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Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | May 02, 2021

Using Digital Tools to Improve the Employee Experience

The effects of the pandemic have forced new conversations in the workplace: How do we better take care of our mental health? How do employers engage a remote workforce? How do we maintain productivity and prevent burnout? Forward-thinking employers are leaning on digital tools to help answer these questions–and come up with solutions for the coming era of hybrid work schedules. Digital tools can be used to bridge gaps: between coworkers who live on opposite sides of the world, between colleagues in a dispute, between needs and responses, and between the present and future. “I think tools can fill this void between the office environment, where everything is visible, and the home environment, where pretty much nothing is visible,” said Mattias Hallberg, the CTO and head of product development at Attuned, which makes software to help managers understand their employees’ motivation. The versatility of digital tools to improve the employee experience was the center of a panel discussion I moderated during From Day One’s recent conference on “Digital Tools for Building an Engaged, Productive Team.” We’re now all familiar with the solitude of quarantine. “I think the pandemic and a move to more remote work has really spotlighted the need for more connection,” said speaker Kate Zimberg, the VP of employee experience and enablement at F5 Networks, an application security and delivery company. To satisfy this need, Zimberg’s team has piloted a peer-to-peer coaching program in which employees are paired to talk about a topic of their choosing (work-life balance or career prioritization, for example) over a period of two to three months. “They are fed with a series of questions to discuss. It’s just the two of them, so they get to form a safe relationship with someone they may have never met before.” Restoring human connection can form the basis for healthy working relationships across a virtual or hybrid workforce. In the office, Zimberg’s team is replicating the in-person collaboration experience with tools like Zoom, Slack, Lucid, Adobe Spark and Miro to “replicate, and in some ways better than replicate, a whiteboard in the conference room experience.” While digital tools are beneficial for workers who sit at a desk all day, they can be deployed to help employees in other work situations too. Applied Materials and Bristol Myers Squibb, both of whom employ in-person as well as remote staff, are using digital tools to improve the work experience of those on the manufacturing floor. Mike Hill of Applied Materials, the director of integrated talent management, said the company is using augmented reality (AR) to train support engineers at the customer level to fix their equipment. “They can see layouts of the equipment diagrams and what have you, and they can have audio coming in from somebody else anywhere in the world, telling them how to do something. It actually saves a whole lot of time.” Other tech tools can be used in learning, development, and career growth. Chantal Veillon-Berteloot of Bristol Myers Squibb, the VP of HR for global product development and supply, said her team is “exploring ways to leverage AI to understand better the internal and external work from a skills perspective and foster greater internal mobility and greater development opportunities. There’s a lot of appetite for this,” she said. Speaking on employee experience, top row from left: Gina Nebesar of Ovia Health, moderator Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza, and Kate Zimberg of F5 Networks. Bottom row, from left: Mattias Hallberg of Attuned, Chantal Veillon-Berteloot of Bristol Myers Squibb, and Mike Hill of Applied Materials (Image by From Day One) Restored contact creates opportunities for inclusion too–or lack thereof–and panelists’ experience using digital tools to cultivate this in the workplace have varied. Hill said that in his experience, face-to-face communications make it easier for people to speak up: “I think we’re more inclusive face to face, and I think that’s happened because of the way these meetings work. When we’re really trying to do something fast or hard, we’re less inclusive, we don’t hear all the voices, we don’t sense people want to contribute, and I think that’s a big problem.” Zimberg said her experience has been different–that being totally remote has put everyone on equal footing. When only a few team members were remote, they were the “forgotten ones,” she said. Now that everybody is remote, at least for the time being, workers are more intentional about seeking out the opinions of others. A forward-thinking way of applying digital tools in the workplace is conflict resolution, one of the areas where Hallberg’s work is focused. “It sounds almost impossible, right? Using digital tools to resolve conflicts, which traditionally is something you do face to face,” he said. “But at Attuned, we believe that a lot of friction between people at work comes from the difference in values, or rather, a difference in what motivates them. Our tool is really there to help people uncover these and to bring them to surface.” He calls this making “the unseen seen.” Hill has used similar tools for interpersonal diagnostics at Applied Materials: “I was looking for a tool that a team leader and team members could use to diagnose their team dynamics–not what they’re working on, because they spend hours and hours talking about that. But they rarely talk about how the team is working,” he said. Panel speaker Gina Nebesar, co-founder and chief product officer at Ovia Health, a maternity and family benefits company, said implementation of digital tools can aid employee well-being. There has been a rapid proliferation of digital health-care tools, and Nebesar talked about the normalizing effect of their application: “I think in a year we’ll no longer be saying ‘digital health care’ or ‘virtual care,’ it’ll just be called ‘care.’” Maintaining mental and physical well-being can be especially challenging for parents and caregivers. Nebesar has seen employers adopt Ovia’s platform to “reach these parents in a safe and accessible environment, which is often in the comfort of their own homes,” she said. During the pandemic, some caregivers have adjusted their schedules and working environments, while millions of women have left the workforce altogether. They’ll need to get back to work, and Nebesar believes that the use of digital tools is necessary if employers are going to support returnship–tools for finding child care and mental-health care, as well those digital supports that make it possible to work from anywhere, like communication and planning apps. “When people don’t have child care that they can rely on, they can’t work. When people don’t have behavioral-health support, they can’t work,” Nebesar said. “So how am I going to support my employees, not just in a pandemic, but what does this investment look like in the long term? This is a really important conversation I’m so glad to see among so many of these employers.” I asked the group: If digital tools are meant to make life easier, how many is too many, and how do you know? Veillon-Berteloot, for whom English is a second language, reminded the group that non-native speakers simply need time to process and absorb information. So while digital programming, like training and watching meetings on playback, can be helpful, the sheer overload can make it tough for those in a global workforce to take it all in. “Be cognizant that there’s only so much the brain can absorb. Digital is not making your brain bigger, your capacity bigger,” she observed. Zimberg advised against always chasing the next shiny thing. When her team needed a tool to handle goal setting and feedback, they earnestly shopped for a new product. “And finally we came to, ‘You know what? Our current HR [information system] can do it. It’s not sexy, it’s not the best user experience, but it’s there, people know it,’” Zimberg said. “It’s not something else we need to buy and implement and train and do change management.” She added: “The real capacity of our people is incredibly important to be thinking about right now.” Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Richmond, Va.

the Editors | April 30, 2021

Peer Coaching: Unleashing the Potential for Better Performance

Did you put employee career development on the back burner during the pandemic? What will happen to coaching and training in the new normal of hybrid work environments? Numly, a company dedicated to improving employee engagement through peer coaching, offers an innovative SaaS solution to those challenges by pairing coworkers as coaches and learners, based on self and organizational assessment of critical skills. From Day One spoke with Numly’s founder and CEO, Madhukar Govindaraju, about the concept of peer coaching, how it works in practice, and the benefits it can bring to employees and businesses. Excerpts: Why aren’t corporate managers devoting more time to coaching and developing the skills of their employees? Employees always complain, whether the complaint is official or during water-cooler conversations, that their managers are not supporting them in the area of career growth. There are two reasons for it. One is that the managers are not really sure where to start, what skills to work on, and how to work with the teams to really help them grow–which means they don't have a strong coaching culture within the companies. The second reason is that the HR leaders and organizational-design experts at all the big universities have been talking since the 1990s about flattening the organization. Over time, organizations have actually become flat. Now you don't have enough managers–less than 15% in every group of 100 people. You can't expect them to have enough time for coaching. So people aren’t getting the support internally–and meanwhile the culture has become one of all work, work, work. Have the pandemic and remote work made the situation more critical? What’s happened is that the need for skills that we thought were critical before the pandemic is expanding today at a much faster rate. Every company is feeling the same pressure. They need to put the focus back on reskilling and upskilling their teams. Gartner released the results of a survey of HR leaders’ priorities for 2021, and the No. 1 priority was “building critical skills and competencies.” Critical skills are not just hard skills. For a software engineer, for example, programming is a hard skill. But for a person becoming a leader, you must have a lot of soft skills, including written and oral communication, and leadership skills. With everybody working from home today, you need a program to develop skills like time management and working together from a position of trust. How can corporate leaders figure out specifically what skills are needed–and in which roles? Every CEO wants to address the skills gap. But no one knows what the gap is. When you ask an HR leader, “Hey, tell us the three areas where you have a gap,” their immediate reaction is, “We sort of know; we have a hunch,” but there is no quantified view or detail to actually bring that together. At Numly, we measure and quantify the skills gap through self-assessment and coach evaluations and help organizations get started on a peer coaching program that spans the course of three to six months, so we can demonstrate progression on the skills. And it’s not just a set of five skills or ten skills–we have a very deep database of hundreds of soft and hard skills that we can help them build across. Numly CEO Madhukar Govindaraju (Photo courtesy of Numly) How did you catalog what skills are needed–and for what roles? We funded research to gather data from HR professionals. And we asked them what skills are important for your career growth. We interviewed over 18,000 professionals worldwide, from different career stages and different industries: high tech, retail, education, insurance, pharma, automotive and manufacturing. The sum total of that mega-research effort is our crown jewel: the ground-truth data sets that we have. We actually have a set of over 350 skills, but when we took out anomalies and looked at what skills really matter, we brought it down to about 185 skills. How is peer coaching different from traditional executive-coaching programs with external and expert coaches? What we mean by peer coaching is literally a coaching network within your company. When people use the term “coaching,” they tend to think about bringing in external experts. That's still valid. But for most companies, that's a very expensive effort. And most companies do that with only the top 8% of the executives and senior leaders, which doesn’t benefit the bottom 92% of your organization. What we’re trying to do is pivot it back to the critical mass of the entire organization and develop a strong bench or a very resilient organization with peer coaching. How does peer coaching work between the coach and learner? The key definition of peer coaching is that it’s about two individuals within the company. They reflect on current practices, what's happening, and what the challenges are. They refine and share ideas. And eventually they’re solving problems. It could be something like, “Hey, my manager is not helping me,” or “What do I need to do to get a promotion?” You develop a trusted connection between the two. That's the first step. And it’s a private conversation. All the conversations that the platform will guide between a coach and learner would be entirely private. The idea is to create a safe environment where a coach and a learner can openly discuss issues, without the learner having any kind of fear that something they say might lead back to HR. It's almost like my conversation with my physician, whom I’ve been seeing for over 15 years at Stanford. When I go there, I say, “Here's my problem, what do I do? Please give me a solution.” Now, if that conversation came back to my manager at work, or my HR team at work, and there's no privacy, I wouldn’t be opening up to problems with my physician. We want to bring in privacy to enable trust. Trust enables us to connect and share knowledge with each other. How do you match the peers for a peer coaching partnership? We have algorithmic ways to identify coaches according to their rating on a set of skills. Companies can bring in their managers and other talent into the system. Then once you identify the coaches and learners, we put them together with a set of skills to be learned, a coaching program. You can pick different sets of skills for different audiences. And we give our customers a dashboard of analytics showing the distribution of where the skills are and where the gaps are. In these one-on-one coaching situations, what’s in it for the employees doing the coaching? Everybody in the company wants to be a Leader, but the first skill you want to master before you become a leader is how to be a coach. Coaching helps to develop leadership skills. That’s a big thing: As humans, we want to grow, we want to feel that we are contributing, that we are impacting others. It also helps coaches to expand their network. Today, what leaders typically do is mentoring programs, say connecting a VP to a Senior VP, but the networking connection could be superficial. In contrast, we’re connecting for skills and development, within and across teams. Those lateral network connections strengthen your organization and are a lot more powerful compared to external coaching. So the investment that companies make with our tool is not a one-time thing, it's an ongoing process. What are some of the other benefits? It also drives employee engagement. In a peer-coaching platform, skills development and engagement become natural and foundational. Right now companies are pivoting from the concept of diversity, equity and inclusion, to one of inclusion and belonging. You need to create a sense of belonging in the employee experience. And we’re not just connecting them, we're helping them with developing the skills they need, which is a much better employee value proposition (EVP). We empower employees to help each other. What better way to motivate and energize your team than to say, "Hey, we want you to help us get there." Can it help with the burnout factor, which seems to be widespread? Yes, and that’s what every company is facing. In an article I recently wrote for Forbes, I said that work-from-home burnout is real. Whether it is Zoom fatigue or because everybody's scrambling throughout the day, work-life balance has evaporated because there's nothing that differentiates work from life. Employee well-being is becoming a big issue. Of course, there are tools that make your life easier and more productive, which is where Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Webex and Slack are going. That's one end of the spectrum. The other end of the spectrum is recognizing there is a role for the manager to help with work-from-home burnout by understanding employee problems and issues. Peer coaching can help because it is highly personalized and contextual, rather than being an out-of-the-box solution. These programs have been designed to bring people together in a guided, customizable process so that they can engage and feel connected again–and not just to each other, but to the company as well. Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this story: Numly.

