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Two Qualities Will Help Workers Face the Future: Agility and Resilience

As the economy emerges from the pandemic, a workforce wracked by layoffs, job stress and digital transformation will need to have a second wind. What can employers do to help? Industrial and organizational psychologist Marinus van Driel, Ph.D., associate partner in the Human Capital Solutions practice at Aon, the professional-services firm, believes that companies need to foster two important qualities in their workers: agility and resilience. From Day One talked with van Driel about what that looks like, both in theory and in practice. Excerpts: In terms of their human capital, what are corporate leaders thinking about right now? Organizations are taking a hard look at what things will look like once we get out of the pandemic, making sure they have people in the right places to progress their businesses forward. That's a very high-level response, but I think it rings true in every industry. If you're in manufacturing, you're thinking about how you're going to have the talent to keep manufacturing cardboard boxes. If you're in banking, how you're going to have the right software engineers or the data-science talent. Another element is that we're seeing hugely elevated concerns around the career progression of women in the workforce–the likelihood of it being suppressed because of the pandemic. We are also seeing that organizations are concerned that their employee value proposition (EVP) is not aligned to what employees actually want. Companies are actively seeking ways to ways to support individuals within their workforce to grow their careers, thereby adding to the employee value proposition and creating a more agile workforce.  When people hear the term agile, they might think about the famous software-development process. Are you talking about agility in a broader way? Yes, agility with a capital A is definitely a topic for most firms, but workforce agility in a bigger sense is about talent transformation, helping employees to get to the next step in their careers. That is, aligned to their own preferences and capabilities, but also in alignment with what the company needs. I'll share an example from the banking industry. A lot of banks right now are looking for programming staff, people who can do things like cloud native engineering, or they're looking for data scientists. Well, those skills exist at a premium in the open market. So banks can go out there and recruit that talent, but at the same time, banks also have more traditional roles in terms of business analysts and quality-assurance analysts. Those jobs are changing for a variety of reasons. But these people have skills that can be sharpened to then move into these other roles. And as a consequence of that, their employers can make a small investment by identifying the people that have these skills adjacencies or have the capability to make that shift. Yet is reskilling hard to sell–both to corporate leaders who might find it expensive, and to workers who might find it an insult to their current skills? I would couch it as an investment in your employees. And your employees have a lot of institutional knowledge that can help propel your business forward–if they are just deployed in a different way. From a financial perspective, there's a huge business case around reskilling your employees. In the work that we've done, in one case we saved the client about $150 million. When you tally up all the costs of hiring new workers–recruiting, onboarding, training, the market premium, plus the costs of retrenching the previous roles [i.e., a permanent job elimination], you're ending up somewhere in the one-and-a-half to four-and-a-half times the retrenched employees’ annual salary. We've run the numbers on it. Aon's Marinus van Driel: "What we've learned in our work with clients is that middle managers, in particular, are the glue that holds any kind of reskilling initiative together" (Photo courtesy of Aon) What’s the key ingredient in making these kinds of transformations? Ultimately, the common denominator to all of that is mindset. If employees have the mindset to make that shift, you can have an agile workforce. So one of the things that we preach a lot in our assessment practice is that mindset is forever and skills are temporary. If you have folks that are primed to learn, folks that are primed to adapt, and folks who that just generally curious–and have the baseline skills–you can move these folks in very interesting and impactful ways. What’s your definition of workforce resilience? I tend to think of it as the opposite of burnout, when you just can’t get up off the ground. Yes, it’s the ability to bounce back, but even beyond that it's the ability to thrive on change. A resilient workforce is a prerequisite to an agile workforce and agile decision-making to be truly activated throughout an organization. To foster resilience in your people, your approach to well-being needs to be employee-centric and aligned to the needs of your workforce, it needs to be well-communicated, and be within an environment at work that allows people to thrive in an ever-changing situation. At its core, there are three indicators of workforce resilience: a fundamental sense of security at work, a strong sense of belonging with the employer, and the adaptability and motivation you need to reach your full potential.  Coming back to resilience, how do you foster those elements? How do you ensure that you support your employees that have very challenging home lives? The extent to which organizations can really and genuinely appreciate that, and meet people where they are, will allow them to retain the talent and move forward. For example, let's consider helping working parents. Organizations can provide assistance to working parents who work from home by allowing flexible schedules to accommodate their children's school schedules as well as work. Alternately, for employees who need to work onsite, organizations can offer tangible support for parents and their children. An example that comes to mind is a hospitality company that repurposed ballrooms as socially distanced e-learning venues for  children of their hotel employees. If a company is doing its best to promote agility and resilience, what’s the best way to get that across to employees and prospective hires? The more concrete you can be, the better off your firm will be. If employees know what their options are, and how to exercise them, then they will exercise them. But if they don't, they won’t. We’ve been having loads of conversations with firms about employee experience and EVP. Some firms feel like they have the basic building blocks that differentiate them as employers in the market. But for one reason or another, those messages haven't been coalesced in a unified message that can go out to employees, or to external talent. I'm thinking about some of the firms in the hospitality world, an industry that was heavily impacted by the pandemic, and may not be as attractive to talent coming back in. So those firms have to totally reimagine their EVP and communicate that back out to the market. The other component is communicating your EVP to employees: Well, these are your career options. Now that you are remote, these are the things that you can continue to do within your career. Or if the expectation is for you to advance on a particular track, here are the developmental activities that are available to you. Firms should focus on ensuring every employee, including remote workers, knows equally what opportunities are available to them.    In practical terms, who are the corporate leaders who can make this happen? What we've learned in our work with clients is that middle managers, in particular, are the glue that holds any kind of reskilling initiative together. For one, they need to be able to have those coaching conversations with their team members in a very action-oriented way. And two, they need to be willing to let folks go [to different roles], because if they're not, it's just not going to happen. You’ve written about how companies should update the “competency framework” of their employees. What are the key skills that need to be pushed up the priority list at this point? Having a learning mindset, a willingness to adapt and adjust, being just generally curious. So we advocate for selecting for mindset and training for specific skills. I think having that intellectual curiosity about work and life in general is incredibly useful when you want employees to have the capability to reimagine themselves in the future. Basically, people need to have the behavioral DNA to succeed in a professional environment and they need the technical skills to move into whatever the next area is. But the folks who do that the most effectively are the ones who don't look at it as a step backwards, but rather as an interesting challenge that they need to adapt and adjust to. The other thing that is a little more proximal to the pandemic are competencies that enable successful remote working. As people are working more remotely, self-management is crucially important: being diligent about how you manage your day, your priorities, and your home life.  Another critical competency is effective communication: using all of your communication avenues  to maximal effect, including email, video calls, regular phone calls, internal communication channels, message boards, and so on.  Yet another critical competency, particularly for leaders, is goal setting. Setting goals for team members you don't see or talk to every day requires forethought, good communication, and a clear monitoring strategy.    We’ve talked about the career journeys of workers in general, but what about your own? I'll share the story of how I got into this field. When I was an undergrad, I was pre-med, very gung-ho to go into medicine. And somewhere along the way, I had a bit of a change of heart. I knew I wanted to help people, in one way or another. And then I had an internship with a Dutch grocery company at a U.S.-based operation in Greenville, S.C. My work during that internship was focused on developmental programs to enrich people's work lives. While I was working there, I had this lightbulb moment that as a working adult, one day in the not-too-distant future, I'll be spending a lot of time at work and would like to enjoy what I did for a living. I also realized that I could help others enjoy their work and careers. This seemed like a really neat thing to do, given my original premise for seeking a career that would be focused on helping others. That was the naive, seed idea for me getting into industrial/organizational psychology–that I can help people have more fulfilling careers. Thankfully, I've been able to achieve this. What I've learned over the years as a practitioner is that you can really help people have amazing careers, particularly when a mindful, evidenced-based approach is taken. Bringing a layer of data to career discussions, whether at the individual or organizational level, is what I've really enjoyed. I like being a scientist in the service of enabling people to have more career options. I also like giving organizations clear recommendations about shaping their talent-management practices based on objective data. By doing this, it is possible to shape career-development programs to support individual employees to have amazing experiences at work. By pursuing my initial idea, I really have been able to help people have better careers. It has been a neat thing to start with such a simple idea and see it come to life in some astonishing ways.        Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this interview, the professional-services firm Aon. Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time

