshana Zuboff has dubbed surveillance capitalism, in which “predictions of our behavior are bought and sold” without our knowledge. Uber, which has been accused of building its empire on the backs of its drivers, suffered a disappointing initial public offering (IPO) this week, which some critics attributed to a warped winner-take-all mentality that has taken over Silicon Valley. Apple, for its part, touts its respect for privacy “as a fundamental human right,” but has its own dominance issues with the power of its App Store. The U.S. Supreme Court this week allowed a class-action lawsuit to move forward, giving consumers the opportunity to make the case that Apple has used monopoly power to raise the price of iPhone apps. In an almost cartoon-like scenario, Apple has even been accused of cracking down on apps that fight iPhone addiction, according to an analysis by the New York Times and Sensor Tower, an app-data firm. “Why is one company—with no mechanism for democratic oversight—the primary and most zealous guardian of user privacy and security?,” the Times asked in a follow-up editorial. The growing public consensus is that society has to reign in the giants, which has given the 20-and-more Democratic Presidential candidates a big problem to tackle. The question is, how? Among the chief proposals: break up some of the giants to level the playing field, pass legislation to regulate them, and tax them in various ways to influence their behavior. “The good news is that we’re onto them. They’re on the defensive,” said Zuboff last week in a panel discussion on digital privacy at the Brooklyn Historical Society. Her fellow panelist, author Douglas Rushkoff, pointed out that in the early days of the internet, it was seen as a benign force to connect humanity. “It used to seem like the government was the enemy,” he said, whereas now it’s “technologies that divide and alienate us.” To get ahead of the backlash, the tech giants have gone on image-boosting campaigns, touting their benefits to society and their ability to self-regulate. Amazon released a report during National Small Business Week that said it helped mom-and-pop companies create 1.6 million jobs last year, up from 900,000 the year before. Meanwhile, Google CEO Sundar Pichai wrote a piece for the New York Times, declaring that the company’s approach to privacy adheres to its egalitarian, “for everyone” philosophy about its products. “For us, that means privacy cannot be a luxury good offered only to people who can afford to buy premium products and services. Privacy must be equally available to everyone in the world,” he wrote, mentioning several new privacy features the company is introducing. At Facebook, Zuckerberg announced late last year that he plans to create a Facebook Oversight Board of outside advisors to help the company in its efforts to moderate harmful content. Facebook is looking for feedback about the board, “partly through some roundtables held around the world with policy experts,” The Week reported. Testifying before Congress last month, Zuckerberg said that his company could live with regulation, but noted that “details matter.” Yesterday, Facebook announced that it would put more restrictions on the use of its live video service. As the big tech companies scramble to adapt to much greater public scrutiny, here are some of the latest proposals for reining them in: BREAK THEM UP “Today’s big tech companies have too much power—too much power over our economy, our society, and our democracy,” Presidential candidate Elizabeth Warren wrote in March. “They’ve bulldozed competition, used our private information for profit, and tilted the playing field against everyone else. … That’s why my administration will make big, structural changes to the tech sector to promote more competition—including breaking up Amazon, Facebook, and Google.” Lately, candidates Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have made similar statements. In his specific call to bust up Facebook, citing the historical anti-trust examples of AT&T and Standard Oil, co-founder Hughes argued that too much power is in the hands of one person. “Mark’s influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government. He controls three core communications platforms—Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp—that billions of people use every day.” That’s where Hughes draws the dotted line for breaking up the company, which he feels should never have been allowed by the federal government to acquire the two other platforms. “How would a breakup work? Facebook would have a brief period to spin off the Instagram and WhatsApp businesses, and the three would become distinct companies, most likely publicly traded.” Photo by Rajeshwar Bachu on Unsplash REGULATE THEM To some degree, tech companies already face regulation by the federal government, including the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). Any day now, Facebook and the FTC are expected to announce that the company will pay a penalty of $3 billion to $5 billion to settle claims that it mishandled users’ personal data. “The case is being closely watched globally as a litmus test on how the U.S. government will police the country’s tech giants,” reported the New York Times. Even so, existing U.S. laws have failed to keep up with the rapid growth of market power in Big Tech. Europe, instead, has taken the lead in new legislation, particularly in the realm of privacy. “If you want to understand where the world’s most powerful industry is heading, look not to Washington and California, but to Brussels and Berlin. In an inversion of the rule of thumb, while America dithers the European Union is acting,” wrote The Economist in a recent cover package, published the same week European Union authorities fined Google $1.7 billion for antitrust violations in the digital ad market. Last year, Europe adopted the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), a sweeping new law that defines personal data and a citizen’s rights in regard to its use. The