Emily Nonko | April 27, 2021

How Tech Can Boost Inclusion in a Remote Workforce

During the Covid-19 shutdown, the multinational food company McCormick & Company was in the midst of a new global-purpose launch. Instead of putting that on hold to wait for calmer times, “the company decided to move forward with that launch,” said Tracie Hall, the company’s senior director for global talent management and acquisition strategy. “We decided to leverage all types of technology.” While it might feel like defining company purpose or embarking on a culture alignment should move to the backburner in the midst of abrupt change, the opposite may be true. “From a research perspective … cultural alignment is a tremendous tool to leverage in a time of stress and challenge, even if you haven’t started yet,” according to Natalie Baumgartner, the chief workforce scientist for the employee-experience company Achievers. Both Baumgartner and Hall participated in a panel discussion examining the tools and policies that can increase a sense of belonging even during an abrupt shift to a remote workforce, part of From Day One’s April conference on “Digital Tools for Building an Engaged, Productive Team.” While digital transformation and remote workforces pose challenges, there are still ways to leverage tech to accommodate all types of diversity in the workforce and empower existing programs like employee-resource groups (ERGs). Crucially, as moderator Lydia Dishman noted, “the sustained effort is key.” Baumgartner expanded on her research about culture alignment during upheaval. “There’s no better time to start than now. Make it simple, what’s that north star, your missions and values, and talk about them at every opportunity,” she said. “We also talk about decision-making in alignment with your core values. And when you make decisions that are not aligned with your core values, speak to it.” By reinforcing culture and purpose, companies increase employee engagement. Panelists expanded on that sentiment by sharing how their companies have managed engagement during the pandemic. At Achievers, that includes daily “all-hands stand up” meetings, quarterly town halls, and an internal tool called “Coffee Chats” that connects employees in a quick, easy manner. Speaking on tech and inclusion, top row from left: moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, Natalie Baumgartner of Achievers, and Elizabeth Fryman of the E.W. Scripps Co. Bottom row, from left: Pamela Sherman of the American Heart Association and Tracie Hall of McCormick & Company (Image by From Day One) At McCormick, in the midst of its purpose launch, the company’s marketing and branding team leveraged social media and hashtags to bring together employees. The company also launched frequent pulse surveys to get real-time feedback. “We got feedback from our ‘employee ambassador groups’ and they came up with ways to stay engaged,” Hall said. Elizabeth Fryman, VP of HR for the E.W. Scripps Co., said the company utilizes the Slack communication platform not just for tasks, but social connection too. “We found that having Slack channels dedicated to certain things really worked greatly for the entire organization,” she said. One of her favorite channels: “What are you binging now?” Pamela Sherman, senior director of HR for the American Heart Association, spoke to what digital engagement looks like for an organization that’s been around for nearly 100 years. “Our senior leaders–the whole C-suite–were super-visible, with weekly Covid broadcasts,” Sherman said. Broadcasts included word-cloud polls asking participants how they were feeling and about news that affected them. In the midst of this summer’s protest movement, senior leaders started speaking about racism and feelings of disconnect that came with working from home. The nonprofit also led two organization-wide training programs on health equity and structural racism, then followed up with “learning and dialogue sessions” for smaller employee groups, Sherman said. “We did a lot of work on giving history and some of the facts around structural racism, and then got down to how people really feel and how they’re related to what’s happening in the country.” She also facilitated role playing that was thoughtfully scripted out and practiced by participating employees. In the midst of change, stress, and a proliferation of digital tools, the panelists emphasized that communication from leadership is vitally important. “There’s just no substitute for checking in with our employees around how they’re experiencing the things HR is doing in an effort to be mindful and engaging around these topics,” said Baumgartner. A forthcoming Achievers report, she added, found a gap between the diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs that companies say they are offering, vs. what employees believe is really happening: “29% of employees in the study said there are no programs in their company with this focus, but just 8% of HR leaders agree.” Indeed, companies need to be transparent with their employees about the effort they’re putting into these issues. During the American Heart Association’s programs on inclusion and social equity, employees asked about diverse hiring. “We had someone from talent acquisition talk about the different places we’re looking for talent and how our interview process is designed to be free from bias,” Sherman explained. In the same spirit, the chief diversity officer fielded employee questions about an internal diversity report released last year. Different generations may engage in different ways when it comes to remote work, which is something managers should understand. At McCormick, the employee-ambassador groups were helpful in that regard. Longtime employees started a “Seasoned” employee group to talk about things like retirement planning, but also to collaborate with other groups like the “YP” group of young professionals. While each generation tends to have its own style of communicating and approach to work, Baumgartner said that employee-engagement research shows that there’s not a significant generational divide. The older generation adapted well to remote work, the research shows, in some cases better than younger workers did. In terms of needs and aspirations, the generations are remarkably similar, said Baumgartner. “When we talk with different generations, folks are saying that we want those same things too.” Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

Kara Cutruzzula | April 27, 2021

Why Your Team Needs to Create Happy Accidents

Serendipity? In a pandemic? It sounds impossible to believe, but serendipity–that strange alchemical gathering of the right people in the right place at the right time–might be what your company needs after a year of remote working. Previously, employees could hash out ideas or get to know each other over happy hours or those awkward but valuable chats during the long walk to the break room. Now, unless you're accidentally Zoom-bombing someone, those kinds of happy accidents rarely happen in the workplace. The flexibility of remote work has bloomed into a confusing side effect: our work lives are more rigorously planned and rigid than ever. Luckily, there are tools to change that–to invite the serendipitous moments, conversational detours, and friendship so crucial to creating a healthy company culture, retaining employees, and sparking innovation. One of these tools is Donut. This five-year-old start-up connects individuals for conversations that build camaraderie, collaboration, and community through a variety of different programs in Slack. The donut-hole version of their story: they're creating a fun, low-friction way for employees to build meaningful relationships with their colleagues in a decidedly non-awkward way. Donut co-founder and CEO Dan Manian joined Fast Company contributing editor Lydia Dishman in a From Day One webinar recently to talk about bringing teams together, encouraging inclusion, and finding a happy medium for both introverted and extroverted employees in this new world. Speaking of serendipity: Dan Manian of Donut, below, with moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, above (Image by From Day One) The first question that may come to mind when thinking about the Herculean task of keeping employees engaged at the best of times–let alone in a pandemic–is: why do connections, or relationships between coworkers matter? Manian opened by setting the stage that this isn’t purely a question of warm and fuzzy feel-goods: "There's actually been quite a bit of research around how a more connected workforce drives more productivity, innovation, and retention." Dishman added that there's a business case to be made for greater collaboration, and traditional measures of productivity and collaboration have changed radically. Especially after this past year, people are missing mentorship, learning, and social interactions, regardless of their company size, industry, or employee type. And when connections weaken between individuals, all companies–whether we’re talking about large, matrixed Fortune 100 organizations, startups scaling rapidly, or teams that have gone remote for the first time–are at risk for silos popping up within the workforce. "That traps innovation within certain teams or certain departments," Manian said. Donut fights silos by creating these connections through serendipitous interactions right in Slack. "We want to be integrated with where people are doing their work,” Manian said. That means not having to learn a new program–employees can build connections in the tools they already know, where they’re already spending their time. Connection at work typically takes many forms: through coffee meetings, structured development programs, small group discussions like employee resource groups, and even chance run-ins in the hallway or around the coffee machine. Donut’s technology helps take the spirit of these programs and serendipitous interactions and put them into motion in a way that works whether employees are co-located, fully remote, or taking a hybrid approach. The app is probably best known for setting up random virtual coffee chats, but it does more than that. For example, customers use Donut to run more equitable, seamless skip-level 1:1 meetings; give new managers an accountability group to practice what they’ve learned in training; and stimulate asynchronous, often-lighthearted conversation through Watercooler topics within a Slack channel. (The latter of which came directly out of customer feedback and a desire to recreate the office watercooler in a low-pressure way.) After all, there's the slight issue of getting everyone out of their bubble. Dishman cited research that suggests a higher state of anxiety during times of chaos makes people more risk-averse. "As a result, they're less likely to seek out those different perspectives and just fall back into what's always worked before, and that desire to bring things under control can also lead to a go-it-alone mentality," she said. Anyone who's thought about maintaining the status quo over the last year can relate–it often didn't feel appropriate to be innovative or to experiment. But for CEOs and managers, providing a bit of uplift can go a long way. "One of the things that's gotten harder is that you used to be able to walk into an office and feel the vibe a little bit," said Manian. "You'd kind of know if the office [mood] is down or not, and that's kind of hard now." Since execs can’t currently walk the hallways and stop by desks, they need another way to connect with team members of all levels that feels similarly serendipitous (which is where the skip-level 1:1 program came from). Inclusive by Design In one way, the year's crisis has been an equalizer for employees, at least when it comes to having your voice heard. Every meeting attendee now has the same-sized Zoom square, the same access to a microphone. Gone are the days of jockeying for a seat at the conference-room table or pretending that perching on the window ledge is a fine consolation prize. And remote workers aren't treated as second-class citizens when everyone else is remote, too: poor connection, missing the chance to speak, and unread Zoom chats are now everyone’s problem, and hopefully a source of empathy in the future. Donut ensures its programs are inclusive in many ways, internally and externally. This means thinking about everyone’s experience and making sure that people’s different social needs and communication styles are respected. "Different people want to build relationships in different ways," said Manian. One way to ensure that people are comfortable? No forced fun, to paraphrase Dishman. When employees opt in, they’re more likely to participate, make authentic connections, and generally feel the benefits of engaging. As for the 24/7 Zoom culture, Manian thinks individuals should be adaptable. "Now that we're a year into this, there's probably a time and a place for having your video on. But sometimes people just need a break, and it kind of needs to be okay to turn it of." Consider that permission to grab a coffee and conversation over the old fashioned way–over the phone, of course. That's So Random, in a Good Way Of course, you can't simply wait around for these serendipitous moments to happen. You have to create them. Part of setting up a Donut channel is selecting the frequency, which means that connections can happen daily, weekly, monthly, or even quarterly depending on the program’s goal. Another approach is Donut's Lottery Intros feature, which allow one participant (or a fixed group of participants) to get randomly introduced to new people each cycle. Okta, a workplace-software company, instituted a Donut Lottery program in which employees opt in to be paired for a 30-minute coffee with the CEO. Instead of confusing calendar checks and "are you free" emails, the Donut program makes an introduction to whomever was chosen on Slack, opens up a multi-party direct message, and creates a Zoom room so all you have to do is come prepared for facetime with the boss. "I think that's a really creative way for executives in this environment to be more accessible," said Manian. Organizations can discover how useful Donut is to their company through an analytics dashboard, which shows program by program, channel by channel, how many participants are in each round, and how many introductions have lead to meetings. Some companies even tie Donut participation back to eNPS and other employee engagement measurement, helping to complete the picture of why this matters so much. The point is to create sustained connections and to find new and different things to talk about. (Please, no more "happy Friday" Zoom happy hours.) Many Slack-oriented companies already have their own common language full of emoji-speak and goofy internal memes. This language is how we connect to one another, how we tell each other "I get it, too," and how we bond despite all the obstacles in our way. Looking ahead, Manian reflected on the advantages of hybrid work and of how Donut can help companies cast a wider net. "The first thing that pops to mind is actually the opportunity to be more inclusive geographically and not have people get left out of the room," he said. Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this webinar, Donut. You can watch a video of the conversation here. Please visit our conference page to register for more upcoming events. Kara Cutruzzula is a journalist, playwright, and author of Do It For Yourself, a motivational journal designed to guide people through their work and creative projects.