Stephen Koepp | March 11, 2021

A Year of Crisis–and Reinvention

Do you remember what you were doing a year ago, when the world changed? I remember vividly. Our team at From Day One had just returned from our conference in Atlanta, where we hosted hundreds of business leaders at the Georgia Aquarium. Everyone was far more transfixed by a whale shark swimming lazily in its tank than the invisible threat circulating in the community. Back in our hometown of Brooklyn, we were planning to depart soon for our next destination, Chicago, when we heard disturbing news about a phenomenon we had never really considered: a super-spreader event, a conference in Boston eventually responsible for more than 100 new cases of the novel coronavirus. We didn’t want that happening to us and our From Day One community, so we scrubbed our live events. That was the responsible thing to do, but it raised a painful question: for a conference company with no conferences, does this mean we’re out of business? I’ll tell you how our story turned out in a moment, but the theme here is reinvention amid the crisis. In a pandemic year of death, suffering and economic devastation, it was also a time of transformation in the way we work, raise our kids, and think about the roles of government and business. We had no way of seeing last March 11, when the global pandemic was officially upon us, how many old ideas would be turned upside down. But lots of thoughtful people are striving to help put the pandemic year into perspective, including how we frame its place in the trajectory of our lives. In a sense, the past year was its own time, not like what went before, or what comes next. For a recent piece in the New York Times, writer Casey Schwartz was interviewing Sherry Turkle, the renowned thinker on human-technology interaction, about her new book when the topic turned to the meaning of the pandemic year, Schwartz wrote. “In many ways, Turkle believes that the pandemic is a ‘liminal’ time, in the phrasing of the writer and anthropologist Victor Turner, a time in which we are ‘betwixt and between,’ a catastrophe with a built-in opportunity to reinvent. ‘In these liminal periods are these possibilities for change,’ she said. ‘I think we are living through a time, both in our social lives but also in how we deal with our technology, where we are willing to think of very different ways of behaving.’” While many of our transformations have been well-documented–we learned to work from home, we absorbed a better understanding of racial and social injustice, we gained a new appreciation for mental-health care, we adopted more pets, and we learned to bake bread–some of the transformations were more subtle or unheralded. To find out more about those, we asked some of the people who’ve spoken at our events to tell us about their own experiences in their businesses and life. Striking Out on Her Own: Myla Skinner, who has moderated several of our events and has worked for organizations including the education-advocacy group OneGoal, decided to heed the advice of a mentor and friend who advised: “What you want to do doesn't exist, so build it yourself.” So that's what she did, launching her own consulting firm. “I wanted to do work that focuses on navigating complex and consequential change with care for people at its core. I wanted to do work that leveraged my experience to support businesses as they do really big things. And I wanted to do work that puts love at the center and foundation. So I built a business to do that. It's called Quarter Five (Q5), whose name represents an extra quarter in the year to focus on the things that most matter to your business related to change. The pandemic forced me to spend real time with myself examining how I wanted to both live and work. I had to sit in the still and silence that this awful virus created. I had to dig deep to find what would bring my life joy. I recognize my privilege in having the opportunity and I'm hopeful that this work will create opportunities for others to do their best work and be their whole selves.” Saving Young People from a Missed Opportunity: For more than two decades, the EXP internship program in Southern California has been the on-the-ground partner to schools and industries, helping young people gain experience, unlock doors to opportunity, and build confidence. During the 2019-20 school year, the program served nearly 6,350 students at ten high schools. But at the onset of the pandemic, “when those classrooms and companies shut down, we were terrified,” says Amy Grat, EXP’s CEO. “We had lost both halves of the circle that we seek to complete–youth and volunteers.” Yet in a dramatic shift, EXP’s team let go of its previous assumptions of what an internship should look like, distilled it down to the essentials, and created a virtual experience. Earlier this month, more than 350 high-school girls from across Southern California, along with nearly 100 industry professionals, logged into a virtual conference space for EXP’s fifth-annual Women in STEM career day. The pandemic crisis, says Grat, turned out to be “a huge catalyst for growth and innovation,” especially in expanding EXP’s reach. Discovering the True Nature of a Vacation: Deep Mahajan, senior director and head of people development at the tech firm Nutanix, said the year 2020 inspired her to reinvent what vacation means to her. “Earlier it meant finding and booking a fancy location, packing our suitcases, travelling by air or by road, clicking a ton of pictures, checking off all sight-seeing places–even if it meant cramming the schedule and heading back to wrestle with Monday blues and an inbox exploding with two weeks’ worth of emails,” Mahajan said. “Today it is different. Vacation to me today can be something as simple as taking a weekly hike with a loved one to a place that was always just a few miles away but was undiscovered till now. I consider taking a mindful walk after work in the evening too as my daily ‘vacation.’ It has helped me admire the change of seasons in the color scheme of my neighborhood. It amazes me how all those trees bursting with the season’s shade and the flower gardens in my neighborhood went unnoticed all these years. Perhaps because I drove past them thinking about a million other things. Walking has changed my understanding and awareness of where I live. You know the best part? After any of the above ‘vacations,’ I never have the dull feeling of ‘going back to work.’ I do not even have to take PTO for this!” Taking a Meeting Outside: Lisa Nichols, an SVP in HR at Citigroup, is a firm believer in being productive without having to sit at a desk for hours on end. “I think one thing that has stayed with me is trying to care for yourself and building movement into your day. One way many of our managers have accomplished this is by doing walking, one-on-one phone meetings where we are simply providing updates or reviewing strategies,” Nichols said. “It has allowed us to get a little exercise while also completing a meeting that did not require that we needed to be in front or our computer or a Zoom meeting. This has been a good way to break up the day and get some movement to clear our minds.” Building a Matchmaking System for Jobless Workers: “As we all were sent home a year ago, the enormity of the implications on jobs started to set in. If businesses are shut down, they can only carry their employees for so long,” said Kamal Ahluwalia, president of Eightfold.ai, which produces software for talent management and acquisition. “So we did what we usually do: organized a hackathon to repurpose our technology for the citizens.” The result was the Eightfold Talent Exchange, created in partnership with McKinsey & Company, which uses artificial intelligence to match unemployed workers to jobs. Ahluwalia shares the story of a Starbucks barista in Philadelphia named Joshua, whose hours were reduced because of the pandemic. As it happened, Starbucks was offering its workers some resources like the Talent Exchange, which Joshua used to land a manager position at a local Walgreens. “There are tons of stories like that, small but meaningful,” said Ahluwalia. “Makes me appreciate what we have a lot more, and try not to take things for granted.” Learning to Let Some Problems Solve Themselves: Rob Smith, executive editor of Seattle and Seattle Business, embraced a new time-management technique. “I found it easier to obsess around perceived issues and problems because of the inability to communicate spontaneously with colleagues. So I started writing down things I wanted to tackle, and if they weren’t major, I stuck them in a drawer and revisited them later. I initially did this every day, but then started looking at them Friday afternoons. I was pleasantly surprised that most had either resolved themselves or I had misjudged how important they really were. I will continue this new tool post-pandemic.” Getting to Know Each Other Better Remotely: Matt Orozco, organizational change consultant for the employee-engagement platform Peakon, said his company has committed to strengthening the ties among remote employees. As an example, “We improved the use of internal comms tools (in our case, Slack) by adding fields to ‘profiles’ so we can be more inclusive and share more about ourselves. Some fields we added were pronouns, name pronunciation (we operate in five countries worldwide), and a link to a  ‘ways of working’ doc so each employee can share how best to work with them.” He described it as kind of a user manual, but for human colleagues. On the personal side, he said that, “as a film student by education, I finally started to channel my passion for writing and film into a creative outlet by contributing to a film website,” as well as coming to grips with “the manufactured pressure to be more productive with respect to personal goals and side hustles during lockdowns.” Keeping Employee Careers on Track: One of the biggest concerns among employees working remotely is that their career development suffers from being out-of-sight, out-of-mind at HQ. Larry McAlister, VP of global talent for the cloud-computing company NetApp, said the company launched a new, AI-enabled tool for setting goals and career paths. “We want everyone at NetApp to feel you can do the best work of your career from your kitchen table. We had a ‘career week’ a few months before launching the tool and we are now the vendor gold standard for adoption of the tool,” McAlister said, adding that the company keeps employee well-being in mind too: “We implemented Wellness Days, where the whole company has a day off each quarter. We have also implemented ‘No Zoom Fridays’ every month.” (Photo by Tolgart/iStock by Getty Images) Taking Control of the Calendar: Deep Mahajan, the executive who reinvented her idea of vacation, made changes in her schedule as well. “Unlike earlier, when all ‘house stuff’ used to happen strictly after and before office hours, today our schedules have become truly integrated. So you may be emptying the dishwasher between meetings and taking a meeting after office hours. It requires planning, without which it can be a mess. I re-invented the art of calendar-and-meeting management as I integrated my life into my work. Every Sunday I look at my calendar to mark the meetings that can be done walking, eliminate meetings which are redundant, add meetings for social interactions as needed, and eliminate those 30-minute ‘unproductive’ slots between meetings to be more efficient with my time. Family and house time has also come onto the calendar. Overall, I feel a better sense of control by organizing my time mindfully.” Learning to Say No, When Possible: Erin Hicks, a senior director of HR at Applied Materials, realized that the lack of work boundaries at home was unsustainable. “For me, 12- to 14-hour days are just a norm I have learned to live with over the last four to five years,” she said, attributing the trend to “increased responsibilities, while there are still only 24 hours in a day, and something in my DNA that requires me to never let anyone down. This past year began with the same unhealthy pattern. That is, until I came to the personal realization that that kind of ‘work ethic’ was not only unhealthy, but it was depriving me of valuable time with my family that I could never get back. So I have worked hard to reinvent the way I work. I stop working when my teenager comes to check in with me on a school break, or when my husband comes in to do the same. The payoff is a lot more laughter during my day. I have reinvented my approach by modulating the work I agree to take on–and setting realistic expectations.” Hicks added a broader observation on the issue: “From a work-culture perspective, I have really enjoyed seeing managers spending more time thinking about their employees’ physical and emotional well-being. The empathy factor has gone up exponentially. Teams have reinvented the way they interact, and not just from the use of new online collaboration tools. Leaders are finding myriad ways to bring their groups together on a human, social level that has been fun to watch. This forced reinvention of how teams interact as co-workers–and as people–in a virtual world will have a lasting positive impact, regardless of that the new normal or future of work looks like.” Testing the Limits of Personal Handiwork: Like many remote workers, Mikeisha Anderson Jones, VP of global inclusion & diversity in the Colleague Experience Group at American Express, decided to do some redecorating. “In addition to adjusting to the new ways of working from home, I also fancied myself a weekend and late-night creative by endeavoring to wallpaper my office. Clearly, I’d spent insufficient hours watching the experts on Property Brothers and Love It or List It. When I started on my wallpapering journey, I hadn’t realized that I’d see my handiwork daily for the next 365+ days via videoconference. Thankfully, I love the print and despite my novice-level wallpapering skills, the result is quite lovely. I also learned something about myself: I will never, ever wallpaper another room by myself.” While some of us may feel like this was a lost year, that might not be true in the long run. In a piece for Time, author and editor Joanne Lipman shared the wisdom of dozens of experts she has consulted for a book she’s writing on reinvention. “The types of transformations they study vary. Yet I’ve been struck by the one step that every type of reinvention has in common: it’s preceded by an in-between time, a seemingly fallow period much like the one we find ourselves in now,” Lipman writes. “The prolonged shutdown, by throwing us off-kilter, may help us reimagine our futures,” Lipman continues, citing the work of a psychologist who has studied survivors of trauma. After time, these survivors tend to “have a sense of fresh possibilities in life, an openness to following new pathways.” In the midst of all this reinvention, one of our speakers offers a reality check. Daniel Roberts, who did some of his own reinvention recently–he left his job as editor-at-large at Yahoo Finance to become editor-in-chief of the crypto-news site Decrypt–predicts that some workplace transformations will revert to the old ways because they had obvious benefits. “We've all certainly adapted for a year and in many cases I think some workplaces have been shocked to learn how well WFH worked. The news media, I believe, rose to the occasion of covering every aspect of the pandemic–from home or in a mask–and has been extremely resilient,” he said. But don’t assume work-from-home will be for everyone, forever, he said. “I think there are a number of companies that see advantages to having their people in person, and are going to tell people when the coast is clear, OK, come back now. I fear some people will be in for a rude awakening when that happens.” As for journalism, he said, “I am a big believer in the power of the newsroom, and in being able to bat around ideas in person in a lively room with your colleagues.” Finally, what about the From Day One team? On the personal front, two of our families reinvented themselves by having their first children. Babies can certainly be transformative. As for me, I took up yoga, faithfully attending my niece’s classes twice a week. And as you might have been expecting by now, From Day One reinvented itself. Considering the alternatives, we were left with one possible way to survive: We would go all-virtual. Three weeks after making that decision in March, we produced our first webinar, titled “Smart Ways to Manage a Newly Remote Work Team.” Since then, we have hosted nearly 60 webinars and virtual conferences. Thanks to the intrepid spirit of our speakers, sponsors, audience members, and our extraordinary staff, we are still very much in business–just not the way we were before. The experience has broadened our reach and taught us how to think outside the conference room. But we look forward to seeing you again in person just as soon as we can. Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time