GDPR is “an important milestone,” said Zuboff, “but it’s based on data ownership, which is a problem. It’s hard to get back.” What Zuboff calls “the public text,” or the information that users willingly give to tech platforms, is “only the little crust of ice on top of the iceberg of information turned into knowledge that they have about us. It’s the shadow text, a massive knowledge base about us.” In the U.S., Europe’s new law inspired the state of California to quickly pass a Consumer Privacy Act of its own, due to take effect in 2020. But that only served to kick the debate over regulation into high gear. “The business community so thoroughly dislikes the California law that there’s broad agreement on passing federal legislation in Washington to preempt that and other potential local directives, possibly this year,” wrote Fortune’s Adam Lashinsky. “This is one area where it doesn’t make sense to have a patchwork of laws,” Michael Beckerman, CEO of the Internet Association, a 45-member trade group, told Lashinsky. “It’s almost like having different electricity standards between states.” One idea that Silicon Valley is coming to grips with is the establishment of a singular regulatory agency focused on the digital realm. PUT TAXES ON THEM While most proposals to get a handle big tech companies focus on anti-trust actions and regulation, economist Paul Romer, a Nobel laureate who advised the Justice Department in its antitrust case against Microsoft, has proposed another solution: taxes. “Instead of banning the current business model—in which platform companies harvest user information to sell targeted digital ads—new legislation could establish a tax that would encourage platform companies to shift toward a healthier, more traditional model,” Romer wrote. “The tax that I propose would be applied to revenue from sales of targeted digital ads, which are the key to the operation of Facebook, Google and the like. At the federal level, Congress could add it as a surcharge to the corporate income tax. At the state level, a legislature could adopt it as a type of sales tax on the revenue a company collects for displaying ads to residents of the state.” Romer argues for the tax approach because the tech companies may already be too big to regulate, in the sense that powerful companies can often undermine their regulators. “Of course, companies are incredibly clever about avoiding taxes,” he acknowledged. “But in this case, that’s a good thing for all of us. This tax would spur their creativity. Ad-driven platform companies could avoid the tax entirely by switching to the business model that many digital companies already offer: an ad-free subscription.” A tax-the-tech movement is catching on locally as well. In San Francisco, where a wave of initial public offerings (IPOs) have aggravated the hot-button issue of income inequality, city supervisor Gordon Mar has proposed a so-called IPO tax that would raise the levy on companies for stock-based compensation to 1.5%, about quadruple the current rate. Mar estimates the tax would generate as much as $200 million over two years, which the city could spend on housing, transportation and health programs. “San Francisco in 2019 is in a radically different place as a city than we were just a decade ago,” Mar told the Wall Street Journal. “I think there is broad support to reset our relationship with the tech sector.” Indeed, a broad rethinking of society’s relationship with digital technology is underway, and it won’t be settled overnight. “The solution is more democracy. Only coming together in the service of political power and political pressure” will work to persuade legislators that they need to act, says Zuboff, who says it will take “five to ten years, not the work of a day or year. Democracy says that humans have the right to rule themselves, and I don’t see ourselves giving up on that power.” Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time
Putting Students in High-need Communities on a Fast Track
BY Stephen Koepp February 07, 2019Corporate America needs skilled, tech-savvy workers—but a lot of potential workers don't have the opportunity to get on track to those jobs. The educational network NAF was formed to fill that gap. The organization creates STEM-focused learning academies within high schools in high-need communities to accelerate the students toward careers ranging from engineering to health sciences. NAF, originally known as the National Academy Foundation, has grown ambitiously. During the current school year, NAF is serving 109,000 students in 617 academies across the U.S. In 2017, NAF launched a new program called Future Ready Labs, an innovative internship concept designed to increase the quantity of meaningful, paid internships companies are able to support for our nation's future leaders. In an interview with From Day One, NAF's Chief Operating Officer Lisa Dughi explained how NAF works and why internships are important for high-school students. Excerpts: Why does NAF focus its educational programs at the high-school level? Is that where the need is highest? Lisa Dughi, NAF's chief operating officer NAF was founded nearly 40 years ago to solve two issues simultaneously: to fill workforce pipelines with skilled and diverse talent, and to create an educational experience for disengaged youth that helped them make connections between what they were learning in school and the knowledge and skills they’d need to thrive in the workforce. All these years later, this is still at our core. High school is the time when young people start making critical decisions about their career pathways. This is when they hone in on their interests, decide on their post-secondary path, and often what major they are going to choose. By targeting high school, we’re intervening at the right time to help students make the best possible choices for their futures. How do NAF academies fit within existing public high schools? NAF academy students participate in all the general, traditional course work and use their supplemental or