Sheila Flynn | April 25, 2021

How to Succeed in the Remote Work Revolution

Two and a half years before Covid-19 changed the world, Harvard professor Tsedal Neeley couldn’t have seen a global pandemic coming down the road. An expert in virtual and remote work, however, she did envision a massive shift to a non-office-based workforce. By the time coronavirus upended the global economy last year, she had already amassed 300 pages of material about the future trend for her book Remote Work Revolution: Succeeding from Anywhere, which was published last month. Despite her research and expertise, though, even Neeley–who is the Naylor Fitzhugh Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School–did not expect some of the major and subtle effects of such a sudden switch to remote work across the globe. That shift, coupled with both its positive and negative ramifications, formed the basis of a conversation between Neeley and Adi Ignatius, editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review, at From Day One’s virtual conference last week on “Digital Tools for Building an Engaged, Productive Team.” Along with most corporate leaders, particularly in the tech industry, Neeley and Ignatius expressed doubts that workers will ever return to previous norms, with a hybrid workplace much more likely. But HR teams and executives from CEO level down must be prepared to shepherd that long-term transition with strong leadership, frequent reassessment, and open-mindedness, Neeley said. “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,” Neeley said. That means identifying and addressing even minor personal and professional changes that have been highlighted by the massive shift in corporate culture over the past year–both good and bad, she added. “Commute times have disappeared, and people’s quality of life has gotten better [through] the democratization of interactions,” Neeley said. Among other equalizers, she pointed out that on video platforms like Zoom, everyone is the same height, using herself and her husband as examples (she’s 5-foot-4; he’s a foot taller). Author Tsedal Neeley of Harvard Business School, left, in conversation with Adi Ignatius of Harvard Business Review. You can watch the video here. “There is this democratization that takes place ... provided we have great leaders that give everyone an opportunity to speak. Operational costs have gone down; bloated travel budgets no longer seem necessary; hiring and retaining employees without asking them to move is actually a special thing that we’ve been seeing in Boston when it comes to identifying and attracting diverse candidates,” she said. “So it’s been great to see this untapped labor pool for many companies. Astronomical real estate no longer seems important ... The numbers are staggering when we look at how many people want to retain some form of remote work in their professional arrangements.” Those are the upsides, yet there are unintended consequences too. Ignatius asked what kinds of obstacles exist when it comes to fostering a diverse, inclusive and collaborative environment when coworkers are so physically far apart–a question many employers are grappling with. “I consider this to be the diversity and digital era,” Neeley said. “And we need to work hard to create inclusive environments so you are working together. It’s a mindset shift; you may not think you’re working together, but you are–it’s just using digital tools.” Employers need to be intentional about the impact of these tools on all the processes of bringing people together as a team, she said. “How we onboard people, how we integrate people, how we help them build social capital ... we had heard about the weak vs. strong ties. There’s a whole set of best practices when it comes to virtual onboarding. And we have to work hard to integrate people through the systems.” She added: “We need to pair people with others so they feel like, ‘Ah, I actually can belong here.’ Experience the place through pairing, hiring, not just one Black person or Latinx member being lonely by themselves–imagine if we brought in two people instead.” In confronting these issues, corporate leaders need to ask themselves if there are deeper-seated organizational issues contributing to isolation that have nothing to do with remoteness. “There are all sorts of strategies–effective strategies–that companies are using in order to ensure that people don’t experience professional isolation,” Neeley said. “It’s not the distribution ... it’s your existing culture and the lack of diversity. You know, diversity begets diversity.” Neeley's new book, published last month While remote work becomes more established, the inclusivity efforts must also take into account employees’ diverse living situations, mental health, and personal circumstances, she said. While a vast majority of employees prefer working from home, an estimated 15% hate it, she pointed out. On top of that, even workers who had been remote for long periods of time before the pandemic had to readjust, thrown off their rhythm when the rest of their colleagues essentially joined them in a virtual daily existence. Further complicating matters is research showing that, at least before the pandemic, remote workers were often passed over for promotion in favor of on-site colleagues. And then there’s the huge existential workplace question, posed by Ignatius: “What is the point of an office at this point?” Managers have a key role in navigating all these crosscurrents, Neeley emphasized. “We have to think differently on how to bring the group together to gel now,” she said, emphasizing the importance of feedback. “People want predictability ... and predictability around the big picture overall,” she said. “So we have to connect people to the big picture because they feel a little bit lost. They don’t know what’s happening at the mothership, so connecting people to the big picture as much as you can on a regular basis. And finally, performance feedback. Remote workers crave performance feedback. They have more questions about, ‘Am I doing okay? Are things okay?’ So we have to be so disciplined about this piece and developing people, as well.” Both managers and employees face other pitfalls, including tech exhaustion and overwork, with Neeley and Ignatius citing previous studies showing remote workers have demonstrated higher productivity but also longer working hours. “Untrained and unchecked, remote work can go wrong,” Neeley said. “I use the term hyper-productivity when I describe productivity gone wrong. This is where our work and non-work lives get blurred to the point where we don’t know where we start and where things end because we’re literally commuting for five minutes,” she said. “The other thing is, we’ve replaced some of our commute times with work. And on average, we’re seeing that people are working 6.8 hours more per week. If you think about seven hours, that’s like a whole day, so it’s so much more work. And leaders need to really put those guardrails up, because people are getting stressed and burned out,” Neeley said. She added: “It’s time to recreate and revise culture–and take the best that remote work and virtuality offers, while at the same time overcoming some of the challenges. One of the most important things that I see, and the failure points that I’m worried about, is around this entire mindset shift that needs to take place. Leaders of organizations are still stuck with the idea that we’re going back to something.” A key practice that will have to move forward is assessing and measuring performance. “How do you do that when you don’t see people?,” Neeley asked. To refocus those parameters, she said, “we need to completely rethink how we measure performance predicated on outcomes and not process. We need to trust people and help people trust people. We need to bring the logic of global organizations, even if we’re not global–which means how we think about time, how we think about space, how we think about connection, how we think about dispersion, how we think about compensation.” Sheila Flynn is an Austin-based journalist who has written for the Associated Press, the Sunday Independent, the Irish Daily Mail and the Irish Times. She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame.

the Editors | April 15, 2021

At Tax Time, a Few Helpful Tips for Your Employees

Taxpayers got good news last month when the Internal Revenue Service announced that the deadline for filing their 2020 returns would be pushed back a month, to May 17. While estimated taxes are still due on April 15, the later filing deadline gives taxpayers more time to adjust to the disruptions of the pandemic–as well as consider the impact of changes in the tax laws. What should they be thinking about? For some tax tips, From Day One consulted with Moses Balian, HR Consulting Manager for Justworks, the payroll and benefits platform. His suggestions: What’s the situation with unemployment benefits, based on the $1.9 trillion pandemic-relief legislation? The first big chunk of unemployment benefits, $10,200, will be excluded from taxation by the federal government. So a lot of money that folks might have been budgeting for their tax bill will be relieved, which is fantastic. This could apply to plenty of employees who were unemployed for parts of 2020 and later went back to the same employer when they were rehired. Millions of people who worked from home might be thinking for the first time about taking the deduction for home-office expenses. What should they know? The home-office deduction is probably the No. 1 most misused tax deduction by individuals–and has the least impact on your overall tax burden for how much trouble it can cause. My general guidance would be not to attempt to take the home office deduction for people who have remained in an employment relationship. If you got laid off and started your own business and started doing freelance work, then by all means, you could write that off on your Schedule C. But for those who remain in a traditional employment relationship, the deduction might not be appropriate and you probably won't have enough deductions across the board to file an itemized return anyway. Unless you’ve been directed by your tax advisor to take the deduction, in the event of an audit, you might be unhappy that you tried to take it. OK, that one’s tricky, but what are some key deductions that individuals might miss or shrug off? A big one is the special charitable deduction. There's an above-the-line, $300 tax deduction that applies at the federal and state level for donations to qualifying charities, even for taxpayers who don’t itemize their deductions and are taking the standard deduction. There's an exhaustive list of tax-exempt organizations on IRS.gov if they want to look. This applies to cash donations made before the end of 2020. What other ones should they keep in mind? There's the perennial option for lowering your tax burden: contributions to a traditional IRA. If your income is low enough, you can qualify for a deductible IRA contribution. That’s always worth consideration. The irony is that folks might not have as much extra money in their bank accounts to save for retirement after the difficult year that they experienced. But if at all possible, any contributions that you can make to your 2020 deductible IRA will lower your tax burden. Moses Balian, HR Consulting Manager for Justworks (Photo courtesy of Justworks) Looking ahead to taxes for 2021, what can people think about doing now? One consideration is the Flexible Spending Account (FSA) for health-care costs, if your employer provides access to one. In some cases, existing balances in FSAs from 2020 can be rolled over into the next year. So you might have some money in your FSA this year that you didn't know was there, that maybe you forgot about. As for open enrollment in 2021, FSAs would normally have been closed already. But the IRS changed that rule because of the pandemic. Workers can make midyear changes in their FSAs, as long as their employer allows it. So if you're looking ahead and your budget allows you to increase your contributions up to the maximum of $2,750 for an individual, that's extra special because, unlike a 401(k) or IRA, the FSA is not subject to taxes for Social Security and Medicare. So that is really a tremendous above-the-line savings if you can swing it. If you don’t think you’ll spend your whole balance on regular check-ups, FSAs can also be used to cover the costs of talk or text therapy, a range of over-the-counter products that can be purchased at a pharmacy or online, and elective eyeware like contact lenses or a new pair of glasses. Let’s talk about tax prep. What should you consider when choosing an accountant or tax firm? I’d say look for value. In my experience, a lot of the independent offices will be more affordable than the higher-tier individualized services that an H&R Block offers. I've had great experiences with independent shops. If you have only W-2 income, you can file yourself and use a self-service, online version of TurboTax or H&R Block, and you'll be in good shape. But a lot of people might have sold investments in 2020, and some services will upcharge you $50 or more for your federal and state return if you have a Form 1099-B, for example. Or if you have rental income. If you have sources of nonwage income or do freelance work, I'd say look for an independent, small shop. In the new era of remote work, it is worth moving to a lower-tax state? If you have a remote-work arrangement that's been extended indefinitely, you should consider moving to an income-tax-free state like Washington, Tennessee and Florida, or even some of the more rural ones, like Wyoming and South Dakota. If you have the freedom of movement, and your employer will support a remote-work arrangement in the state you hope to move to, you can get upwards of a 10% raise just for relocating across state lines. If you’re an employee who gets hired by a company that uses a Professional Employer Organization (PEO) like Justworks, how will your conversation with your accountant be different this year, especially if you make the switch midyear? From a tax-filing perspective, it shouldn’t be different from any other time you’ve changed employers midyear. You’ll still get two W-2s: one from your prior employer, and one from your new employer. The difference is, the W-2 from your new employer will give the name of the PEO as the employer of record as well as the PEO’s EIN. This has to do with the co-employment relationship between PEOs and their customers. Rest assured, it doesn’t change how you, as an employee, are taxed in any way. Just don’t wait to file your taxes because you’re still waiting for your employer to send you your W-2! If they use a PEO, it’ll come from the PEO. (Fun fact: Employees who move from one employer to another that both use the same PEO will only get one W-2!) Let’s talk about benefits for a moment. What are some corporate benefits that people should consider taking advantage of, especially now? The first is short-term disability insurance (STD). A lot of employers provide employer-paid coverage, but if they don’t, they usually will offer the opportunity for employees to enroll. It's not free, but it is not expensive–usually anywhere between $20 and $40 a month. But it's just such an incredible safety net. (A few states do have statutory disability coverage, like in California, that’s on par with most private policies. But for most American workers, STD is well worth it!) As Covid reminds us, you can be a perfectly healthy individual and you just don't know when you might be afflicted by something you never could have anticipated. So having a short-term disability insurance in the event you're unable to work due to illness or injury is really crucial, especially for anyone who has a family. Another one is the Health Savings Account (HSA), which is very similar to an FSA in that contributions are exempt from income tax as well as Social Security and Medicare. However, the HSA is only compatible with a High Deductible Health Plan (HDHP), so employees usually look at them and say, ‘Oh my god, a $5,000 deductible. No way!’” And they don't give it a second thought, but what they often don't realize is that these plans are very special, because they are the only ones that can be paired with an HSA, which have very high contribution limits–almost $4,000 for individuals. And when the deductible is higher, the premiums are typically going to be much, much lower. When you take advantage of an HDHP, the money you would have been spending on premiums for a lower-deductible plan can be contributed to your HSA and invested like a retirement account. Investment gains are tax-free, as long as the funds are used on qualifying medical expenses. And HSA balances roll over indefinitely. Don’t worry about accruing too high of a balance, because funds can be withdrawn penalty-free for any reason once you turn 65. Any other kinds of insurance to keep in mind? Life insurance isn’t fun to talk about, but it’s one of the surest investments you can make in your family’s financial security. If you're young, basic coverage will be a negligible expense. For young parents, especially, it’s a no-brainer. Premiums tend to increase with age, but so might the importance of the cash benefit being available to your family in the event of your untimely passing. We've all probably thought a lot more about death in 2020 than we were used to. To effectively navigate some of these more emotionally triggering ideas, it helps to think pragmatically. We’ve seen how a health crisis can sweep the country. You can be healthy and careful, but that doesn't necessarily protect you. Life insurance is as good of an idea in 2021 as it was in 2019, but maybe people now can be more receptive to just how wise an investment it might be. This material has been prepared for informational purposes only, and is not intended to provide, and should not be relied on for, legal or tax advice. If you have any legal or tax questions regarding this content or related issues, then you should consult with your professional legal or tax advisor. Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this story, Justworks, which offers a resource center with timely tips on running a business.