Stephen Koepp | March 11, 2021

How Microsoft Built an Employee Culture of Giving

When Akhtar Badshah joined Microsoft as head of its philanthropic efforts back in 2004, the company’s reputation was not exactly warm and fuzzy. Only two years earlier, the company had reached a legal settlement with the U.S. government, which had accused Microsoft of abusing its monopoly position in the PC market. When the newly hired Badshah represented the company at a conference, every friend he ran into told him the same thing: “You’ve gone to the evil empire.” Flash forward to the present day, and Microsoft is now considered perhaps the most benign of the giant tech companies and one of the most admired in any industry. What happened? While new leadership at the top is surely a factor, Badshah believes that the less-recognized element is a strong sense of purpose and charitable giving that runs through all levels of the company, he told the audience at From Day One’s recent virtual conference on corporate culture in challenging times. In fact, Badshah has written a book about it: The Purpose Mindset: How Microsoft Inspires Employees & Alumni to Change the World. “I feel that this was the untold story of Microsoft, Bill Gates, and their leadership,” he said. “Yes, they continue to change the world with technology, but they also unleash thousands of people who go out and make a difference, because they got inculcated with purpose through the employee-giving program.” “We were not seen as being friendly,” Badshah recalled in his From Day One conversation with David Kirkpatrick, founder and editor in chief of Techonomy. Badshah’s mission at Microsoft was to foster greater appreciation of the company’s considerable philanthropic efforts. “The only way to put a human face on what we were doing was not by putting the Microsoft logo [on it], but by getting our employees out into the community to make the change, whether they were investing in the local soccer club, or into the Boys and Girls Club, or the food kitchen. Show up. Be present,” said Badshah, who now runs a consulting practice and teaches at the University of Washington. What Badshah realized when he took the job is that the seeds of that thinking had already been planted at the company. His wife had joined the company a decade earlier, and they both noticed a seasonal “rumbling of stuff happening” on Microsoft’s main campus, he said. They were “intrigued as to why these young people were running around raising money for different causes.” Talking about corporate purpose: David Kirkpatrick, editor in chief of Techonomy, and author and educator Akhtar Badshah (Image by From Day One) The commotion was a team-based competition, inspired in 1983 by Mary Gates, mother of the Microsoft co-founder, who proposed an employee-giving program backed by corporate matching funds. The results were modest at first, with $17,000 raised for the United Way, where she was on the national board of directors. “Bill Gates was fortunate to have parents who were committed into the community,” Badshah said. “They were constantly doing things to improve the community in Seattle, and he got a firsthand seat. He talked about having to go on street corners with a placard because his parents had a cause.” At first, the Microsoft CEO was disappointed that most of the money was going to universities. “Universities are a machine at raising money from alumni. These [employees] don’t have any time. They got an ask from a university, they wrote a check that got matched,” Badshah said. The company responded by exposing employees to a myriad of causes that deserved support, including environmental groups and social causes such as Planned Parenthood. “Bill understood the importance of this and he ensured that employees could pick their own causes,” Badshah said. “He wanted to make sure that these young people got rooted into the community. And this was the best way he could do it, by incentivizing them to find things in the community that they could contribute to.” In 2005, under Badshah's watch, the company expanded the charitable program to match volunteer hours with monetary donations, a program called “dollars for doers,” to get people out into the community and not just write checks. Microsoft matches every hour of an employee’s volunteer work with a $25 donation to the nonprofit. From humble beginnings, Microsoft’s employee-driven giving has become substantial. Currently the company matches employee donations dollar for dollar, up to $15,000. In fiscal year 2020, employees donated $221 million, inclusive of the company match, and volunteered more than 750,000 hours. Microsoft’s database of beneficiaries now includes more than 55,000 nonprofts and schools; in 2019, employee participation reached 77%. Badshah sees philanthropic work focused on the community as an antidote to Corporate America’s obsession with growth. Especially in the tech industry, “we all focused on a growth mindset. And rightly so. But maybe there is [something] beyond growth, a purpose mindset. And if we could include purpose within our own journey, maybe we put people on the trajectory of making the world a much better place.” Moderator Kirkpatrick, noting the “bizarrely wholesale transformation that has happened at the company,” asked Badshah what other factors might be in play. Badshah said that the change in leadership, with longtime Microsoft executive Satya Nadella becoming CEO in 2014, brought a shift in the corporate conversation. “Satya came in and listened to the employees and said, ‘Hey, I’m here for you. I want to absorb from you.’ But he was always a skilled businessman, right? He’s not going to just give up and say, ‘OK, this is free-for-all Kumbaya, and let’s do whatever everybody wants to do.’ But the invitation changed the mindset of how people wanted to show up. He embodies it in how he behaves. And that’s a huge shift. And that also gave the energy to Brad [Smith, Microsoft’s president], who always wanted to do this more.” Kirkpatrick agreed: “I think the two of them together are not a sufficiently appreciated powerhouse duo. Brad is possibly the most ethical senior leader in the technology industry.” A benefit of this purposefulness at Microsoft is that it makes the company a more attractive place to work, Badshah said. “The fact that it created this space for engagement to happen between its employees and its community is critical. It’s critical for companies to adopt because the workplace is where we spend most of our time. In a virtual world, we spend most of our time sitting in a little corner of your room, but that little corner of your room has now been taken over by your workplace. So workplaces are where we actually form these relationships. And if you can create a space where different people from different communities, different walks of life, different statuses, different religions, different colors, come together around certain common things that are not just business-related, you are now creating opportunities to shift the mindset. You're creating these bridging environments. And you're building the muscle that allows all of us to behave and act differently when we show up in our communities. That, to me, is the important role any company can play and should play.” Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Angelica Frey | March 09, 2021

Companies Ask: What Does Our Community Need?

There are almost countless phrases that have become popularized–and arguably overused–since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic: “We are all in this together.” “In these uncertain times.” “The new normal.” “Now more than ever.” But when employees at the financial-tech company Fiserv refer to their Covid-19 response as well as their overall sense of corporate social responsibility (CSR), they rely on a classic phrase often attributed to Benjamin Franklin: “Do well by doing good,” says Meg Hendricks, Fiserv’s senior director of corporate citizenship and head of military and veteran affairs. At From Day One’s recent conference on corporate purpose, Hendricks spoke on a panel seeking to answer the question: “Why Should a Company’s Purpose Extend to the Community Around It?” The commitment to “doing well by doing good,” Hendricks said, means not only outlining an effective CSR strategy but committing to ongoing assessment and diversification. Pillars and purpose statements cannot just be ethereal; they must be practical and implemented. When it comes to engaging communities, companies need to remain vigilant. “We made a point to make sure that when we were evaluating how we were going to engage with [community partners], there needed to be a specific plan, we were assigning a relationship manager, we were making sure that we were both amplifying what they need while also being able to expand our network and touch more folks.” In Fiserv’s case, one of the company’s goals has been to help small businesses, which have been hit particularly hard during the pandemic. To reach them, Fiserv decentralized its efforts. “We really did partner with our community groups across the country, small-business aggregators, chamber of commerce incubators, and local resource providers. We went from about 50 community partners to over 100,” Hendricks said. All that outreach will be good for Fiserv as well. “By expanding our network, we’re enhancing entrepreneur ecosystems and creating an environment where we can grow and flourish together as a community, continuously auditing and looking at what we’re doing.” That same commitment to re-evaluation and follow-through has also been informing the efforts of cloud-computing provider Blackbaud, said Melissa Britton, manager of philanthropy and volunteer engagement at the company. She referred to a recent study from the Blackbaud Institute on the state of corporate social impact in 2020, which includes a four-point summary about things corporate leaders should keep in mind when they’re rethinking their sense of purpose and CSR strategy. First and foremost, Britton said, was: “Listen to your people, involve your people at all levels and in all departments in the conversation around developing CSR strategy. No. 2 would be to do an audit of all the social good efforts that you currently have. Are they strategic? Maybe it’s time to rethink some of those,” Britton said. Speaking on community impact, top row from left: moderator Steve Koepp of From Day One, Potoula Stavropoulos of Regeneron, and Melissa Britton of Blackbaud. Bottow row from left: Meg Hendricks of Fiserv and Hillary Bochniak of Acccenture (Image by From Day One) “And the third is, don’t be afraid to change and evolve. That may mean stepping away from some long-standing traditions–and that’s okay. This is the fourth component: Have a very honest conversation about corporate values. What are the values? Do we need to change those, do those need to evolve?” Following those steps, she said, “really ensures that a company’s CSR strategy will be something that’s owned by everyone within the company, not just the HR department or the marketing department, wherever that CSR effort might be housed.” That’s where the word “community” in itself becomes multi-faceted. It needs to involve communities outside of the company as well as within. And multi-level involvement and engagement can be key to bolstering efforts and fostering a collaborative, altruistic culture. Hillary Bochniak, a managing director of HR at Accenture, said the global professional-services firm, which employs more than half a million people worldwide, had “always been an organization that’s been very community-oriented and has provided a lot of support for our employees to pursue their passions in terms of philanthropy and volunteerism.” Last October, she said, Accenture “launched a new purpose, strategy and brand for ourselves. Our purpose is to deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity. Our strategy is pretty simple: It’s to help companies do that in a post-Covid environment. Our purpose is amplified then by our brand, which is ‘Let there be change.’ And that’s the mentality that we take into all of our interactions,” Bochniak said. A recent Accenture study “found that roughly 70% of workers expect that companies will start to behave more responsibly and have a strengthened need for greater responsibility for driving social outcomes.” “On a corporate level, I think that we’re seeing this heightened overall. And what’s really interesting is that it’s also deeply personal,” Bochniak continued. “One in two workers in our survey agree that ethical, sustainable and moral values being demonstrated by employers is going to become even more important to them after the pandemic passes. So the idea of extending purpose to the community, it’s existential, really, and it’s something that is a mandate.” Demonstrating a positive impact on the community pays another dividend, she said: an increased ability to attract the best talent. Community engagement can also involve nurturing future generations, said Potoula Stavropoulos, director of social impact at the biotech company Regeneron, which focuses its CSR programs on STEM education, emerging-talent searches and science fairs. “We were founded about 30 years ago, and still led by our co-founders, who are physician-scientists,” Stavropoulos said. “They founded our company with the vision to use science to improve human life. And that really is the foundation for our corporate purpose: To use science to improve the world, which is where our focus on supporting science and scientific talent stems from.” To do that, she said, Regeneron incorporates all of the aforementioned strategies: re-evaluating, adapting, and involving employees on a personal, hands-on level. “We thought really hard about, how do we apply an equity lens to our work to even deepen the impact of our investments? And we also acted on our commitment to empower our employees to give to our local communities,” she said. This involves “giving them the tools and the resources and the voice to act in the ways that they felt would be most meaningful to them,” Stavropoulos said. With the onset of the pandemic, “we all have had to pivot in the last year and find innovative ways to support our employees,” as well as Regeneron’s nonprofit partners and the STEM students it reaches through its programs. The pandemic, which has affected Black and brown communities disproportionately, prompted the company to deepen its commitment to addressing “those disparities that have long contributed to inequities in their education, systematically and structurally. We believe that the best and brightest minds should be going into science, because it’s through science that we will find the solutions to our world’s most intractable problems,” Stavropoulos said. “We believe scientists are the heroes, and we want to translate that notion in society, where we can elevate and inspire students.” 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.

Sheila Flynn | March 02, 2021

How to Boost Black Leadership in Corporate America

Marion Brooks, a VP and U.S. head of diversity and inclusion at Novartis pharmaceuticals, has heard the excuse too many times–that the lack of diversity in the leadership ranks of Corporate America is because of a shortage of diverse talent to fill the jobs. “I tell everyone in our organization that there’s an African American person, Asian person and Latinx person that is qualified for every role in this organization, from the CEO down the line,” he said. “The question is: Where are you looking, where are you recruiting, and what is your reputation?” Companies that enact long-standing, structural changes toward diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) are the ones that will not only attract diverse talent, but foster a workplace culture where employees can feel a genuine sense of belonging. That was the consensus during a From Day One webinar titled "History in the Making: the Future of Black Leadership in Corporate America," moderated by Myla Skinner, founder and managing partner of the consulting firm Quarter Five. The panelists, five leaders invested in DEI work, discussed the recent wave of commitments from U.S. companies to diversity; what it actually means to foster an inclusive culture that empowers marginalized employees, rather than burns them out; and the urgency of this work not just in response to social-justice demands but to better reflect the changing demographics of the U.S. “A lot of companies are committing and communicating on their public platforms that they want to have a part in driving this work forward from a representation standpoint,” said Marvin Davenport, VP of DEI at the vision-care company VSP Global. “The opportunity there is to be sure it’s sustainable long term. While they are sourcing and attracting the talent, are they able to retain the talent, and keep talent beyond the first few years?” All panelists urged employers to go deeper, beyond “the push just to get the people here, thinking it’s gonna be great,” said Ryan Polly, the VP for DEI at MaineHealth. “That’s the easier part. What everyone here is talking about is real, structural change to the infrastructure that is the way we do our business.” So what does structural change look like? Dion Bullock, the strategy lead for DEI and belonging at the coaching firm Bravely, emphasized “a concept of what it means to be part of an organization and bring your whole self to work.” He spoke to the importance of autonomy and self-determination for employees in deciding what parts of their identity they want to share with colleagues–and having a culture of non-judgement and acceptance in response. Inclusive cultures don’t pressure their employees to assimilate. “When we talk about the future of Black leadership, when we’re thinking about the concept of what leadership is, does it create space for people in different communities or cultures outside of the white norm?” Bullock asked. Speaking on black leadership, top row from left: Marvin Davenport of VSP Global and Dion Bullock of Bravely. Middle row: Ryan Polly of MaineHealth, moderator Myla Skinner of Quarter Five, and Marion Brooks of Novartis. Bottow row: Adia Harvey Wingfield, PhD, of Washington University in St. Louis (Image by From Day One) Brooks outlined some specific actions Novartis took in the past year. The company established new hiring guidelines that required diversity on the hiring panel and within the interviewing pool. He pointed out research that found if there’s only one female or minority candidate in the pool, they have very little chance of being hired. “Just by adding one additional woman or person of color, it goes up by over 50% that one of them would receive an offer and it’s because you’ve broken up the confirmation bias,” Brooks said. Novartis also hired a DEI scouting and recruiting firm, Global Diversity Marketing, to tap into communities they hadn’t reached out to in the past. “We are building a bench of diverse talent so when we have opportunities, we’ll be able to tap into that.” External work should be coupled with internal investments. An example of that effort at Novartis is a multicultural-engagement program that identifies talented Black employees and supports them in their career development. “I’m happy to say that in less than a year, 50% of the people in that program have already received promotions,” according to Brooks. The company is expanding the program to its Latinx employees. VSP’s Davenport suggested that companies should take advantage of flexibility with employee location when possible, especially after Covid-19 made remote work a widely embraced practice. He pointed to a recent McKinsey & Co. report on race in the workplace that said nearly 60% of the Black labor force in the U.S. resides in southern states. “At a minimum, do you have operations from your company perspective if you’re sourcing diverse talent within any of those locations?,” he asked. In recent years, many diversity initiatives have been launched with apparent good intentions, only to fail to make progress. But it doesn’t have to be that way. Adia Harvey Wingfield, the Mary Tileston Hemenway professor of arts & sciences and associate dean for faculty development at Washington University in St. Louis, published a report in Harvard Business Review last year titled “We Built a Diverse Academic Department in 5 Years. Here’s How.” In response to hiring discrimination, she recommended that companies get proactive when a position opens. “When we know that we’re going to have a position open,” she said, “we have done a lot of targeted outreach to reach out to diverse communities and diverse candidates. That really helps to change the applicant pool we have and the reputation gets out that we’re a department interested in having a more diverse candidate pool.” Wage transparency, Wingfield added, is another key tool to attract and keep diverse talent: “Research is starting to show that when companies are more forthright about wages and salaries, it can have the effect of knowing who’s being paid what and seeing where wage discrepancies lie.” There were a few “solutions” that panelists discouraged. Polly, with MaineHealth, noted that in white-dominant spaces there’s a tendency to rely on one-off DEI training. “It serves as ‘I did that, checked the box, and can make myself feel better that I did this training,’” as he put it. Instead, managers “need to understand that [DEI] is a significant time, person and financial investment that has a significant return, but that return can be a few years down the road.” And the work of DEI should be shared. Wingfield warned against the phenomenon of “racial outsourcing”–when the work of DEI is pushed onto employees of color without adequate resources or compensation–a term she coined in her book Flatlining: Race, Work and Health Care in the New Economy. On a related note, the speakers weighed the value of “reverse mentoring,” which in this context refers to employees of color mentoring white leadership. Should marginalized employees be taking on this kind of work? “It goes back to autonomy,” Bullock said. “If I as a Black employee have the option to choose to do that, and have the emotional bandwidth to choose to do that, I want those opportunities to do it.” He added that it shouldn’t be Black people’s responsibility to introduce white colleagues to resources, research, films or podcasts that tackle topics of racism and can be easily searched for online. Brooks reframed the reverse-mentoring relationship as “an opportunity to ask questions,” he said. “What are you seeing in the organization? What are you seeing in society? What are some of your thoughts and recommendations for us? The second part of the question is: Is there any part that you’d like to be involved in?” Again, panelists stressed the importance of valuing this work, and compensating appropriately for it, not as a side job for employees of color to take on in addition to their regular work. In wrapping the panel, Washington University’s Wingfield pointed out the reality of the rapidly changing demographics across the U.S. “We’re at a point where the demographics are going to become more racially diverse than any point in our history,” she noted. “It puts us at an inflection point … I don’t see a way to have organizations well-suited to meeting the needs of a multi-racial population if those organizations don’t reflect the needs of those communities internally.” 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.