elective time for their career courses and work-based learning activities. Students in NAF academies take both their general and career courses together to enable strong bonds to be created and to allow for integrated work across courses. What goes into setting up a NAF academy, in terms of preparation and launching? Those who are interested in establishing a NAF academy participate in an application process to outline their intent and the support available to ensure the success of the academy. Those that are accepted then enter into the Year of Planning program. NAF works to ensure all stakeholders are well-trained and confident in delivering on the NAF educational design and develops a lasting relationship with academies as they adjust the design to fit school or district needs. What challenge are you addressing with the new Future Ready Labs? There are not enough internship opportunities available for high school students, who benefit from practicing their hard-earned skills best in an internship environment. NAF Future Ready Labs enable employers to host more interns than they normally would, since the labs are established as structured group internships that are project-focused and completed in a shorter period of time than traditional internships. Usually internships are associated with college students. Why are they so important at the high-school level? Internships should be happening in high school and in college. By the time students are in college, they likely have already selected their major and their career path or may still be trying to figure it out. High-school internships give students the opportunity to gain practical experience and make better decisions about their future before getting to college and committing to something they may decide later isn’t for them. It also gives them a leg up when pursuing college internships. How are the interns organized and put to work within companies? Internship structures change from company to company. In general, in order for an internship to qualify for NAF’s employability credential, they must consist of 120 hours; payment of no less than federal or local youth training wage; direct supervision by an adult that is not the student’s teacher; produce work of value to the employer; and include a written individualized learning plan with targeted outcomes. The main emphasis is that students get the opportunity to be treated as an employee of that company and gain real-world experience. What kinds of projects do the interns work on? Lynne Doughtie, who serves on the NAF board and is Chairman and CEO of KPMG, talking with Future Ready Lab Students I think many employers are surprised by what high-school interns are able to contribute. NAF interns work on a variety of projects depending on their academy theme and the needs of their employer. For example, a finance student may create financial reports for the accounting department. Engineering students can assist mechanical engineers with computer-aided design (CAD) drawings. Health-sciences students can work in a doctor’s office or hospital and take patients’ vital signs. There are so many possibilities. This generation has an important perspective and unique capabilities. In the first three labs you launched, in 2017, what did you observe? We found that collaboration and commitment from planning partners were the key to success. With support, interns were able to grow as professionals, practice core career skills, assess their interests and abilities, and refine their career goals. Our first pilot was considered successful, and it shows. Following our first year, we expanded the number of Future Ready Labs from three to nine and for the summer of 2019, we anticipate even greater expansion. What industries do you focus on in your programs? NAF academies are focused on growth industries. They include engineering, finance, health sciences, hospitality & tourism, and information technology. NAF academies are meant to serve the needs of their local community’s workforce, so some academies adapt the NAF educational design to fit their specific needs. For example, we have academies in rural areas that focus on agriculture. We also have academies that focus on aviation and cybersecurity as there are vast opportunities for work in those fields. You have a program called NAFTrack Certified Hiring. How does that work? NAFTrack Certified Hiring is a groundbreaking initiative in which a growing number of top companies have committed to give special consideration to college students and eventual job applicants who, as high school graduates, earned NAFTrack Certification. It's achieved through an online system created by NAF for education and business leaders to assess college and career readiness. Student performance is measured through career-related coursework, a qualifying internship, and high school graduation. How can companies and professionals get involved? There are many different ways. NAF academies rely on business professionals to provide the work-based learning experiences that bring the educational design to life. When business professionals give just a little bit of their time to share their expertise with students, the impact is monumental. Anyone interested in getting involved can learn more here. What do you, professionally and personally, find gratifying about NAF's mission? I often say that it is hard to have a bad day when at the end of it, everything we do is focused on improving the lives of underserved and underrepresented students, their families, and their communities. Getting to hear the stories of our students and alums whose lives and futures are transformed by the experiences they have in their NAF academies, and having the opportunity to see the successes they are able to achieve as a result, makes every day working at NAF better than the last. Our nation’s future is sitting in classrooms across the country and having a positive impact on many of those students is certainly time very well spent. Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time