the Editors | April 15, 2021

Does Your Team Have a Healthy Climate? Here's How to Tell

Businesses today focus a lot of attention on their overall corporate culture, yet research has shown that the most influential environment in a workplace is at the team level. SSCA, an executive-leadership consulting firm, puts a particular emphasis on what it calls the “climate” among workplace groups. From Day One spoke with Stephanie Tran, a partner and executive coach at the firm, about the concept of climate, the behavioral science behind it, and the practical ways in which leaders can promote a healthy workplace. Excerpts: How is climate different from culture, and who creates the climate? If we want to observe culture, we would walk into an organization and see how they make decisions, see how they operate, and we would able to define their culture. Climate is a subset of culture, a smaller component within the organization that's directly controlled or created by the leader you report to. If we want to understand the climate that's created by the leader, we would interview the team and ask, “How does it feel to work for him or her? Describe the environment and what a meeting looks like.” Then we would get at the climate. I like to compare it to arriving in Guam, where I spent three years. Getting off the plane, what do you feel right away? You feel the heat wave, you feel the humidity. In a workplace, you can just walk into a meeting room and understand the climate. Is it a fear-based climate? Is it a climate that actually nourishes people to create psychological safety–people challenging one another in a healthy way? From the research that’s been done, what are the elements that create a climate? There are six components. One is all about the perception that we don't have rules that are unnecessary. We don't have to jump through hoops to get our job done. We’re empowered and enabled in a way that we feel that we can take risks. Therefore, we take full responsibility for our role, which is the second component of climate. We feel we can own our job and not have to check in with our boss all the time. But we know when to do it–we understand our guardrails. Third, we have a high standard on our team, we push for excellence, and there is a continuation of growth on our team. Fourth, we get rewarded, acknowledged, appreciated, and encouraged for doing a good job. We feel supported; our leader has our back. Fifth, we understand the big picture. We know the vision, the purpose of the organization, and how that links to our department or function and how that links directly to our role. We have clarity about what is expected. And finally, we have great pride and ownership of the team that we are part of. We're better as a whole. We have a team identity, we have trust. Stephanie Tran, a partner and executive coach at SSCA (Photo courtesy of SSCA) Did your company invent this concept? That would be taking too much credit. It actually was from two gentlemen, Litwin and Stringer, who were students of the psychologist David McClelland, one of the key contributors to the understanding of human motivation. We teach a ton around human motivation, because a large component of leadership is about motivating people. If we know what motivates people, we as leaders create conditions where people will flourish. Litwin and Stringer came up with this concept of climate, which we teach almost daily in our coaching practice. How has this era of pandemic and remote work affected workforce climates? We get less clarity within our jobs and less alignment and connection points with peers or other departments, the kind of thing that happens organically when we're in a common space. We’ve lost the drive-by conversations where we just stop by someone's desk or cubicle to check in to see how life is and then, “By the way, what are you working on? And can I get some information on this?” The research also says that we're not losing connection with our “A” players, meaning relationships we've already built over time. We naturally reach out to them even in a virtual setting, to check in. Yet it's the “B” players or the relationships where we don't have a strong connection–it takes more effort to reach out to those. What can leaders do about recreating a positive climate in a remote or hybrid work situation? Clarity is one of the key components of climate. As a leader, are you being crystal clear about what the expectations are? Are you creating opportunities for people to speak to you? The reward component of climate is not about monetary rewards, it's about acknowledgement, appreciation and recognition. It is about holding space, whether virtually or live, for people to feel seen, heard and valued, given the challenges of today. So leaders need to spend time asking how people are doing, not in a quick transactional way, but letting people share the humanity of the change that we're all experiencing from this global pandemic. As a leader, expressing vulnerability and being authentic helps your people not have to compartmentalize their life. And the best way to do that is to model it. How does diversity fit into the concept of a healthy climate? The beauty of having diverse teams is that we have multiple angles, multiple perspectives, different experiences at play. Therefore, we're solving problems holistically, looking at angles that you wouldn't see by yourself. The challenge with diversity and inclusion is truly embracing the diversity–being able to park your own perceptions and make space for other perceptions to exist and truly be inclusive of that. It’s difficult to achieve, because leaders get rewarded and promoted for having an opinion, for stating an opinion, for having some conviction around their opinion. And then you get to a level where, oh, I have to actually embrace others’ thinking and entertain it in a way that maybe their ideas are better than mine. You have to be truly self-aware in order to act upon that–and not treat diversity and inclusion as just buzzwords. How does the arrival of so many technological tools, and wholesale digital transformation, effect the stability of a workplace climate? Technology is meant to be utilized as a tool to enable you to do your job. It's never, in my opinion, the strategy. I think technology can get in the way if we're not good at having it enable us, to help us work from anywhere, anytime. Technology actually inhibits climate if it’s not used to best effect. For example, some clients of ours don't turn on the camera when they’re on Zoom. So they’re inhibiting us from connecting as humans, face to face, which isn't ideal. Humans are meant for social interaction with one another. If we discount the importance of that connection, it will hurt the team dynamics. In fact, can the use of technology sometimes create more workplace friction and frustration? What is the terminology–keyboard warrior? If you think that in hiding behind a keyboard, you're not accountable for your behavior, you're wrong. People will still formulate an opinion about you, whether it's virtual or live. But I think it's even more pertinent that you manage that in a digital setting, where you need to be super-accountable, to make more effort to connect and bond with people, versus just the hit-and-run. I personally have to stop myself too. It's just too easy. Say you're going to the doctor's office or you're picking up your kids. You might want to check your email for five minutes and you want to just type up something on your phone to respond so you can check that off your list. But if your goal is to connect and relate to the person who's writing to you, you probably don't want to spend just five minutes. You probably want to be more thoughtful. Because at the end of the day, people don't follow organizations, they follow people. In terms of the recognition aspect of climate, you talk about the platinum rule. How does that work? Recognition for you might not be the same for me. The best way to know is to ask. On a team, I might say, Lisa, what's your favorite compliment? What is it about your job you enjoy most? What would you improve? I want to understand that, so that when I see an opportunity to appreciate you and encourage you, I would do what you would prefer. If the golden rule is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, the platinum rule is to do unto others as they would have it done unto them. You might like public recognition, for example, while others like private recognition. They might appreciate you just spending time with them, developing or coaching them. OK, to put your suggestion into action, what compliment would you most like? I've been fortunate to receive some wonderful compliments in my life–and I think that's what keeps me going and makes me love my job so much more. It would be somewhere along the lines of, “You've made a difference in my life.” When I hear those words, I’m like, “OK, I'll work tirelessly another 40 years for that.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this story: SSCA.