Emily Nonko | February 27, 2021

To Engage Your Workforce, Invest in Managers

Bad managers are a big deal. The effects of poor management on employee productivity, morale and attrition are well examined and regularly reported. Fifty percent of employees have left their job to escape their manager at some point in their career, according to Gallup, and the Predictive Index People Management Study from 2018 found 77% of workers who have bad bosses say they plan to leave–soon. Poor management isn’t always for lack of trying, but lack of training. To lead their teams well, managers need education and resources. They have to support their teams, but who’s supporting managers? In a From Day One webinar, two leaders of the employee-engagement platform Achievers, Employee Engagement Evangelist Brie Harvey and Chief Workforce Scientist Natalie Baumgartner, who has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology, presented four data-supported practices companies can use to empower managers to improve employee engagement and  performance: manager contact, recognition, professional development and coaching. Their recommendations come from the 2020 Engagement & Retention Report, produced by the research arm of Achievers, the Workforce Institute, which Baumgartner leads. To inform the report, the Workforce Institute asked survey participants how likely they are to recommend their manager to a peer, then asked them to rate their manager on skills like the quality and frequency of feedback, how well they support the professional development of their direct reports, and whether they recognize strong work–all virtues that Harvey and Baumgartner cited as footing for employee engagement. The goal was to find and understand the relationship, if any, between manager effectiveness–or whether the manager is having a consistent, positive impact on their team–and employee engagement. They found the relationship is a positive one, influenced by the four practices, which Achievers calls the four pillars of manager empowerment. Brie Harvey, employee engagement evangelist (Photo courtesy of Achievers) “Seventy percent of people who would recommend their manager are very engaged,” said Baumgartner. Managers who score highly for the four pillars of manager empowerment are more likely to be recommended by their direct reports. Manager effectiveness begets employee engagement. The four pillars, explained: Manager Contact: This refers to regular facetime between manager and direct report, like regular one-on-one meetings or real-time feedback. Harvey cites a 2009 Gallup poll, which found employees who feel ignored by their manager are almost twice as likely to disengage at work. Engagement, Baumgartner said, “is a significant driver of greater workplace productivity and lower levels of talent turnover.” Recognition: This pillar is about managers taking the time to show appreciation. “If I’m working my tail off and the people around me routinely make me feel like no one’s listening, it’s only a matter of time before I lose steam,” said Harvey. But in order for this to be most effective, she said that recognition must be frequent, public, timely, specific and values-based. Unless it satisfies these criteria, it can feel like insincere or empty praise. Professional Development: Managers need to regularly invest in the careers, not just the jobs, of their employees. As businesses slice budgets because of the effects of COVID-19, professional-development activities can be early casualties, suggesting to employees their career development just isn’t a priority anymore. But consider the long-term effect of professional development on employee retention. Harvey argued: “It has never been more important to help employees see the bigger picture and show them how valued they are by investing in their development,” an investment that doesn’t have to be expensive. Regularly ask employees about their goals and find ways to satisfy their growth within the company, all for free. Natalie Baumgartner, chief workforce scientist (Achievers) Coaching: Achievers’ fourth pillar of manager empowerment is coaching, or real-time support, like consulting employees rather than directing them, and encouraging individual contributors rather than managers to identify problems and plan solutions. Many managers manage, but they don’t coach, simply because they don’t know how. This is where Harvey and Baumgartner recommended teaching managers to lead empathetically, not just delegate. Baumgartner emphasized these four practices should mean managers are given more support, not more work. “Our Achievers Workforce Institute 2020 Culture Report shows that managers have been feeling less supported than any other level of employee during the COVID pandemic. We think that’s likely the case because managers often find themselves torn between objectives, between the demands and needs of those above them and those that report to them. Add to that the fact that many managers likely have additional demands at home, and you have a deeply overwhelmed body of employees,” said Baumgartner. “We're not proposing that you add more to the plates of your managers,” she said, “but rather that you ensure that you are empowering your managers with tools and resources to more powerfully execute on the drivers they’re already delivering to their team members.” 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. Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza is a writer, editor, and content strategist based in Richmond, Va.

Emily McCrary-Ruiz-Esparza | February 25, 2021

America's Military Veterans: Tapping a Rich Talent Pool

The qualities that make great soldiers are the same ones prized by hiring managers across all industries: Punctuality. Reliability. Respect. Versatility. Dedication. Military veterans comprise a rich talent pool for civilian employers, but the path from military service to jobs with civilian employers often has bumps and misconceptions. Employers don’t necessarily know where to find potential recruits, how to attract and retain them, or how to equate their military experience with civilian job demands. Veterans, for their part, sometimes don’t know where to look for opportunities, how to promote themselves, or how to explain the ways in which their skills can translate. Those gaps were addressed in From Day One’s recent webinar, “American Military Veterans: Tapping a Rich Talent Pool,” with veterans themselves and other experts offering insights into how to train, recruit, encourage and develop workers from the armed forces. Key for companies is to recognize that the worker shortages in many industries today aren’t because potential hires lack credentials or education, said Dave Harrison, executive director of national apprenticeships for Fastport, a software company that build products to help job seekers, particularly military-community members, find meaningful employment and apprenticeship training. The challenge for many employers today, he said, is in “finding people–to be rather direct–who can show up on time, pass a drug screen, can work in a changing environment and stay focused, can work as part of a team, and can overcome obstacles. That’s the hardest thing to find in today’s modern era. Those soft skills [are] what every industry is wrestling over right now.” Delaney Rea, driver services manager for Melton Truck Lines, whose apprenticeship program and recruitment has a particular focus on veterans, said that members of the military “fit very well into our culture,” especially because of “the pride they take in their work.” “They have this culture of representing us well and being part of a larger team,” Rea said, adding: “We can find people with Class A [truck-driving] licenses. But if they don’t take that pride in their work, they’re actually being more than just not representing us well. They’re also being unsafe.” Veterans, in contrast, “are just the most outstanding employees that we’ve been able to have–and [they have] that understanding of hierarchy, as well." Julie De La Mora, a regional recruiting director for Allied Universal, a security-services company with more than 250,000 employees, made similar observations, colored by her own military experience and firsthand perspective. “We thrive on being proud and doing what we do best,” she said of veterans, adding: “We have the values that were instilled in us when we first joined the military, and also the sense of belonging and urgency and not leaving anyone else behind.” Speaking on military veterans, top row from left: Nick Curry of Amazon Web Services and Lydia Dishman of Fast Company. Center row from left: Delaney Rea of Melton Truck Lines, Dave Harrison of Fastport, and Katie Adams of Apprenticeship Services Group. Bottom row: Julie De La Mora of Allied Universal (Image by From Day One) All of those qualities resonate with businesses and other employers, participants said. “I would say every employer that I’ve worked with, they’ll of course cite veterans’ core values of discipline and accountability, understanding chain of command,” said Katie Adams, CEO of Apprenticeship Services Group. But the less straightforward aspect is getting veterans in the door in the first place. “What we’re seeing now is that employers are really having to break away from traditional methods of recruiting, hiring, evaluating talent,” Adams said. “And so they’re really having to look more broadly at, what are the skills, credentials, certifications? What [do] those credentials and certifications mean? The employers that are going to succeed are the ones that do their homework to figure out what those military ratings equate to. If someone was in artillery in the army, don’t write them off. There’s a lot of logistical, technical work that they’ve done. And they have the capacity to turn around pretty quickly and do that in a different environment.” Much of the onus lies on hiring managers to identify and gauge veterans’ capabilities as well as transferable skills, said Nick Curry, a veteran who heads military recruiting and apprenticeships at Amazon Web Services. “Veterans have a certain determination and grit that we all look for in Corporate America,” Curry said. “But to drill down a little bit deeper, I think what separates veterans is that the core values that most of the veterans are exposed to, in their branches of services, really closely align to Amazon’s 14 leadership principles, so much so that we actually prefer to hire people that are cultural fits almost more than we need their technical skills, because working at Amazon and the culture of Amazon is so important to us. That’s why it’s so easy for us to hire from the military community.” “But you know, to specifically call out something,” continued Curry, “it’s because veterans have the ability to learn a lot of new skills very quickly, which is important in our technical, fast-paced world. And they don’t give up when the going gets tough. And that’s something we see a lot from other types of hires. But the military community really can persevere." Translating Military Skills Into Civilian Many veterans come to the job market with relevant technical skills for specialized jobs, as Adams mentioned, but the transferability of those skills to the civilian workplace needs to be highlighted. “There may be someone that comes out of the army that had worked in cryptography [and] they have the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree in computer science–you just don’t know it,” Curry said. “And so it’s up to the hiring manager. Again, the traditional methods of recruiting, evaluating and hiring talent aren’t working. And so these folks have to get innovative and be able to speak the veterans’ language.” An integral part of doing that means engaging veterans already employed by other organizations, whether it’s through recruitment or mentorship, participants said. “The best advertising any employer can have is to take care of someone in transition [from the military], because that word of mouth to the next people that they served with will mean much more than a million-dollars’ worth of advertising,” Fastport’s Harrison said. Once those veteran employees are trained and supported, their contributions are invaluable and they, too, can help others make the transition. Webinar moderator Lydia Dishman, contributing editor for Fast Company, referred to a LinkedIn study finding that “veterans are 39% more likely to be promoted earlier than non-veterans.” “The critical time for a veteran in transition is in the first six months,” Harrison said. “If you get them past the first six months, you’ve got a good chance of keeping them a long time. And they will thrive after that first, six-month period.” That’s where mentorship comes into play, he said. “If you want to engage the situation in that first six-month window, where you avoid miscommunication, try to pair someone with another veteran who’s been in your culture,” he said. “They can communicate with that person much more effectively. A mentor doesn’t have to be 24/7, just somebody to talk to, to resolve any confusion they have. You would be amazed at how big a difference that makes in both retention and just overall productivity.” Providing Resources to Help With the Transition Veteran-focused employee resource groups (ERGs) are another helpful buttress, especially when companies and organizations get a more comprehensive sense of the veteran experience, said Curry. “Understanding the community better is really up to us as the employers, and we need to be doing more to help educate the service members on how to prepare for biases and make adjustments,” he said. If employers “don’t have a business resource group or an affinity group for your employees to participate in, you’re going to make them feel isolated when they come into a new environment,” he said. Other resources to help veterans with transition include tech tools to hone resumes by translating military attributes into civilian speak. Networking and support are also absolutely vital, whether it’s through government agencies, nonprofits, or social media for veterans and their families. “We belong to a lot of social-media platforms where we connect with a lot of the groups for military spouses, so I’ve made sure that each one of my military recruiters, as well as our regional recruiters, join all of those groups,” De La Mora said, later adding: “We are looking at transitioning our veterans who not only have their spouses, but also their kids that are of age to start working. We’ve got entry-level positions for them and we connect with the state resources,” which in many cases offer funding to train young people in the 18-to-24 age bracket. Veterans and their families tend to have a shared sense of purpose and service, Rea said she learned from experience. Tapping into that spirit helps attract and keep them as employees. “You’re trying to recruit a workforce of people who have raised their hand to serve our country,” she said. “They clearly have a passion beyond themselves and [for] what they can do to continue to serve–and that’s one of the things that we’ve highlighted a lot in trucking. I mean, who impacts our country more than our truck drivers, who touch every single industry and keep the rest of us going? That’s been a huge part of how we’ve attracted talent,” Rea said. "So yes, we do have some other attractions for them to come here–benefits and stuff. But sometimes that’s the sole reason someone picks it–because they want to do something impactful to continue serving their country.” Sheila Flynn is an Austin-based freelance journalist who has written for the Associated Press, Daily Mail, Irish Times and Sunday Independent (Ireland). She is the proud daughter of Vietnam veteran and Bronze Star recipient John Flynn, who served with the 101st Airborne Division in the A Shau Valley in 1968-69. Upon his return to the U.S., he spent decades installing phone systems for AT&T and Lucent in New York City before starting his own telecom business.

Sheila Flynn | February 25, 2021

How Companies Can Find Their Sense of Purpose

When Casey Wahl founded his startup Attuned, software that measures intrinsic motivation among employees, he didn’t have a set statement of purpose to share with his own hires. “I just thought that our values are there–we never actually wrote them down,” he remembered. But that was a problem. “People were not fully aligned because the values were not clearly stated, and we could not have the expected behaviors that we want within the organization. People were going in different directions.” To get his workers on the same page, he asked the team “what do you think we are?” and compared the responses of employees and the executive-leadership team. After reaching a consensus that shaped a company mission statement, he made it official by putting it in writing. Wahl was one of five organization leaders who gathered to speak about the importance of establishing a company purpose, what it takes to align behind one, and how it can evolve through crises like Covid-19. Representing a variety of corporate types and sizes, the executives spoke on a panel moderated by Fast Company contributing editor Lydia Dishman as part of From Day One's February conference on creating a culture of purpose. When it comes to crafting a corporate purpose, the panelists agreed on a few major points. To start with, leaders should be in open communication with employees during the whole process. Idit Aronsohn, head of corporate responsibility, inclusion and well-being at the IT company Amdocs, outlined a process her company launched a year ago to invite all 26,000 employees “to participate in crafting our purpose through active participation through different workshops, all the way to voting on the main ideas.” She added, “I think this is one of the reasons why people are connecting to this purpose–they were part of crafting it.” Authentic communication is key. Karsten Vagner, the VP of people at Maven Clinic, compared it to storytelling. “So much of women’s health is still so stigmatized,” he said of the company’s goal to improve health care for women and families. “Being authentic to our purpose internally and externally comes down to storytelling, telling our member’s stories internally so our employees recognize the stakes of this work, but also externally and not being afraid to call out the real struggles people deal with.” Speaking on corporate purpose, top row from left: Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, Charu Esper of NASA, and Graham McLaughlin of Optum. Bottow row, from left: Idit Aronsoh of Amdocs, Karsten Vagner of Maven, and Casey Wahl of Attuned (Image by From Day One) Employee engagement needs to come from “transformational leadership at the top,” said Graham McLaughlin, vice president of social responsibility at health-care company Optum. Effective leaders will match the resulting mission statement with both internal and external change: “You can have rhetoric, but if the way you think about compensation doesn’t change, or the way you lift individuals up and hire in an inclusive way doesn’t change,” you won’t get there, he said. “It’s about actions that have to line up to the rhetoric.” Statements of purpose are hardly set in stone. A case in point is NASA, explained Charu Esper, the space agency’s deputy for culture and workforce for digital transformation. “Our mission is evolving and has always evolved,” she said. NASA now has more partnerships with private sector companies like SpaceX, and is increasingly involved in climate, satellite and weather-pattern work. “The transformation of the last two years has very much accelerated with digital transformation and future of work,” she said. The Covid-19 pandemic even further accelerated that process; the agency embraced a listening tour to solicit employee feedback, held a culture hackathon, and quickly aligned around a shared sense of purpose. “We’re moving toward the betterment of this world through science and technology,” as Esper put it. When a statement of purpose is in place, and a company is honestly and effectively engaging its employees around shared values, the panelists suggest that it opens doors to new possibilities. At Amdocs, the company found success in allowing its employees to dedicate volunteer hours to causes they personally care about, as opposed to causes picked by the company. Vagner, of Maven Clinic, spoke to the importance of rewarding employees who live up to company values. “How do you add that ‘oomph’?” Vagner asked. “You have a perfectly crafted sentence or two [of company purpose]. How do you live it? Are you adding it to your hiring, your performance management, your recognition and rewards? All of those pieces matter.” Later in the conversation he suggested that companies actively craft employee policies, like robust benefits packages, that speak to its purpose and values. Esper stressed the payoff of “psychological safety” that a shared value set can often bring. “If you feel safe, and you feel your leaders are authentic and vulnerable, you’re prone to taking risks and steps towards innovation,” she said. McLaughlin, at Optum, also emphasized the importance of risk-taking: internally, for employees, and externally, for companies living up to their value sets. “Still, you have to ask, where are we credible?” he posited. “Your authenticity of purpose needs to be aligned not on doing the hot thing at the moment, but doing something where you can make the most difference.” In a year of social hardship on different levels, panelists suggested the experiences could be poured back into the company’s purpose. “There’s the ‘man in the hole’ story concept … when you’re falling and all kinds of bad things happen and then you start pulling yourself up and are in a much better place,” Wahl said. “If you can bring out that ‘man in the hole’ story and put it into the purpose, you’ll get a deeper excitement.” As a purpose forms and evolves, a company should continually rally around it. “To have such aligned purpose, such clarity, and expectations of what everyone is doing leading up to it–it’s incredibly important,” McLaughlin said. “The interesting thing about purpose is that it’s all of the above.” 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.

Emily Nonko | February 23, 2021

Joy in Childhood: How a Corporate Charity Sharpened Its Focus

A week before COVID-19 shelter-in-place restrictions took hold, the Dunkin’ Joy in Childhood Foundation was in the middle of its “week of joy,” in which the foundation helps place volunteers in food banks. Suddenly, the system to keep food banks running had to shut down. Volunteers couldn’t come in, food transit was halted, and the excess food from restaurants and grocery stores dried up. In response, the foundation scrambled to provide the food banks with $1 million in direct cash assistance. The Joy in Childhood team assembled a simple, five-question grant process; a few days later they sent out the checks. The capability to provide such lightning-speed relief–which happened again at the end of 2020, to the tune of $2.5 million–didn’t come together overnight. Since its founding in 2006, the Joy in Childhood Foundation has undergone an evolution and realignment with the Dunkin’ Donuts brand to establish itself as an effective nonprofit tackling childhood hunger and offering moments of joy to children battling illness. Kari McHugh, executive director of the foundation and senior director of consumer and community relations for Dunkin’ Brands, spoke about Joy in Childhood’s journey with Fast Company contributing editor Lydia Dishman at From Day One’s February virtual conference on creating a culture of corporate purpose. “We didn’t start to really raise money until we narrowed our focus and became very clear about what we did,” McHugh explained. Ten years after the foundation was initially launched, it transformed into “a much more successful corporate philanthropy program,” she said. McHugh began her career in corporate philanthropy before shifting to communications and PR. About 17 years ago, she was hired by Dunkin’ for a communications role and increasingly focused on company operations. By the time the company was looking to start a philanthropic arm, she had a deep knowledge of the brand, its marketing, store operations and company margins. (Dunkin’ also owns the Baskin-Robbins ice-cream brand and last year was acquired by Inspire Brands, which owns Arby’s and other chains.) “The bleeding heart is not the most important element to bring to the table,” she noted of corporate philanthropy. “The element to bring to the table is an understanding of marketing, operations, how the business makes money and finding a way to integrate into that work.” Kari McHugh, executive director of the Joy in Childhood Foundation (Photo courtesy of Dunkin' Brands) The early work in establishing a charitable foundation for the company got off to a rocky start. In bringing together Dunkin’ retail-store franchisees, many of whom were already invested in local philanthropy, the group couldn’t settle on a common denominator to base a foundation. “It was an iterative process over about six months, and in the end we created a foundation that had multiple giving areas and its focus was around local work,” said McHugh. This alignment in goals was a “watershed moment” for the company, she said, “but over a long period of time we didn’t raise very much money.” McHugh worked in other leadership roles at Dunkin’ Brands before returning to the foundation three years ago. “That’s when we really dove deep and focused even more,” she said. “The foundation even moved to focus just on one brand, which is on Dunkin’ [Donuts], and focus on two giving areas.” In 2019, with the mission of providing food to children facing hunger as well as joy to children facing illness, the foundation raised $7 million, distributed 5.3 million meals, and awarded 150 grants. McHugh credits the success not only to sharpening the focus of the foundation but by working in close partnership with franchisees. “Corporate philanthropy programs are only as good as the people in the local communities and the people representing its foundation or the brand on a day-to-day basis,” she said. At Dunkin’, she added, “our franchisees are an expression of the foundation.” McHugh pointed to an example of selling dog toys inside the retail stores, part of Dunkin’s Dogs for Joy program, knowing that Dunkin’s customers tend to love dogs. “The franchisees knew their consumers would feel good doing this. The foundation is built when you start to have programs integral to the business,” she said. The company raised $1 million for a program that brings therapy dogs into pediatric hospitals. While the foundation sticks to its two priority areas, it continues to evolve its programming. McHugh said the foundation is planning to implement virtual programming for kids who are isolated due to their illness. “This year we all learned what it was like to be quarantined,” she noted, then compared it to children who receive bone-marrow transplants and have to spend a year in protective isolation to prevent infections. “We’re trying to bridge that isolation with technology and virtual programming.” The foundation will also focus on teenagers with illnesses, who are often underserved, through bringing gaming specialists and gamers inside children’s hospitals. Ultimately, McHugh stressed that foundation programs should be integral, not secondary, to the brand, while the foundation should be based on the principles of the actual business and operation at hand. Most importantly, she noted, “make sure your programs aren’t window dressing. Make sure they are making a true and real difference.” The result? “You’ll find that you’re helping the business,” she said, “and that people feel really good about that because you’re really helping people, and you keep getting invited back to the room.” 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.