Bryan Walsh | April 14, 2021

Reserve Your Desk for the Hybrid Office

A year into the pandemic, office buildings remain one of the last parts of pre-Covid-19 life to reopen. As of April 7, an average of only 24% of office workers in major cities like San Francisco, Dallas and New York had returned to the office, according to data from the building-security company Kastle Systems. But with the pace of vaccinations accelerating, by summer it’s reasonable to expect that virtually every person who worked in an office before the pandemic will be able to get a vaccine if they want one. Which means that from a health perspective, there should be little obstacle to office life returning to what it was before the wrong bat met the wrong person and touched off Covid-19. So things will go back to The Office kind of normal? Not quite. One year in, the experiences of the pandemic have fundamentally changed our expectations of what office work is and how it can be done. Thanks in part to new technologies like easy videoconferencing and message apps like Slack, we now know it is entirely possible for most white-collar knowledge work to be done remotely with little loss of productivity–and possibly even a gain by some measurements. When grocery-store workers and meatpacking employees couldn’t make it to their workplaces, those corners of the economy teetered on collapse. But when most of the nation’s office workers were sent home in mid-March 2020, for the most part they just kept working from spare bedrooms and kitchens and whatever corner of space they could carve out for their laptops. The second thing we learned is that the virus itself isn’t the only thing keeping office workers out of the office. Surveys from researchers at Stanford University who looked at both what workers want–and what bosses have so far promised–indicate that hybrid work will be the dominant form going forward: a mix of remote work and in-person office work two or three days a week. In fact, many workers are unlikely to return to the office at all. A report from Emergent Research estimates that 15% to 18% of workers will be full-time remote even after the pandemic, up from single digits before Covid-19. The pandemic is far from over, so it’s possible some of these attitudes will shift in the months ahead. Working parents may feel differently about the lures of remote work once their kids are able to go back into full-time, in-person schooling, while employees who took the opportunity to move to cheaper, bigger housing far from their original office likely won’t be able to come back to even a hybrid in-person setup. But there will be no going back to the pre-pandemic normal. A survey from the office-management software company Envoy found that nearly half of workers say they would leave their job if they weren’t offered at least a hybrid work option, while another survey found that workers would take an 8% pay cut for a hybrid option. Rethinking the Value of Business Districts Yet as much as employees may desire hybrid work, on a national scale it will present profound challenges for both workers and managers, as well as the cities that have long hosted them. Currently 16.4% of office space in Midtown and lower Manhattan, the country’s two largest central business districts, is up for lease, a larger amount of vacant space than after 9/11 or the 2008 recession. While some of that space will assuredly be filled as the pandemic ends, a hybrid future, let alone a remote-first one, will likely require less space for businesses. This will have enormous knock-on effects for the restaurants, cafes, public transit and other services that cater to commuters. It’s far from clear what will fill the vacant storefronts in Manhattan or Los Angeles if the flow of commuting office workers drops by even 10% over the long term. Making a Reservation for Your Work Station For both workers and companies, hybrid work may seem like the perfect solution, but it will require a fundamental rethinking of what an office is actually for. In the future, office spaces may be less for doing all work than for doing specific work, and it will fall to managers to make those lines clear. That will mean specific days or even weeks when workers are expected in the office, and guidelines about what they’ll do when they’re there. Instead of the single gleaming central corporate headquarters, companies may benefit from smaller but more numerous satellite offices–or even co-working spaces, which could herald the rebound of firms like WeWork. (Photo by Onurdongel/iStock by Getty Images) Office time will be set aside for specific collaboration projects that require in-person face time, with different teams getting different time slots. That all-important question–“could this meeting have been an email?”–will become even more vital in the hybrid age. But with space likely to be at a premium in the slimmed-down office of the future, managers will need to know exactly when workers will be in the office, which means going to your work station could be akin to signing up for a popular exercise class. Avoiding burnout may be the biggest challenge–although for many workers, it might be too late. According to a report from Microsoft, time spent in meetings is more than double what it was last year. Workers now spend an additional hour connected to Slack than they did before the pandemic, and Microsoft’s survey found that nearly 40% of workers are reporting that they feel exhausted from all that screen time, though we can hope at least some of those negative feelings will be curbed when the pandemic is finally in our rear-view mirror. Measuring Our Work Some help may come from the adoption of workflow-automation tools, which accelerated during the pandemic. The pace of adoption will only grow, and at their best, these tools can lighten the load of office workers by automating the mindless tasks that make up much of our workday. But they also represent a very real threat to workers who will lose their jobs in the name of automation efficiency, a trend that will likely be strengthened in a remote or hybrid-first future, when productivity will be judged by metrics rather than presence. It’s a lot easier to treat your workers as bits of output when “they’re just squares on a Zoom screen,” rather than flesh-and-blood humans in a cubicle, as Kevin Roose, the New York Times writer and author of the new book Futureproof: 9 Rules for Humans in the Age of Automation, told me recently. Both remote and hybrid futures also present a threat to something that is difficult to measure: company culture. “It’s hard to inculcate culture and character and all those things,” Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, said recently. “It’s very hard to build and develop a deeper relationship on Zoom.” The big losers may be younger or new workers who haven’t had the opportunity to build up the kind of social capital that helps sustain a remote career. Data from Time is Ltd. found that the number of connections that new hires make at work is down 17% from before the pandemic. And it’s notable that employees over the age of 40, who have deeper professional networks and are more likely to have a remote-friendly setup at home, are more likely to say they would prefer to continue working remotely, compared with workers under 40. Affirming the mood gap, data from Microsoft indicates that business leaders say they are thriving in the pandemic even as members of Gen Z say they are “merely surviving or flat-out struggling.” Setting a New Set of Office Rules At the same time, managers will need to be on guard against the tyranny of physical proximity. A hybrid future where top corporate executives are able to continue working in-person, while most lower-level employees work remotely or in a hybrid fashion, is one set up to unfairly favor those workers who can make it to the office. That means setting parameters not just about how often an employee can work from home, but also how often they can work in the office, to ensure that corporate advancement doesn’t once again depend on who can put in the most face time. As we look to the future of work, it’s important to keep in mind that everything workers went through over the past year was colored by the experience of what is hopefully a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. The trauma of sick and dying family members, the productivity nightmare that was remote learning for many working parents, even the inability to tote your laptop to a local café –all of this should be behind us, sooner or later. But that means that for all we learned during the year of the plague, workers and managers are about to embark on an experience that in its own way will be just as unprecedented as the pandemic itself. And unlike Covid-19, we have no way of knowing when or how it will settle into the new kind of day at the office. Bryan Walsh is the Future Correspondent for Axios, covering emerging tech and future trends, as well as the author of End Times, a 2019 book about existential risk (including pandemics). He previously worked as a foreign correspondent, reporter, and editor for TIME for more than 15 years.

Emily Nonko | April 10, 2021

Two Workplace Qualities for Our Time: Resilience and Courage

Resilience and courage: these two qualities gained new importance in the world of work over the past year as employees navigated layer upon layer of crisis–the pandemic, recession, and racial-justice movement after the death of George Floyd. So it’s fitting that these virtues were the focus of two mini-masterclass sessions presented this week during Harvard Business Review’s virtual event on Leaders Who Make a Difference. Marcus Buckingham, the author and business consultant who leads research at the ADP Research Institute, talked about the importance of building resilient teams. And Vernā Myers, VP of inclusion strategy at Netflix, spoke on having the courage to fight for a more inclusive workplace. Buckingham kicked off with an overview of ADP’s latest Global Workplace Study, which surveyed more than 25,000 employees from 25 countries to understand engagement, resilience, and the impact of Covid-19 on the workplace in 2020. He focused on resilience, “one of those things that are really important, but you can’t count,” he said. “Our focus was trying to understand what enables people to be resilient, to have a reactive frame of mind that enables you to take on the challenges that the world throws at you.” Some surprising findings: resilience wasn’t hugely impacted by gender, age, the type of work people do or the country they live in. “What was much more powerful as a driver of resilience was an intimacy with Covid itself,” Buckingham explained, meaning people who experienced it or knew someone who had. Findings showed employees were almost three times more likely to be highly resilient after a personal experience with Covid-19; they were also highly resilient if they experienced five or more changes in the workplace. These findings should be telling for leadership, Buckingham said: “Your people don’t fear change, they fear the unknown.” As for how workplaces address Covid, he added, “we don’t need modifications or sugar coating–but please don’t rush us back to normal if you think rushing us back to normal is going to be filled with uncertainty and the unknown.” Marcus Buckingham, author and business consultant (Photo courtesy of Marcus Buckingham) Buckingham broke down ten components of workplace resilience, which you can read more about here, then categorized them under senior leaders, team leaders, and the self. Senior leaders, he said, should be one step ahead of events, always do what they say they’re going to do, and instill trust in employees. Team leaders, he continued, should tell employees what they need to know before they need to know it, instill trust, and encourage them to take risks. He stressed one-on-one communication: “The best leaders are checking in, one by one,” he said. “Research shows the simplest way to drive engagement is frequent, light-touch check-ins about the near-term future. Asking two questions: ‘What are your priorities this week?’ and ‘How can I help you?’” Resilience among individuals depends on agency and compartmentalization. Agency means personal control by employees over how and when they do their work. During Covid-19, Buckingham said, it’s about setting “stress-recovery rituals” at a time work and life have bled into each other–like taking daily walks or reserving one day of the week to cook with your child. As for compartmentalization, it’s “almost the opposite of catastrophization,” a balance of being realistic about challenges ahead while bringing focus to accomplishing the tasks at hand. Buckingham concluded his mini-masterclass with a tip to avoid burnout. “The most resilient people find love in what they do,” he said, which might sound syrupy, but the important point was how he modified the statement. It doesn’t mean you love everything–instead you identify what he calls “red threads,” the gratifying things about the work you do. “If you can weave a working life in which you wake up every day ... and know the activities that will bring me strength today, then tomorrow, I’ll be so much more resilient because my work isn’t something to escape from, it’s something that invigorates.” Vernā Myers kicked off her mini-masterclass by outlining “the four Cs” that encompass Netflix’s inclusion and diversity vision: consciousness, competency, compassion, and courage. After the death of George Floyd, she said, “Something shifted–not just in me, but in other people as well who could finally see the reality of anti-Blackness and colorism.” The resulting consensus call for change, she said, means it’s time for courage in U.S. workplaces. “I boldly declare that we’re not just talking about change, we’re talking about transformation,” she said. “Not tinkering, not programs, not trainings or statements, and not claiming how good we are as people, but wholesale transformation.” Such transformation requires companies to welcome new perspectives, different life experiences, and radical alternatives. Vernā Myers, VP of inclusion strategy at Netflix (Photo by Laurie Bell Bishop, courtesy of Vernā Myers) Myers recounted a visit to Harriet Tubman’s birthplace in Dorchester County, Md., and feeling deeply inspired by her leadership and courage as a conductor of the Underground Railroad. “There are five things I think have that kind of ‘Harriet’ courage for our leaders,” she said. The first is self-reflection: “It takes courage for leaders to show up vulnerable,” Myers noted. The second quality is that leaders need to be opportunity-givers. “They must be courageous enough to move beyond their biases and create opportunity … to get people historically underrepresented into positions of power,” she said. In that vein, companies must examine policies or practices that set “norms” that exclude others. The third component is proximity: “We need leaders who, despite their discomfort with difference, are willing to get close enough to listen to the lived and painful experience of Black folks, the trans community, those who have less than enough financial resources.” Myers said the fourth quality is for leaders to be bold enough to “stand up and have the courage to actually say something, to interrupt the bias they see.” These kinds of leaders aren’t afraid to push for actual change within companies that are taking only incremental steps toward inclusion. Finally, a leader needs to serve as an ally, which Myers breaks down into “A for advocate and amplify, L to listen, the other L is learn, and the Y is yield.” Allies remove obstacles for colleagues who have faced barriers or have been undervalued. “It requires the sharing of power and resources,” she said. Bringing such courage to the workplace can no longer wait, Myers believes, and the payoff will be immense. “Every inequity we see and do not correct, we are made worse for it,” she said. “If we do not transform the situation it will contort our souls, communities and future generations.” Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