Emily Nonko | February 20, 2021

How to Make Your Recruiting Metrics More Transparent

Company recruiting metrics were once fairly simple. They consisted of reactive data that measured such factors as the time to hire, the cost per hire, and the number of hires made in a given period. This was considered a one-size-fits-all approach for companies across the board. The problem is, those metrics didn’t really work. They never told a company the full story when it came to recruiting productivity and the impact of recruiting on the company’s bottom line. With better technology, however, “we’re now able to provide more strategic results and reports that are directly linked to better outcomes,” says Viet Nguyen, head of customer talent advisory for the talent-acquisition company Gem. “Recruiting is no longer a tactical and reactive function, it becomes a strategic arm of the business.” In a presentation at From Day One’s virtual conference on acquiring skilled talent in the year ahead, Nguyen spoke about which recruiting metrics matter to whom–and how often you should be reporting them. He laid out just how granular these metrics should get and how those details can pay off for the overall company. To make the transition toward strategic reporting, Nguyen suggested that companies shouldn’t get hung up on the past. “This is a trap that’s easy to fall into with reporting,” he noted. “What you really want to do is use historical data to predict the future.” Recruitment leaders should also know their organizational goals from the get-go, be prepared to make internal comparisons, and report on the why, not the what. “It’s a step toward solving the problem as opposed to reporting on the what, which isn’t nearly as productive as you could be,” said Nguyen. As far as what metrics are most helpful for C-level leadership, Nguyen highlighted the business impacts of recruiting–“how it affects revenue, productivity and innovation”–as well as the importance of full transparency around metrics that impact business results. He added that leadership should leave space for additional comments, ideas or changes. “The last metric should be what’s top of mind for [the C-level] in that moment,” Nguyen said. One report that company leaders should consider is the time to fill a position and how you’re pacing against it. “This report gives executives an idea of how recruiting is tracking against the original plan,” according to Nguyen. The longer a role stays open, the more likely it is to negatively affect that area of the business. “So having an idea of when goals can be filled is incredibly important to allow the rest of the business to forecast effectively,” he said. Viet Nguyen, head of customer talent advisory for the recruiting platform Gem (Photo courtesy of Gem) Another potential report is “cost of vacancy,” which is the payroll-and benefit-savings minus revenue lost to a vacant role. “Simply put, it's the cost of a role remaining open longer than intended,” Nguyen said. This metric should be tracked over time; it will help demonstrate how recruiting impacts the bottom line of the business, as it can be tied back to revenue. Nguyen delved deep into the topic of diversity, suggesting that companies set realistic diversity hiring goals, figure out what diversity goals look like “at the top of the funnel,” and commit to long-term investments in diversity over short-term fixes. He shared a highly-detailed report that tracked applicants' race and gender alongside metrics like when they submitted their application, if they had phone or onsite interviews, and if an offer was extended. “Diversity is something that's top of mind for executives, so they'll want to get into the details,” he noted. Nguyen focused sharply on pass-through rates, which he called “the single best metric recruiters have to debug a pipeline.” He added, “the pass-through rates will make it abundantly clear where there's a problem in the interview process, interviewer quality, candidate quality, or a combination of the three.” In this case there’s no single metric to put into use; ideally companies need to set specific goals and mentor team members on how to read pass-through data. A “source of hire” report is simpler but still a valuable asset. “Looking at this report will tell you which sources are providing the highest volume and the highest quality of candidates,” said Nguyen. “By understanding these two metrics, recruiters and sourcers will know which channels yield the highest ROI for their time.” Finally, a capacity report will tell hiring managers how many total hours their team needs to dedicate to interviewing in order to hit hiring targets. “Every hour their team spends interviewing is an hour they're not spending on their primary business responsibilities,” said Nguyen. He suggested this report utilize historical data from the company, set the total hours expected of a hiring team, and allow the hiring manager to distribute hours across their team. Understanding how much time a hiring team spends on interviewing should translate into improved candidate experience. Companies can bolster recruitment data with candidate-experience surveys and by asking for—and recording—rejection reasons. Only 25% of companies make recruiting data available to their entire recruiting team. Fully 70% of hiring managers believe their recruiting organizations need to be more data-driven. These data points show there are lots of missed opportunities in fostering a transparent, data-driven recruiting culture that’s deeply connected to the company’s business goals. As Nguyen summarized: “Anchor your reporting to position recruiting as a strategic partner.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this thought-leadership spotlight, Gem. Please visit our conference page to register for more upcoming events. 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.

Emily Nonko | February 11, 2021

Five Strategies for Digital Recruiting Success in 2021

Talent acquisition did not come to a halt during the pandemic, but attitudes changed among both the job candidates and recruiters. The hiring process now needs to reflect the remote-work revolution. “Most office workers (83%) want to work from home at least one day a week, and half of employers (55%) anticipate that most of their workers will do so long after COVID-19 is not a concern,” reports PwC, based on a survey. “But if recruits–and recruiters–are working remotely at least part of the time, traditional talent acquisition processes just won’t cut it for firms that want to attract the best talent. Companies should digitize the way they recruit talent end to end: find talent, attract them, show them the ropes and make them feel part of the team.” How to adapt? Artificial intelligence is a precious tool in this regard. Eightfold AI, the inventor of a Talent Intelligence Platform rooted in deep-learning AI technology, serves 100 large enterprise and government customers. Steve Feyer, Eightfold’s director of product marketing, offered five strategies to recruiters in a presentation at From Day One’s virtual conference on attracting skilled talent in the new year. “Why do we need them?” he asked. “Well, the simple reality is that the beginning of 2021 is more uncertain than any year we have encountered as professionals. We don’t know what our organizations will need.” Eightfold's five strategies for these uncertain times: Hiring For Potential: The way we hire now is typically “the safe option,” Feyer said. “We want to hire someone who has done the job before.” The downside: the person who has had that job before may not be the ideal person for the job now, because that person is going to be motivated to do something new, or take a step further–a natural promotion, a new step in that role. People are really motivated to take the job that’s next for them in their career. When looking for candidates and checking their backgrounds, recruiters will see profiles showing their background. Yet what recruiters should be looking for are the skills that they have, as well as the skills they can readily acquire. “Cross-checking current skills and potential skills allows recruiters to understand who is going to be most motivated by this potential job offer, and therefore is going to be the most loyal, the most productive,” said Feyer. In fact, when hiring for potential, you really understand each candidate better. Steve Feyer, director of product marketing for Eightfold AI (Photo courtesy of Eightfold AI) Building a Talent Network: Talent re-discovery, the process of matching candidates who’ve previously applied for a job with new roles that have become available, took on new importance in the past year as companies scrambled to adapt to new situations. “Recruiting organizations have not been set up to do talent re-discovery historically,” said Feyer. “Recruiters do new sourcing for every job. They might not have the capabilities to look for silver medalists in their organization.” Most hiring networks now have disconnected recruiting channels: pools of past applicants, university recruiting, internal referrals, company alumni who don’t interact with each other. The way to do sourcing better is to build a single network to access all sources of talent. Recruiters should build a database and continue to nurture them, just as salespeople and marketers chase leads. One unified database is the handiest source–it’s cost-effective and cuts a lot of unnecessary steps. Creating Personalized Career Sites: Many organizations fail to make their career page as accessible as possible. The candidate has to manually select options and search for keywords. They’re typically returned a long list of jobs. They have to parse through all of the job descriptions and then, once they decide to apply, they have to painstakingly fill out an application. It takes, on average, 150 to 300 clicks to complete all the steps, Feyer said. “Recruiters might think that people who apply through the career site are not going to be qualified, because qualified candidates are just going to be so turned-off by the process that they’re not even going to apply,” said Feyer, explaining how recruiters tend to do their own thing in cases like this by reaching out to promising candidates individually. With a personalized career site, the candidate is encouraged to upload a resume, then the AI will scan the resume for keywords in the candidate’s experiences and skills. The program will then come up with a list of jobs for that person and show them the reasons those jobs are well-suited for them. Once the candidate is in the network, recruiters can easily retrieve their resume for other opportunities. To be effective, Feyer said, the AI program needs to have a deep understanding of the content, not just keywords—all the information that’s there. Hire Anywhere and Hire Virtually: Before remote work (and remote hiring) took hold, recruiters would typically hire people who lived within a 60-minute commuting range. Widening the search to an entire time zone, or beyond, opens up many more possibilities to find motivated talent. Not every role has to be on site. “I was not sold on this myself,” Feyer confessed. “We had a mindset that we wanted to be in-person. But then the pandemic hit, and we quickly decided that we needed to acknowledge people were not going to be at the office right away.” Opening up to other locations resulted in finding tremendously skilled workers from all around the U.S. “We were able to grow our productivity more than we’d have expected,” he said. Candidate Engagement: Once you have a network, how can you make sure they’ll come in when they’re ready? Communication is key. Feyer made another marketing analogy: we get emails every day from organizations that want to sell us something–and we ignore them most of the time. Yet, every now and then, we might get an email selling us something that meets our immediate needs, and we interact with them. That’s the mindset recruiters need to have as talent professionals: send messages to people who are ready to respond right then. The pre-established network and career site make the process an efficient one. “The content that you have is likely to be of great interest to some small portion of a talent network,” said Feyer. “So focus just on them: you’ll greatly increase the response rate.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this presentation, Eightfold AI. Please visit our conference page to register for more upcoming events. Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Angelica Frey | February 10, 2021

Is Your Employer Reputation Keeping Up With the Times?

Markita Jack has been working for First Horizon Bank for 21 years. Now the SVP of diversity and inclusion, she has always valued her company’s people-first approach and attention to social-justice issues. Last year, however, she gained a new appreciation for her corporate culture in the wake of the police killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and other Black people. Colleagues spontaneously reached out to her, a woman of color, expressing empathy for the situation in a way that felt genuine. In the midst of COVID-19, their extra measure of compassion was notable. “The pandemic only really shone the light on what we already knew about our culture in our organization,” she said. “But sometimes when you live in something, and you become accustomed to being in it, you don't really appreciate what you have, until then.” The banking executive talked about her experience in a panel discussion titled “Is Your Employer Reputation Keeping Up With the New World?,” a session during From Day One’s recent conference on acquiring skilled talent in the coming year. The speakers, all HR leaders, emphasized that an employer’s reputation is crucial in hiring and retaining sought-after workers–and that the components of that reputation include supportive corporate culture, a sense of mission, and humane working conditions. Among their observations: “Closer Than Ever,” the Importance of Company Culture: “What we have witnessed and seen has brought us together, more than ever,” said Ajay Sah, a VP and head of talent acquisition at Capgemini, a global consulting and technology firm. “I have been more close to my ecosystem, my colleagues, my customers. I've been more close to them today than ever, including my candidates-to-be, to be honest,” said Sah, a 15-year veteran of the company. The importance of building a strong culture in calmer times is to prepare for the inevitable crises down the line.  “We were able to respond to 2020, based on what the foundation that we'd already laid prior to 2020,” said Jack. “But that is why it's great as an organization to always be engaged, to always show who you are in the community, to always support your associates.” She added: “Can you imagine not having a great culture, not having connectivity, not having teamwork, and then experiencing the tsunami that we experienced last year?” Your Mission Is Your Brand: “Candidates are interviewing you!,” said Saloni Ahuja Shah, head of talent acquisition at Coty, the global beauty company. “I’ve been asked, both from entry-level  and C-level candidates, “What are you doing differently? How are you handling the COVID crisis?” The answers tell how empathetic a company’s leaders are in the moment, but in the long run, having a genuine mission is what leaves a lasting impression on prospective employees. Speaking on employer reputation, top row from left: Moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, Peggy Anderson of Shutterfly, and Markita Jack of First Horizon Bank. Bottow row, from left: Saloni Ahuja Shah of Coty and Ajay Sah of Capgemini (Image by From Day One) In the case of Coty, celebrating diversity has become a core value, Shah said. The company has long been associated with iconic brands including Calvin Klein and Gucci, but more recently,  brands like Kylie Skin by Kylie Jenner. “Some of the brands we have in house are in tune with the world around us, so that corporate [management] can get wind of what's happening in the marketplace,” Shah said. “Kylie’s following is incredibly diverse, and it is dominated by people of color. And she has done a really tremendous job in speaking up, as has her sister, Kim Kardashian West, with social justice and police reform. People can laugh about it all they want on social media, but what's right is right, and she was doing the right thing.” The company’s message, as a whole, has gone from the old-school entrepreneurial “Own it, Thrive it,” to “Beauty Within,” conveying a sense of going beyond the superficial idea of attractiveness. Capgemini’s Sah affirmed the importance of a company’s mission, and emphasized that an employer brand has to be genuine. “The future of talent acquisition is talent branding, engaging talent at scale using technology,” he said. “But before you give a message, you have to have a message.” Benefits Won’t Just Be About Perks or Money: The pandemic has reshaped work culture, creating a crisis in caregiving, especially for working moms. Employers should try to help in every way they can, but that has to be balanced with the realities of business in a recession. “Let’s be honest: 2020 was a rough business year, for almost every American company,” said Peggy Anderson, who leads talent acquisition at Shutterfly. “2021 is going to be a challenge in order to be able to get the business going. It could be challenging for companies to add benefits. We’re still rebounding. But what we have done is shine a spotlight on the benefits we do have.” Specifically, she said, managers were instructed to embrace a philosophy that doesn’t necessarily cost money, which is primarily about flexibility, or the compassionate “grace and space." A 9-to-6 schedule no longer meets the needs of employees who, say, from 8 to 12 have to supervise their child’s remote-school session. And no one should expect to have a perfectly laid-out plan. “As much as I would love to say we’ve been so strategic, that’s not the case,” said Jack. “We’re looking at lagging indicators–we did not have predictive analytics. We changed tires on a moving truck. We iterated along the way.” Added Coty’s Shah: “We’re not in a position to give more in terms of money. But we can give more in terms of time, in a context of an agile work environment. Covid was a beta test to see if it worked, and it worked.” Lesson learned: When companies can respond well to challenging times by challenging their own assumptions, word gets around. Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Angelica Frey | February 10, 2021

Why America Needs a 'Marshall Plan for Moms'

From a widely publicized op-ed in The Hill to last week’s celebrity-laden ad in the New York Times, the proposed Marshall Plan for Moms has been making headlines and simultaneously highlighting some alarming statistics. The numbers reflecting the impact of the pandemic on working women and mothers are staggering: An estimated 5.4 million have lost their jobs since last February. As of September, there were three working mothers unemployed for every father who’d lost a job. The percentage of American women in the workforce is currently the lowest it has been in 32 years. But those figures come as little surprise to any working mother who’s been weathering the pandemic while juggling the seemingly insurmountable demands of home and coronavirus working conditions. Reshma Saujani, the plan’s architect and founder of Girls Who Code, knows all too well the challenges being faced by mothers in the American workforce. Their situation was stressful enough even before the pandemic, she said, speaking on a Zoom call from her son’s bedroom in a From Day One webinar with fellow mother and Maven Clinic founder Kate Ryder, also a signatory to the New York Times ad. But now the demands on working mothers in American society are exponentially worse, and failure to address them will result in devastating setbacks, undoing decades of female progress in the workforce. “I think the thing that’s so scary is how quickly we lost so many gains,” said Saujani, the mother of two children ages six and one, pointing out that labor participation among women in the U.S. has declined to levels not seen since the 1980s. “That happened in nine months," she said. "That should frighten all of us." Saujani was speaking from a particularly well-versed place; she started Girls Who Code a decade ago to fix the “pipeline problem” that had contributed to a low percentage of women in tech jobs. “Ten years later, almost, we have taught over 300,000 girls to code,” she said. “We have 10,000 Girls Who Code clubs across the country. When we started Girls Who Code, almost 18% of computer science graduates were women–and now, in some schools, it’s almost as high as 50%. So it’s no longer a pipeline problem.” “The work that we’re really focused on is rooting out bias, sexual discrimination, racial discrimination, to make sure that tech companies actually hire these amazing women,” Saujani said. Yet now, thanks to the pandemic, the challenge is retaining these women in the workforce. “If we’re ever going to solve climate, if we’re going to solve Covid, if we’re going to solve cancer, we need women sitting around the table,” Saujani said. “Women are leaving the workforce now not because we don’t want to work, but because of child care–and because our companies that we work at, oftentimes, don’t respond with the flexibility that we need.” “And so I, out of anger and frustration and desperation, wrote an op-ed, and it resonated with millions of women who said: I feel seen. And so now we’re going to get it done. Because that’s what we do as moms, right? You know, the fabric of our society is based upon motherhood. As we build America back better, we have an opportunity to build motherhood back better. And I think we should take full advantage of that.” The conversation on women and work: clockwise from upper right, moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, Kate Ryder of Maven, and Reshma Saujani of Girls Who Code (Image by From Day One) Her proposal for a Marshall Plan for Moms, a reference to the 1948 U.S. government program that spent billions of dollars to help rebuild Europe after World War II, calls on President Biden to implement, in his first 100 days, significant protections for working mothers. But Saujani remains a realist about the blowback and the challenges–as does Ryder, whose company provides health care for women and families. “At the end of the day, your moms are going to pick their children over their jobs,” said Ryder, “and so how do you support the moms who will always make that choice, which I think almost all moms will make?” She continued: “For moms that have left the workforce but then want to come back, how do you create returnships in a really profound and pronounced way?” To do that, Ryder said, employers must be “super thoughtful about what flexibility means for their organization and how to really make a leadership-level and board-level imperative to maintain gender equity in the workforce.” If a company has lost a lot of women, she added, it needs strategies to bring them back. That’s a tall order, she and Saujani agreed–particularly when women were “already facing a motherhood penalty and a fatherhood premium in the workplace,” the Girls Who Code founder said. “I think the penalty is going to be even greater when we go back, unless we do something about this case and we’re very intentional about rooting out the deepened bias that we have towards motherhood that has also, I think, been exacerbated by this pandemic–because now you really see our roles, doing all the unpaid work.” In her own life, Saujani said, she’s become–on any given day, at any given moment–nanny, tech support, cleaner, cook and mental-health counselor. “As you’re thinking about a reopening plan, and you’re figuring out the cost of keeping teachers safe, I want you to calculate the cost of lost labor–factor that in,” she said. “Until you really start putting a value on our unseen, unpaid labor, nothing changes.” “The second thing is, we need to pass policies like affordable day care and paid leave,” Saujani said. “There are some good ideas that are in Biden’s plan right now in terms of bailing out the day-care industry and making sure that low-income mothers, in particular, get a tax credit to pay for child care. But it can’t just be a one-year stopgap. We need real structural change.” “The third thing is, look, schools have to be open five days a week, period. If we don’t open up schools five days a week, safely, then we’re going to be in the 1960s” in terms of gender equity, she said. “So we should be working on, again: What do we need to do in terms of batch testing, keeping teachers safe, social distancing in the schools? “And lastly, what are we doing to bring women back?,” Saujani asked, picking up on Ryder’s earlier point. “The vast majority of those working in retail and health care and education are women and women of color. And a lot of those jobs are not coming back. So how do we retrain women for the jobs of tomorrow–and then for women who have left and want to come back?” To support and retain moms on their workforces, companies need to expand their concepts of job flexibility, said Ryder. Some “leading companies” are doing a commendable job, she said, “telling people that they could keep full benefits, which are really expensive, [and] they could work part-time, so they could work on a reduced schedule.” At many companies, Ryder said, “if you go down to 25, 30 hours a week, and you work with your managers on that, then there’s no penalty.” Employers should be “really, really clear about what those rules are,” she added. “You really have to get in at a manager level and train them for how to work with their teams and assign some kind of support on how to pick up some of that work if somebody goes part-time.” Oftentimes, she said, there are a lot a good intentions on setting these flexibility policies, but then in some cases employees are “at the whim of the manager–and how was the manager adapting to that? What tools did they have?” Integral to solving the growing problem, Saujani said, is gathering the knowledge and data to know its true extent. There is a need, she said, “to be specific about who is suffering–what are they struggling with, how do we help mothers at our workplace? What are the things that they need?” “I think the first way that you actually solve the problem is by being specific and by being intentional, so really getting the data. How many mothers have left? Why have they left? What are the needs that they have? You know, is it about child care? Is it about an aging parent? What would it take for them to actually come back to work?” She continued: “This point about the motherhood penalty is going to be huge. We already know that so many women are asked, ‘Hey, are you planning on having another kid? How young are your kids? What’s your child-care situation at home?’ [Employers are] already trying to assume that, because we have kids, we’re suddenly not as interested in our careers,” Saujani said. In the aftermath of the pandemic, “that is simply going to be exacerbated. So in the same way that we’ve been doing a ton of unconscious-bias training, and really trying to root out some of the inherent bias that we have, we’re going to have to do the same when it comes to the motherhood penalty,  because we are going to pay a bigger tax for this, post-Covid,” Saujani said. “And if we’re not careful, we’re really quickly going to get back to where we were in the 1960s. Before we know it.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this webinar, Maven Clinic. You can watch a video of the conversation From Day One webinar. 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.

Sheila Flynn | February 05, 2021

Why Companies Should Have 'Rebel Talent' in Their Ranks

When Harvard Business School professor Francesca Gino thinks of a workplace culture that effectively encouraged unconventional talent, 18th-century pirate ships come to mind. More than a century before slavery ended in the U.S., these ships were the most diverse organizations on the planet because they hired people not based on gender or race but because of their attitudes and belief in the mission. Together they worked out an equitable leadership style, with members of the crew in charge of electing the captain. So what do pirate ships have to do with the modern American workplace? More than you might think, argues Gino, author of Rebel Talent: Why It Pays to Break the Rules at Work and in Life. During a conversation with Fortune features editor Kristen Bellstrom at a From Day One virtual conference on acquiring skilled talent, Gino discussed not only the history of nonconformist  workers but how rebels can change things for the better and can be employees who help businesses evolve and succeed. “People say, what is that magic percentage, what is the percentage that can make my organization great when it comes to rebels?” Gino told Bellstrom. “I say you want 100%.” Gino is an award-winning researcher who focuses on why people make the decisions they do at work. Originally, she studied misconduct like the accounting scandal involving Enron Corp. “As I was doing this research,” she said, “I kept noticing a very different side of rule breaking, people who were approaching the world with unconventional looks and were driving positive change.” Gino outlined five rebel qualities: novelty, curiosity, perspective, diversity and authenticity. “These features don’t come naturally to us because of human nature,” she noted. Most of us get comfortable with our routines. Novelty, for example, introduces disruptions to the day-to-day. One positive trait to rebels is that they embrace conflict in a productive way. “Three ingredients that are important there are authenticity, curiosity and perspective,” Gino said. Authenticity means that rebels have the courage to speak their minds. Perspective allows them to be open to different possibilities. And curiosity opens up new dialogue and the potential to go down different paths. The subject was rebel talent: from left, Kristen Bellstrom of Fortune and Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School (Image by From Day One) These are key qualities to workplace leaders, too, which have emerged during the pandemic. “This crisis revealed good leadership and really bad leadership,” Gino said. “Leaders who I wouldn’t call rebels don’t have trust in their people, they’re not providing them enough freedom,” she said. “A lot of leaders reverted back to micromanaging, which is not good for engagement or creativity.” Rebel leaders work to make positive changes in their organization, as opposed to waiting for change to happen. Gino used an example of an Air Force leader who rebelled against the follow-the-rules culture and empowered his squadron to express authenticity, curiosity and offer their own perspectives. “If you look at the number of the innovations that came out of the group in the last three years, it’s really impressive,” she said. The rebel talent of diversity is also relevant to the recent focus on workplace equity and inclusion plans. “Rebels are able to push back on stereotypical views that society passes upon us–they’re truly leveraging their differences,” Gino explained. In a workplace setting, these rebels should be empowered to help others feel included. “We want to be in situations, in organizations, feeling that our differences are cherished and leveraged. I think that rebels tend to do that better than ‘regular people.’” But as Gino points out, rebel talent can be–and should be–encouraged and nurtured for every employee, at every level. (You can actually take a rebel test on her website to figure out the kind of rebel you are.) Among the characteristics of novelty, curiosity, perspective, diversity and authenticity, “nothing should worry us,” she said. To attract and encourage rebelliousness in the hiring process, Gino suggested that companies focus on the questions they ask job candidates. “For curiosity, a good question is what organizations or industries they follow,” she suggested. “See if they’re just following the organization in the same industry that they’re applying, or if they’re broadening their interest.” To embody perspective, Gino gave an example set by the CEO of the social-good platform Catchafire, who poses challenges to the job applicant and pays attention if they solve it from a different standpoint than her own. The conversation ended on how employees could encourage rebel talent in their own workplaces. The power of suggestion can go far, Gino said, especially when it’s positioned as an opportunity for more talent to come forward. To kickstart things, employees can act as rebels themselves: “Start small … but get going!” said Gino. “Don’t wait for others to pave the road for you–just get started.” 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.