the Editors | April 09, 2021

Developing Leaders in a Growth Economy: Strategies for Now

As businesses look forward to an economy emerging from the pandemic, a large majority of HR leaders expect their corporate revenues to grow over the next 18 months, according to a new Stewart Leadership survey of more than 300 HR leaders in more than 15 industries in the U.S. With an accompanying growth in demand for skilled labor, the HR executives said their top strategic imperatives will be engaging and retaining employees, building an inclusive culture, and aligning strategic direction and goals. Their top leadership-development priorities will be to promote development conversations and action plans, as well as using virtual tools to develop all levels of leaders. Are business leaders ready to follow through on those goals? While the majority of HR executives in the survey, conducted in partnership with From Day One, felt their company’s leaders were prepared to deliver on their business and people priorities, a notable minority (35%) said their leaders may not be prepared. In a similar vein, respondents were nearly evenly divided about whether their organizations have a leadership-development strategy in place–and only 41% were confident that their current strategy will produce the leaders needed in the next 18 months. In terms of leadership-development investing, the employees getting the largest shares are at the manager and director level, the survey showed. Among the factors holding back more leadership-development solutions, the respondents said, are competing priorities, along with a lack of budget and internal resources. What needs to change, the respondents said: better alignment of strategies and goals, as well as three related factors: engagement, listening, and communication. The results of the survey were the focus of a From Day One webinar. The Survey Participants: The survey included 310 respondents representing more than 15 industries, including health care, professional services, technology, education, finance and government. The participants represented five levels in their organizations, with 80% at the manager level and above. Among generations represented, Gen X was the most numerous, at 55%, with Baby Boomers (23%) and Millennials (21%) in nearly equal proportions, and Gen Z coming in at 1%. Most of the participants work for companies with more than $50 million in revenues, with 17% in the $1 billion-to-$10 billion range, and 6% at more than $10 billion. Daniel Stewart, president of Stewart Leadership, will be exploring his firm's newest survey in a From Day One webinar (Photo courtesy of Stewart Leadership) The Growth Outlook: Like most economists right now, our HR leaders are expecting a boom. Twenty-five percent of participants say they anticipate “significant growth” and another 55% are looking forward to at least some growth; less than 5% anticipate negative growth. Key insights: Senior managers and above were more bullish on growth compared to other respondents; growth expectations were consistent across all generations; and employees at larger companies tended to be the most confident about future business activity, with 88% expecting some growth or significant growth. Top Strategic Imperatives: With expectations of their businesses expanding and calls for diversity, equity and inclusion ringing in their ears, HR leaders said their top five strategic priorities will be to engage and retain employees (19%), build an inclusive culture (18%), align strategic direction and goals (15%), find the right workplace balance between remote work, in-person and hybrid (12%), and upskill managers to lead change and transformation. Key insights: C-suite respondents put a particular emphasis on engaging and retaining employees, while directors and senior managers tend to focus on building an inclusive culture, as do Millennials, for whom it was the top priority. Leadership Development Priorities: When the survey asked participants to choose among several priorities for the near future, 78% of the responses chose one of these four: promote development conversations and action plans (22%), acquire micro learnings and virtual tools for all levels (20%), create cohort development programs for specific audiences (18%), and get back to the basics (17%). Key insights: Respondents put a higher priority on cohort programs vs. targeted ones; all levels of management put an emphasis on promoting development conversations and action plans; and smaller companies tended to focus more than larger ones on getting back to the basics of leadership development. Are Leaders Prepared to Deliver Results? Corporate representatives in the survey said they agree (49%) or strongly agree (16%) that their leaders are prepared to deliver on their business and people-related goals. However, that leaves 35% with leaders who may not be prepared. Key insights: Among generations, Baby Boomers are most optimistic about their corporate leaders, with more than 67% saying leaders are prepared. In terms of company size, the largest companies are most optimistic that their leaders are prepared, vs. 40% of representatives of organizations with revenues of $500 million to $1 billion feeling neutral or pessimistic on the issue. Do They Have a Plan–and Confidence in It? In short, not so much. Forty-seven percent of respondents believe their companies have a leadership-development strategy and plan in place for the next 18 months, which leaves 53% either neutral or believing they don’t have a plan. Put another way, respondents were asked whether they have confidence that their organization’s leadership-development plan will produce the desired leaders in the next 18 months. Only 41% said they were confident about this, leaving 59% neutral or unconfident in their strategy and plan. Who They’re Investing In: Asked where they’re putting the most dollars in leadership development in a range of levels from individual contributors to C-suite executives, respondents said they’re investing the most in managers (28%) and directors (23%) and at much lower levels for vice presidents (10%), senior leaders (11%), and C-suite executives (6%). Key insight: Organizations of all sizes were consistent in this focus on managers and directors. A slide showing results of the survey notes that a minority of participants were confident in their company's leadership-development strategy and plan (Graphic courtesy of Stewart Leadership) Desired Future Leadership Style: By strong margins, participants favored trusting, collaborative, and active-listening approaches to leadership. On a scale from micromanagement (“driving an employee’s work by providing detailed day-to-day directions and guidance”) vs. a more holistic and trusting approach (“supporting employee’s work by providing feedback, recognition and support”), more than 88% supported the latter approach. On another scale, participants were asked whether the leadership style needed to “drive results through a focus on leading functional priorities and goals” or, at the other end of the scale, if leaders should be “influencing results by breaking down silos, collaborating across functions and overcoming obstacles through clever approaches.” The collaborative approach won out, with 76% support, though a significant portion of participants (24%) put an emphasis on goal-setting. On a third scale, participants were asked which was the better approach: “ensuring employees are completing work on time,” or “supporting employees by actively listening to their needs and working together to understand the actions needed to resolve problems.” The latter approach was favored by the vast majority, 84%. The strong sentiment in favor of these desired approaches may be influenced by calls for greater flexibility and empathy at a time of remote work and the disruption of family life. Critical Leadership-development Skills: Participants supported a broad range of skills that will be needed, but some stood out: communication (12%), engaging experience (11%), connection (8%), and inclusion and belonging (8%), all of which showed a pattern of a need to build closer bonds among team members. Another pattern was about the importance of leading change and transitions (8%), developing self and others (8%) and leading culture (5%). Key insights: Responses putting a priority on employee experience and communication was consistent on all levels of management and across all generations. What Prevents Leadership Development? The obstacles appear to be “other priorities” (22%), a lack of sufficient budget (18%), and lack of internal resources (11%), according to participants. Key insights: All generations and representatives of all sizes of organizations identified “other priorities” as the No. 1 issue getting in the way of more leadership development. A significant number of respondents (11%) said there is a “need to assess current needs first,” a point made most often by respondents at the director level or below. The Best Leadership-development Approaches: Developing leaders through projects, assignments and job positions was judged to be the best overall approach to developing leaders. Key insights: This approach was supported consistently at all organization levels and all company sizes. Workshops, webinars and other approaches that can be done virtually were also favored, with Baby Boomers in particular citing virtual workshops as their preferred approach. What Can Be Done Differently: When asked what needs to change in the organization to boost leadership development, 28% of participants said “strategy and goal alignment,” 19% endorsed better engagement, 16% put an emphasis on communication, 14% said teamwork and collaboration, 13% said more listening, and 10% called for greater diversity, equity, and inclusion. As workplaces wrestle with remote work, social-justice issues, political unrest, mental-health challenges, and the increase of digitization, organizations will need increasingly strong leadership–and they need to do a candid self-assessment of whether they have an effective plan in place to develop those leaders. Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this thought-leadership spotlight: Stewart Leadership. You can watch our April webinar exploring the survey here, and please visit our conference page to register for more upcoming events.

Sheila Flynn | April 09, 2021

If Your Employees Are Thinking of Leaving, This May Be Why

During the past year of massive economic and social upheaval, it would perhaps seem reasonable to assume that workers who had retained employment–in the midst of a worldwide pandemic–would remain committed to keeping those jobs, bolstered by a sense of security and, in many cases, good fortune. Yet a new study from the Workforce Institute, the research and insights arm of HR engagement platform Achievers, yielded some startling results. The institute’s 2021 Engagement and Retention Report, the fourth annual study, surveyed 2,000 respondents throughout the US and Canada across an array of sectors and tenure. “One of the first findings that was a little surprising was the uptick in the percentage of employees who claimed they’d be putting their ear to the ground for a job hunt in 2021, compared to 2020,” said Brie Harvey, Achievers’ Employee Engagement Evangelist, speaking in a recent From Day One webinar. “According to the survey, more than half of employees will be hitting up the job boards for opportunities to potentially jump ship, which is an increase of more than 40% from the previous year,” Harvey said. Natalie Baumgartner, Chief Workforce Scientist for Achievers, explained how, “after compensation and benefits, work-life balance was the second-highest motivator that employees cited, with one in four employees naming that as the main reason that they would jump on in 2021. Now, that’s a pretty high number, especially when you consider the fact that many of us might have assumed that working from home would improve work-life balance.” Natalie Baumgartner, Chief Workforce Scientist (Photo courtesy of Achievers) “However, with schools still closed in many regions, on top of other stressors related to the pandemic,” Baumgartner said. “It’s really become clear over the past several months that many employees are struggling significantly with work-life balance.” “So let’s look at what’s keeping people at their current companies. Get this: Work-life balance was cited as the No. 1 factor motivating people to stay in their current role ... We just spoke about how it’s a motivator to leave. But when it’s working, it’s also a major factor driving retention,” Baumgartner said. She added: “Employers really need to keep a laser focus on work-life balance as both a recruitment and retention strategy.” To do that, she said, employers must realize that the workplace has fundamentally changed and will never return to previous norms. Many more factors must be taken into account given the realities moving forward to increase engagement and retention, foster company culture, and adapt to new conditions on every level. Three quarters of respondents reported working from home during the pandemic, and the issue of ‘remote or hybrid workforce?’–it’s not going away,” Baumgartner said. “Forty-two percent of the respondents in our study said that their company culture has diminished since the onset of the pandemic,” Baumgartner said. “Now, you may be saying: That’s not surprising, we’re in a pandemic. But we wanted to learn specifically what was driving that feeling. And the data told us most employees place blame on a lack of impactful communication, and also on a lack of effort to make remote employees feel connected.” Fostering that connection involves several key elements: investing in proper technology to unite remote workers, improving communication between managers and employees, proper recognition, and soliciting and acting on feedback from workers. “HR has to own up to the fact that taking time to gather stakeholders and ensure your survey’s asking the right questions, and administering surveys and analyzing the results–it’s all a colossal waste of time if feedback isn’t consistently being acted on,” said Harvey. “So there’s really just no better way to show your employees that you don’t care about them or their opinion by asking them to take time out of their day and give you the benefit of their observations–and then doing nothing with it.” “So when I hear HR leaders talk about the risk of survey fatigue, it honestly drives me crazy, because there is no such thing as survey fatigue. It doesn’t exist. What employees suffer from–and the real thing HR should be concerned about–is inaction fatigue.” She added: “When we look at what changed from 2020 to 2021 is that more companies are prioritizing and putting energy towards acting on feedback ... We jumped from 9% to 16% of employees claiming their employer is awesome at acting on feedback. And although that’s actually really wonderful, it also tells the story that an overwhelming majority of organizations have more work to do to bridge the gap.” Brie Harvey, Employee Engagement Evangelist (Photo courtesy of Achievers) That bridge should involve employers looking at the emergence of new challenges and demands faced by employees–as well as their expectations from management. Much of that centers on re-imagining workspaces, incorporating hybrid working conditions, and figuring out how to strike that elusive balance between personal and professional. “Balance is crucial,” Baumgartner reiterated at the end of the webinar. “For both recruitment and retention, employees want to know that they’ll be able to meet their personal obligations like child care, elder care, as well as just having downtime to rest and recover. So start by asking employees, either in one-to-one meetings or through a quarterly pulse survey, whether they feel they’re able to balance their work and their personal commitments.” “If they’re not,” she advised, “ask them how they could be better supported. And remember–that balance starts at the top. So make sure that your leaders and your managers, they’re taking vacation and shutting off in the evenings and on the weekends to model that for others.” Lack of balance and inability to monitor dissatisfaction from the top down, Baumgartner said, will surely lead to a lack of engagement, which leads to a lack of retention and has a snowball effect. “Particularly during these precarious times, deep disengagement can truly be catastrophic,” she said. “And to that point, our studies show that 70% of those not likely to job search are engaged, or very engaged. So a big call to action for leaders is to acknowledge that there’s never been a more critical time to put energy into reimagining your engagement strategy. And success begins with setting the expectation with leaders, that they’re accountable for the engagement of their team. We have to ensure that leaders understand how engagement influences every aspect of their success and, thus, the success of your business ... Engagement is exceptionally fluid, and it changes throughout the course of a single day, let alone over weeks or months or years.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this webinar, Achievers. You can watch a video of the conversation here. Please visit our conference page to register for more upcoming events. Sheila Flynn is a Chicago-based journalist who has written for the Associated Press, the Sunday Independent, the Irish Daily Mail and the Irish Times. She is a graduate of the University of Notre Dame

Emily Nonko | April 06, 2021

How We Can Develop More Authentic Leaders

When Teresa Hopke, CEO of the leadership-coaching consultancy Talking Talent, coached a group of 50 women–all the highest performers in their organization–she found a startling commonality. “They all showed up with confidence issues,” she recalled. “They thought they were the only ones who had somehow been wrongly selected for this program.” As the women began to talk and relate over shared experiences, “they all realized they had this human connectedness around their vulnerabilities, which allows us to be authentic,” Hopke said. The experience spoke to the power of bringing authenticity into leadership development. “Somewhere along the way in Corporate America, we took a wrong turn in thinking that being buttoned up and polished, being prepared, having notes and always being on top of your game was the way to win,” as Hopke put it. “That’s something we coach people around a lot–get rid of their perfectionism, get rid of their imposter syndrome.” Hopke was one of five experts in a conversation led by Myla Skinner, the founder and managing partner of the consulting firm Quarter Five, about how to promote authentic leadership in the workplace. The panel was a part of From Day One’s March conference on how to develop authentic leaders and the role of HR in the process. As Skinner put it at the top of the discussion, “we have literally torn down the walls between our personal and professional lives” given the last year of Covid-19. “This is such a critical time, for that reason, to talk about authenticity and promoting authenticity within our work.” The panelists then discussed what authenticity is, what it’s not, and the best ways to practice and encourage it in the workplace. Alexa Teare, chief people officer of Lingo Live, a coaching firm focused on communication, summed up the quality this way: “It’s less to do with authentic leadership and more to do with authenticity at the core: self-authenticity, self-reflection and self-awareness.” A conversation on leadership, top row from left: moderator Myla Skinner of Quarter Five, Kimberly Newkirk of Liberty Mutual Insurance, and Alexa Teare of Lingo Live. Bottom row from left: Teresa Hopke of Talking Talent, Simone Martins of Alcon, and Patrick Donahue of Danaher Corp. (Image by From Day One) In that vein, authentic leadership doesn’t have to look any one, specific way. “As HR professionals, we’re often inundated with information about what a leader is,” Teare said. “From my perspective, it looks like there can be dissenting views. An authentic voice for myself may be different than [others]. A workplace can foster individual authenticity and healthy collaboration between colleagues, without forcing a specific vision of “authentic leadership.” Patrick Donahue, VP of leadership development and learning for Danaher Corp., a global science and technology company, affirmed Teare's assertion that “authenticity starts with self-awareness.” He also pointed out what the quality is not. “There are some limits to the notion of ‘bring your whole self to work every day, every hour.’ And we shouldn’t make authenticity an excuse for not-necessarily-good leadership behavior,” said Donahue, who is also the author of The Power of Genuine Leadership: How Authentic Leaders Earn Trust. Panelists had suggestions on how to create a workplace environment to foster real authenticity. Kimberly Newkirk, chief learning and talent officer for Liberty Mutual Insurance, shared how the company developed Guidelines for Inclusion that included 12 everyday habits, including “step up and then step back.” Newkirk said that “they became actual habits in the company that people cite all the time. Three years later, they have become a sort of common language.” To build off that work, Liberty Mutual co-developed a foundational leadership program that emphasizes diversity and inclusion. “It really goes into the neuroscience behind threat and reward, how to think about yourself in that,” Newkirk said. The goal, she added, is to provide a foundation for self-awareness and reflection in leadership. Simone Martins, head of HR for the vision company Alcon, advised leaders “to focus on the purpose.” She also said a company’s management needs to develop a sense of True North, “where you want to go and what is your purpose. That’s where we start to develop the authentic leadership environment in the organization.” Another factor the panelists aligned on: They agreed that when authenticity comes from top leadership, it has a trickle-down effect. “Executive storytelling is so powerful,” said Donahue. “It’s amazing how many people at the mid-level will say, ‘Wow, that person is human and I can be too.’” Panel speaker Donahue is the author of a recently published book on the topic Consistency as a leader emerged as another important component. “It’s not about showing up in one way on Monday and a different way on Thursday,” said Teare. “It’s about being consistent in the way you’re leading. It’s turning credibility into reliability, and then into integrity.” There are still risks with prioritizing authenticity in the workplace. “It can fail, like anything,” Martins noted. “The critical issue is that we have self-awareness. The more we know about ourselves, the more we can get better and work close with others to help them succeed.” Knowing how much to share about oneself in a workplace setting can be tricky. “Authenticity isn’t you sharing your deepest, darkest secrets in a way that’s not helpful or well-received by the other person. It doesn’t have to mean you bare all,” Newkirk said. “It means you show up, you’re not trying to keep up a facade, and you understand when and where it’s appropriate to share.” The risks, the panelists agreed, are worth it. “Embrace the journey,” as Teare urged. “There’s been no more important time for authenticity than now,” said Newkirk. “If there’s one thing we can get right in 2021, it should be this idea of authentic leadership in workplaces and supporting people in the way they need to be supported.” Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

Stephen Koepp | April 05, 2021

Why Corporate America Joined the Battle Over Voting Rights

Compared 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

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | March 31, 2021

Training the Leaders of Tomorrow? Best to Start Early

Training leaders is not just about moving employees up your ladder. Effective leadership education can build culture, foster diversity and inclusion, and even influence company reputation. The far-reaching potential of such training is what five panelists discussed during From Day One’s conference last week exploring the role of HR in building authentic leaders. Belinda Grant-Anderson, VP of talent development at AT&T, said leadership training programs can reinforce the behaviors that companies want at the center of company culture, and for her team, diversity and inclusion is central. Internal leadership training can also have effects outside a company’s doors, said Cheryl Smith, who leads talent development at Xerox, where she trains leaders who will shape the company’s reputation. “We wanted to show that we’re committed to early-career folks. You know, Xerox isn’t just your father’s company,” Smith said. “One of the things that I did was to create an early-career, leadership-development program to win the hearts and minds of those who are earlier in the workforce, and turn them into internal ambassadors for the company’s future.” In fact, leadership development can start even earlier, before a young person enters corporate life. For Melissa Kilby, executive director of United Nations Foundation’s Girl Up, whose programs have involved 75,000 young women in 125 countries, leadership training is about equipping young women with a strong identity they can take into the workforce. “We are striving for equality, and I know many of the young women I work with want to see that in their workforces, but we also know that they may have challenges along the way, so how can we prepare them for that?” The panelists agreed that to build effective training programs, organizations must first identify their goals. And for most, success is evaluated against specific metrics. Grace Berman, the senior director of learning and development at DaVita, the global kidney-care company, said identifying business metrics is the first step in her program design. Leadership-training experts in conversation, top row from left: moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, Melissa Kilby of Girl Up, and Laurie Rebholz of Citigroup. Bottow row, from left: Grace Berman of DaVita, Belinda Anderson of AT&T, and Cheryl Smith of Xerox (Image by From Day One) What kind of metrics? For Laurie Rebholz, the head of global leadership and performance solutions at Citigroup, one quantitative goal is to increase representation of marginalized groups at all levels of the company. “If you think about how women and minorities are moving up the pipeline more slowly, that also means we’re reaching them from a development perspective more slowly,” she said. “We rebuilt the entire ecosystem in the lens of democratization.” AT&T’s Grant-Anderson said strategic business goals are front and center, along with key qualitative outcomes, like the culture-creating behaviors they want to encourage. To support women of color and Black and Latinx leaders, her team trains managers to mitigate and confront biases. “We made sure that our supervisors are actually educated around those cultural issues, those corporate issues, so that they understand the gaps and that they’re undergoing some learning along with that individual.” Once leaders understand how to work toward a trust-based relationship, she said, they can move from mentor to advocate to sponsor. Before bringing participants into leadership programs, managers should get a baseline assessment of their competencies, the panelists said, in order to measure how much progress they’ve made after the programs wrap up. That will help determine whether the company’s business goals have been met, but leadership-training programs must also serve participants’ needs and their professional goals. AT&T asks participants what they want to gain from the programs, and Citigroup gives learners as much control as possible over how they engage with programs of their choosing. At Xerox, Smith said her program aims to expand participants’ overall career potential, even if it’s not with Xerox. “We want these chosen leaders to have broader careers than they would otherwise have if you were just sitting in your department,” Smith said. “So the design that I selected has a lot of executive visibility. It’s intense, but very purposeful.” The mode of delivery also matters. Some panelists said their organizations have moved from in-person to virtual classrooms so workers can still benefit from leadership education during the pandemic, but Grant-Anderson’s team strived to give the virtual training a community flavor. In-person training had become cost-prohibitive for AT&T before the pandemic, so the organization had long been delivering leadership training online. “But what we found during Covid is that people needed people,” she said, “and they needed that connection and they needed to be able to speak with each other.” So to better serve their workforce’s needs, her team transitioned from delivering entirely self-directed study to educating small online cohorts of about 20 people each. Rebholz and Kilby say they have successfully used blended delivery structures, including live virtual classrooms, self-directed study, and social-learning platforms. Multi-format delivery makes it easy for global organizations like Girl Up and Citigroup to deliver interactive experiences across time zones. The age of future leaders should also be taken into account, the group said. DaVita’s self-directed leadership training, which includes a leadership podcast and their self-directed SPARK program, has been especially embraced by early-career employees. Kilby said Berman’s team is ahead of the curve, that social-learning platforms in particular are effective and even preferred by young, digitally native professionals who enter the workforce looking for an employer that is invested in their future. The panelists recommended using post-training measurement to evaluate the success of leadership education. Smith’s team tracks employee achievements, like new roles and stretch assignments, and Rebholz and Berman recommended surveying both participants and their managers to quantify the effects. “Three months after the program, for some select core programs,” Berman said, “we will send out a survey to the participant as well as their manager and ask them similar impact questions to determine if they actually applied what they learned, if their skill has increased, and to what degree was the learning intervention responsible for that increase.” But just like program goals, success evaluation must have a softer side. Learner experience must also be considered—do participants actually believe there is value in the program? Grant-Anderson asks participants how willing they are to recommend the training course to their peers, and Kilby’s team directly involves future leaders in making improvements to the programming. She put it this way: “We build with our leaders so we’re building for them.” Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Richmond, Va.

Emily Nonko | March 29, 2021

How Well Do You Know Your Team's Emotional Landscape?

We’ve all heard the saying before: “Act professional.” In fact, it’s such an ingrained ethic in Corporate America that in many pre-pandemic workplaces, we tended to disregard how employees navigate a complex sea of emotions as they come to work each day. “We become less emotionally intelligent when we enter the workplace, because of all of the norms of ‘act professional,’” according to Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks, the William Russell Kelly Professor of Business Administration at the University of Michigan’s Stephen M. Ross School of Business. “In the workplace you’re supposed to just focus on the task and not the people–but that’s no longer an option.” Sanchez-Burks spoke with Kristen Bellstrom, the features editor of Fortune, about how the pandemic has strained the old playbook for emotional management. He made the argument, during the recent From Day One conference on authentic leadership, that leaders must recognize how employees bring a diversity of moods to work each day–and learn how to respond with understanding and empathy. Sanchez-Burks traced the concept of “be professional” all the way back to the early days of the country’s founding. Puritan pilgrims who arrived from England believed hard work was part of their worldly calling and were open to doing business with people unlike them. “In order to do business with strangers, you have to put aside emotions and focus on the task,” Sanchez-Burks pointed out. “The research shows this has not gone away–there’s still a notion that to be professional means to put aside as much as possible, like relationships or emotions, while working.” Hundreds of years later the religious element of work has dissipated, but the emotion-free workplace largely remains. Sanchez-Burks noted that emotional management today often relies on just two strategies: sharing a “one for all” pep talk or sounding the alarm to raise the stakes in the workplace. Neither, he believes, are effective at getting through to employees. A conversation about emotions on the job: from left, Kristen Bellstrom of Fortune and Jeffrey Sanchez-Burks of the University of Michigan's Ross School of Business (Image by From Day One) Instead, leaders must learn to navigate a workplace’s emotional landscape, as he wrote recently in a piece for MIT Sloan Management Review. “Emotional landscape simply refers to the tenor and tempo of the collective emotion, the diversity of the emotion,” said Sanchez-Burks. “How homogeneous is it, how diverse is it, how is it changing?” It’s a careful balance between one-on-one attention and assuming that everyone is the group must feel the same way. For the past year, the Covid-19 crisis has forced leaders to become more attuned to the emotional landscape of their workforce–whether they were prepared or not. “We’re having a seismic shift in how much yearning there is for emotions to be recognized and a seismic shift in the need for organizations to address it,” Sanchez-Burks said. So how can organizations address it while also navigating challenges of remote work? Sanchez-Burks mentioned one company that integrates 15 minutes for games into its virtual meetings and sets aside a budget for programming on issues that employees care about. He spoke of one executive who studied her employees’ home backdrops for clues to their affinities–and used that information for choosing thoughtful gifts. An employee with a shoe collection in their background, for example, received a Nike gift certificate. As workers return to offices, Sanchez-Burks said employees should be encouraged to display family photos or mementos that are important to them. There are also simple techniques for emotionally astute management that shouldn't be underestimated. Sanchez-Burks stressed the value of listening, and pointed to a Harvard Business Review report by professors Alison Wood Brooks and Leslie K. John on the importance of following up with thoughtful questions. “You're signaling in a very authentic way that you’re attuned to the other person,” Sanchez-Burks said. Leaders need to make room for the fact that employees might respond with different emotions to the same development. “Giving voice, without forcing a particular voice on people, is a delicate dance,” he said. “We need to make legitimate that people have different reactions and very different emotional experiences. If we can make that normative, it no longer should be surprising or uncomfortable to express these unique emotions.” Sanchez-Burks shared the Emotional Aperture Measure he designed to assess someone’s ability to accurately identify the emotions of people individually vs. in a group. “Research consistently shows you could be good at one but not the other,” he pointed out. “Taking one of these assessments gives you a sense of where you are, and then working at that.” Executive coaching can often support this work, he said. Sanchez-Burks said he isn’t sure if the seismic shift caused by Covid-19 will result in an enduring focus on the emotional landscape of employees. But he notes, “My work on emotions is much easier now than it’s ever been. It’s not really been a topic people felt [was] a high priority–and now people want to understand what is going on.” He continued, “That barrier is done. Now it’s a matter of, ‘What do I do with this, and how do I get better?’” Emily Nonko is a Brooklyn, NY-based reporter who writes about real estate, architecture, urbanism and design. Her work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, New York magazine, Curbed and other publications.

Webinar Recap

Parents Under Pressure: How to Ensure Their Well-being

The life of working parents is a juggling act in normal times, but the pandemic has made it an unsustainable one. Handling childcare and school, paid work and housework, and in some cases, care for other family members, means something has to give. And for many parents, what gives is their mental health. A survey published in the medical journal Pediatrics found that between March and June 2020, 27% of parents reported worsening mental health. Another by the Kaiser Family Foundation found 57% of mothers and 32% of fathers saying their mental health has worsened as a result of the pandemic. Lisa Adukia, manager of total rewards communications at Gap Inc., said parents and managers went straight into “survival mode” with such speed that they didn’t have time to plan for what at-home work and childcare would look like. “We all just kind of scrambled,” she said, “and so there wasn’t a lot of opportunity to really connect and brainstorm ideas [with] other parents, because everybody just immediately hunkered down.” Believing it’s not too late to have that conversation, five leaders in human resources and employee care lent their expertise in a From Day One webinar titled “Parents Under Pressure: How to Ensure Their Well-being at a Time of Historic Stress,” moderated by Caroline Hroncich, the careers editor at Insider. Diana Geofroy, VP of human resources at the Colgate-Palmolive Co., said listening must be at the root of parental care. “I think one of the most important things is just listening, listening to understand what are the needs and how we as a company can help out.” The group agreed there’s no single policy, program or resource that will support everyone in your workforce. “Every family that you talk to has a different set of circumstances going on at home,” said Adukia, “so companies can’t expect to deploy a one-size-fits-all.” Kelly Young, senior director of talent investment and culture at KinderCare Education, proposed a one-size-fits-one approach instead. In response to what they’re hearing from employees, Geofroy said her organization, where she leads Colgate-Palmolive’s HR operations in Mexico, has created small conferences specific to the feedback they’re getting on things like stress, burnout and grief. The From Day One panel, top row from left: Kelly Young of KinderCare Education and Diana Geofroy of Colgate-Palmolive. Middle row: Gina Nebesar of Ovia Health, Emily Stirling of Intermountain Healthcare, and moderator Caroline Hroncich of Insider. Bottow row: Lisa Adukia of Gap Inc. (Image by From Day One) Geofroy has seen strong results, she said. Colgate-Palmolive’s conferences have increased employee uptake of mental-health resources. “We provide an employee-assistance program for the employee and the family. We have seen [in the past] that people don’t use it much because of the stigma of calling that program, even though it’s confidential. But we have seen that once we have a conference, you see more people calling the line.” Normalizing mental-health care, panelists said, is why open communication is so important. “Not every conversation has to be about work,” Geofroy said. When the employer opens the door to talk about what’s going on in their lives, employees are, in a sense, granted permission to do so. Emily Stirling, employee social well-being manager at Intermountain Healthcare, said her team encourages peers checking on peers. Some workers are not comfortable confiding in their managers, but are comfortable talking to a coworker, parent-to-parent. “We’re trying to normalize conversations about mental health so that it’s not something that someone has to take on alone.” The expectation is not that workers should solve their peers’ problems, but understand how to listen and point them to the appropriate resources. Even so, Ovia Health co-founder and chief product officer Gina Nebesar said employers should not expect employees to speak up about their needs. Because of that, resources must be broad and easily accessible. “One thing we do is not necessarily overestimate someone’s ability to self-advocate and know that they have risk factors for depression,” said Nebesar. “One thing our program does is deliver depression-risk screeners,” which, she said, is helpful not just for acute care, but also for knowing when to seek preventative care. Panelists agreed that flexibility must be a part of employee mental-health care. Give employees the ability to easily step away for therapy or a nap, allow employees to design their work schedules and hours. Cut unnecessary meetings and activities to free up employee time, and make meetings available on playback for those who cannot attend live, or don’t need to. But ultimately, any practice or policy will fail unless leaders model healthy behavior and openly participate in conversations about mental health. “The biggest thing for us is just modeling self-care,” Young said. “I often am giving feedback to leaders in the organization: If you’re working from six to nine, your employees are going to think they have to work from six to nine also.” Adukia says she tells her team why she’s taking time off, and labels her calendar with the reason: Mental Health Day. The group also recommended equipping senior leadership to talk about mental health with employees. “It’s really important to keep your senior leadership team focused on self-care and talking about it, and also mental health in general,” Young said. Yet few business leaders are equipped to do this. That's why Intermountain Healthcare created guides that leaders can use to identify and talk about issues like burnout, stress and depression. Stirling said the goal is not for managers to play the role of therapist: “They don’t have to solve the problem, but connect people to resources.” Many of the changes fostered by the pandemic are good ones: wider acceptance of remote work, better communication within organizations, and agile workforces. Adukia identified another development that’s especially important for working parents: “We finally killed this concept of work-life separation. I remember when I started working, people would say, ‘Leave your personal life at the door.’ That’s impossible. That never was possible,” she said. “We have to embrace the whole being, the whole person, and understand that the whole being shows up to work. I think that’s been a gift that the pandemic has given us.” In Young’s experience, supporting the whole employee has created a more unified and effective workforce at KinderCare. “We support our centers and hence our children and families, the most important people to us, so much more efficiently and so much more holistically than we did before, and I think that’s something we will take with us.” Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Richmond, Va.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | March 26, 2021

Angelica Frey | March 16, 2021

Why Culture Is So Important in Fast-growing Companies

“We like to say that emergency is our middle name,” said Dr. David Bessler, CEO of Veterinary Emergency Group (VEG), a network of emergency-only veterinary hospitals. “It’s all we do. So we do it best,” goes the rest of the slogan. Indeed, VEG describes itself as the only company in the U.S. focused exclusively on veterinary emergencies. “Our entire essence is about dealing with uncertainty: Is my pet sick? Is it going to live?,” said Bessler. And VEG, pronounced like “wedge,” is a success story. What started as a single hospital in White Plains, N.Y., is now a group of 19 facilities across the U.S. Bessler spoke about VEG’s unique character at From Day One’s recent conference on creating a culture of purpose amid uncertainty. In a conversation with Ursula Llabres, head of client success for Workplace From Facebook, Bessler told how he scaled his community-based culture across hospitals during the Covid-19 pandemic. “My company is a manifestation of my values,” the CEO said. “I’m an emergency veterinarian–I think that's probably the most important thing for me, for our company, and for our employees. As for core values, there’s four of them: togetherness, openness, heroic helping, and meaningful moments.” In pre-pandemic times, togetherness manifested itself by involving pet owners in every step of the emergency and allowing them to be near their ailing pets. “True openness is actual participation,” Bessler said. “And so unlike every other company that's out there, our big differentiator is this operational transparency, where we invite people into participating in their pet's emergency.” All of the customers are in the emergency room at the same time, watching one other's emergencies. “Somebody's pet might die–another customer will come over and give them a hug. Another might hold an oxygen tube next to a family pet’s nose, helping with those emergencies,” Bessler said. The benefit of this approach is increased trust and faith that everybody is doing what they can, and a sense of control at a time of great distress. Speaking about a unique corporate culture: Ursula Llabres of Workplace From Facebook, at left, and Dr. David Bessler of Veterinary Emergency Group (Image by From Day One) When Covid-19 hit, VEG had to perform an emergency makeover of its own procedures, making a radical shift to curbside service. “It seemed like the pandemic was specifically designed to attack our company and our differentiation. We're the place where we don't separate people from their pets. Everybody's together all the time,” Bessler said. For VEG, it was an existential crisis. “We thought we were gonna have to shut down because there'd be no business because nobody would be leaving their houses.” Something very different happened. With so many people being housebound, there was a rush to buy pets, especially dogs. “Americans kept trying to fill voids with canine companions,” as one account put it. “Nobody knew business would be booming and we'd be overwhelmed,” said Bessler. At VEG, employees worked with customers to invent new ways of keeping faith to their promise of transparency. “We invited them to help us make protocols for what we would do, how we would respond with curbside service. And through that participation, our people felt in control.” Having survived and thrived during the pandemic, VEG plans to continue its robust expansion. “There needs to be a VEG everywhere there are a bunch of people that have pets, and those pets get into shenanigans,” said Bessler. How to maintain the company’s unique culture across a larger corporation? One way that Bessler makes sure every employee has a voice is through technology. Using the communications tool Workplace From Facebook, which includes features like Workplace Chat, helps him to stay connected with people on the frontlines. Employees are encouraged to post stories of life-saving procedures and share them on the company’s communication channel. Workplace comes in handy: One of VEG’s nurses based in Fort Worth, Texas, which was in the middle of a massive power outage, recently posted a picture of their busy waiting room, with a fellow employee sitting on the floor and actively tending to a patient. This is one of the moments of “heroic helping,” one of the company’s four core values, which Bessler says are inspirational for the 800 employees all over the country. Bessler sees technology as a great conduit for storytelling, which is the cornerstone of company culture. “You have technology, embrace it, don't fight it,” he said. “I know a lot of people that have run veterinary companies and they're battling cell phones. They're like, ‘I don't want my people to have their phones on them all the time. It distracts them from work.’ We encourage our people to have their phones, so that if they take a picture, it’s super easy for them to post it on our Workplace. They don't have to sit down at a computer.” Wise use of technology also allows employees to share company-wide ideas. In normal times, for example, customers are welcome to sleep next to their pet’s cage if the pet has to stay overnight. This inspired a thoughtful idea: one of the nurses suggested providing a freshen-up kit with a toothbrush and other toiletries–and even posted a prototype online. “A lot of times our culture travels from the front lines out to the edge corners, we have these great ideas, and we produce these for everybody,” Bessler said. As a counterpoint to the seriousness of its mission, VEG embraces a playful spirit in a lot of its lingo. The employees are called “VEGgies.” A T-shirt designed for new hires reads, “I am a fresh VEGgie, prepare me.” With emergency work being incredibly taxing for employees, not to mention for the owners of pets in peril, Bessler believes that his job is “to make everybody else’s life as good as it can be.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this thought-leadership spotlight: Workplace From Facebook. Please visit our conference page to register for more upcoming events. Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.