Emily Nonko | January 29, 2021

Measuring Skills in Job Candidates: How to Be Objective?

You might imagine the Federal Bureau of Investigation to be a workplace where tradition and decorum trumps innovation and flexibility. But that assumption would be out of date. When COVID-19 hit, it forced virtually every organization to adapt–including the FBI. “Everything we thought we would do at the beginning of the year got tossed out the window,” said Peter Sursi, the agency’s senior executive for recruitment and hiring. “It’s been good in that we’ve been able to tell hiring managers: No matter what job you hire someone for, technology will change, the company will change, and you want someone who will learn, adapt and grow.” Sursi spoke in a panel discussion on new ways of measuring skills in job candidates, part of From Day One’s conference this month on acquiring skilled talent in the year ahead. As companies adapted to new ways of organizing work, employees have adopted–and in some cases embraced–different skills. So what does that mean for job applicants and incoming employees? How can those skills be identified in the hiring process? What are the long-term implications for recruitment and building out a diverse-talent pipeline? Moderated by Myla Skinner, chief of staff for the educational advocacy group OneGoal, the expert panelists told about the changes they’re making in the hiring process in light of the pandemic, remote work, and the racial-justice movement. Iriet Schulman, director of talent acquisition for Condé Nast, noted that recruiting significantly slowed when COVID-19 hit and allowed hiring managers to figure out an “action plan.” As hiring picks back up, there’s focus on “cultivating an inclusive vision,” she added. Jennifer McClellan, senior director of talent pipelines and specialty recruiting for the global software company Citrix Systems, added that with roles opening up, “managers are definitely being thoughtful about finding the right fit, but some also want to move quickly.” One obvious change in recruitment is that the process happens virtually. “Being virtual has caused some problems and some openings,” said McClellan. For one thing, it may reduce the tendency of managers to hire subjectively. “Being able to see yourself in a candidate happens more so in person. The virtual ability has opened the hiring manager’s perspective, because they don’t see the immediate body language.” McClellan’s company has been exploring new ways to use virtual hiring to objectively assess its growing applicant pool. Objectivity was an important topic throughout the panel and emphasized by Rob Bennett, senior director of sales for SkillSurvey, a provider of reference-checking, sourcing and post-hire solutions. “How do we get hiring managers to objectively–that’s key today–interview the final pool of candidates so they’re making the best decision for the organization, their team and their style?,” he asked. McClellan shared some strategies. He suggested that diversity-and-inclusion leaders guide the company in adopting more objective interviewing skills and that hiring managers are trained accordingly. It’s less about advertising jobs in specific communities, but “how to help managers hire people that don’t just look just like them,” he said. “Organizations that are doing that in the hiring process are going to see the value of their organization grow tremendously due to the fact that they’re bringing in more inclusive behaviors. It’s going to show on their bottom line.” McClellan said consistency is key: “We want to help hiring managers thinking about the competencies and sticking to consistency across their interviews, so that they really get a full picture when they’re comparing candidates.” Schulman added that an employer should also reflect diversity in its interviewing panel, “so that people who are interviewing can see someone they have someone in common with on the other end.” Speakers on talent acquisition in the year ahead, clockwise from upper left: Myla Skinner of OneGoal, Jennifer McClellan of Citrix Systems, Iriet Schulman of Condé Nast, Rob Bennett of SkillSurvey and Peter Sursi of the FBI (Image by From Day One) Flexibility was emphasized both for job candidates and the companies themselves. At the FBI, Sursi put a focus on “learning agility” for candidates. He’s also working with the organization’s internal hiring managers to set expectations for the quickly-changing workforce. “We have a very long-term culture that we don’t woo people, people come to us,” he said. “That’s great, but white guys come to us and other people don’t. I need you to woo a little bit more,” he tells managers. Since the dramatic changes in corporate work are likely to continue for some time, adaptability will need to be an abiding value. “When you’re evaluating talent, you have to be thinking long term,” as Bennett put it. “The hardest group within our organization are going to be the managers, who are wondering why they might have to go back into the office. When we evaluate talent, are we going to measure them on that adaptability?” At Condé Nast, Schulman said there is still some flexibility on employee location and working remotely. “From a candidate pool perspective, I’m seeing a lot of candidates applying who are not local,” she said. “I really think it depends on the role at hand and what the hiring managers are comfortable with.” At the FBI, Sursi added, how to integrate telework into a traditionally in-person office will pose new challenges. Citrix Systems is taking advantage of remote work when it comes to tighter talent pools like IT. “You have to be thoughtful about how you engage those folks because I think everyone starts to suffer from virtual exhaustion,” McClellan said. “Balancing that with going back into the office–you’ve got to advertise [remote work] as an opportunity while still keeping that engagement a high priority in order to move the work forward.” At the end of the panel, Skinner summed up a recurring theme about inclusion and engagement: “It’s actually not as much about the candidates coming in, but more about the work environment, the people internally, and how they orient to the candidates whether they’re remote, Gen Z, or millennials.” As Schulman put it: “This last year has brought a lot of light to companies about inclusion, diversity and an equitable workforce. That’s something that’s always top of mind for me, as head of recruitment, and I know it’s top of mind for a lot of companies. I hope that doesn’t fade away.” 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.

Emily Nonko | January 26, 2021

The Breakup: How Corporate America Finally Split With Trump

They were warned, repeatedly. They saw all the evidence: the thousands of lies, the conspiracy theories, the racial divisiveness, the tendency to encourage violence, nearly three decades of well-documented misogyny, and the political exploitation of a pandemic. But despite all that, Corporate America’s leaders felt they had to do business with Donald Trump. “He is the president of the United States. I believe he is the pilot flying our airplane,” said JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon, one of America’s most respected bankers, early in Trump’s tenure. “I would try to help any president of the United States because I’m a patriot.” The ensuing relationship between Corporate America and President Trump was bumpy at times, most dramatically when Trump declared that there were “very fine people on both sides” during the outbreak of white-nationalist violence in Charlottesville, Va. But for the most part, America’s business leaders went along for the ride. Trump became an ally in lucrative ways, rewarding corporations with major tax cuts and rolled-back regulations. Now they’re essentially done with him, provoked by Trump’s toxic myth of a stolen election and the Jan. 6 assault by his believers on the U.S. Capitol. In the days before Trump was impeached for an unprecedented second time, by a vote of 232-197 in the House for “incitement of insurrection,” corporate leaders began distancing themselves from Trump at increasing speed. First came the immediate statements of shock and dismay, echoing from Wall Street to Silicon Valley. Citigroup CEO Michael Corbat said he was “disgusted by the actions of those who have stormed the U.S. Capitol.” Accenture CEO Julie Sweet called for elected officials to “bring to justice the perpetrators of today’s violent assault on our country.” Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, Google’s parent company, said in an email to employees that the events were “shocking and scary for all of us.” He added: “The lawlessness and violence occurring on Capitol Hill today is the antithesis of democracy and we strongly condemn it.” JPMorgan’s Dimon weighed in with his own strong condemnation. Even two of Trump’s billionaire backers, Blackstone Group CEO Steve Schwarzman and Home Depot co-founder Ken Langone, said they were horrified at the turn of events. Their support for a fellow businessman as the country’s CEO had ended in catastrophe. Langone told CNN that he felt “betrayed” by the Republicans who attempted to overturn the election. "Last Wednesday was a disgrace and should never have happened in this country and if it doesn't break every American's heart, something is wrong. It breaks my heart, for sure. I didn't sign up for that," said Langone, adding that he would “do everything I can” to support President-elect Biden. Then came the acts of separation. Trump’s internet empire collapsed as Twitter, Facebook and other social-media platforms shut him down. Trump’s business partners, ranging from the PGA Tour to the real-estate giant Cushman & Wakefield, terminated deals with him. His bankers started closing his accounts. The city of New York dropped him as the manager of ice rinks and a golf course. Major corporations halted their campaign donations, in some cases to all 147 Republican members of Congress who heeded Trump’s call to object to Biden’s victory. In an extraordinary move, the National Association of Manufacturers, long loyal to Trump, burned its bridge by calling for him to be removed from office. “This is chaos,” said the group’s statement. “It is mob rule. It is dangerous. This is sedition and should be treated as such. The outgoing president incited violence in an attempt to retain power.” All told, Trump fell practically overnight from a problematic partner to a full-fledged pariah. More importantly, the end of the Trump era raises a host of questions about how Corporate America moves past the effects of its relationship with a president who Slate described in 2017 as “a walking violation of a host of human-resources policies [who] stands in stark opposition to the corporate-style progressivism that permeates so many consumer-facing companies today.” Among the questions: What should corporations do to shore up democracy? Should they be taking more of a stand on social and political issues? How can they address the deep polarization that may divide their employees and customers? And how can they respond to the renewed shock of their Black employees who, less than a year after George Floyd’s death, witnessed an assault on the U.S. Capitol by rioters carrying Confederate flags? A closer look at Corporate America’s relationship with Trump and what lessons may have been learned: Enabling a Dishonorable Leader   As corporate leaders ran away from Trump, business journalists were eager to ask what took them so long–and who should be held accountable. “There were many enablers–educated, smart, articulate, often wealthy people who were willing to ignore Mr. Trump’s threat to democracy in the name of economic growth, lower taxes, lighter regulations, or simply access and proximity to power,” wrote the editors of the Dealbook newsletter from the New York Times. “At a time when business leaders tout their ‘values’ and ‘social responsibility,’ how should those enablers–and the institutions they run–be considered after all this?” “This is what happens when we subordinate our moral principles for what we perceive to be business interests,” said Darren Walker, the president of the Ford Foundation and a board member at Square and Ralph Lauren, in a conversation with David Gelles of the Times. “It is ultimately bad for business and bad for society.” Calling CEOs complicit in the Washington riot, Hank Gilman, editorial director of Newsweek, wrote: “You have to do business with politicians you don’t agree with. But you don’t have to check your morals at the door.” His prescription: cut off the money. He urged corporations to halt campaign funding for Trump’s Republican enablers in Congress as well as far-right Washington lobbying organizations. Disconnecting the Tweeter-in-Chief Before he was impeached a second time, Trump suffered nearly as consequential a calamity for a master of social media: he was de-platformed. Twitter, where the president had more than 88 million followers, first suspended his account temporarily after Jan. 6 and then made it permanent, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence.” Facebook, whose founder Mark Zuckerberg had declared at a White House dinner in 2019 that Trump was “No. 1 on Facebook,” banned Trump indefinitely, as well as on the company’s Instagram platform. “We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great,” Zuckerberg said in a statement. Trump’s use of social media had been a point of contention for years, pitting arguments in favor of free speech vs. alarms about the thousands of falsehoods he spread on issues ranging from the coronavirus to mail-in ballots. While the relationship between Trump and the platforms was stormy, it was immensely lucrative for both sides. The deadly rioting on Jan. 6, as well as Trump’s unrepentant statements afterward, finally tipped the balance. “The internet as most people know it has decided that Trump is no longer welcome. It’s a turning point for digital speech that was years in the making, but it took just a few hours to happen,” wrote David Ingram of NBC News. Trump supporters outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, when rioters stormed the building (Photo by Chris Kleponis/Sipa USA via AP) The sudden moves left Trump supporters wandering in the social-media wilderness. Other tech giants joined the clampdown as Trump fans migrated from the mainstream platforms to freewheeling, conservative-friendly sites like Parler, which has been accused of providing a venue for planning the Capitol attack. Amazon responded to the situation by kicking Parler off its cloud-computing service, leaving the platform at least temporarily homeless. (Parler has sued Amazon for the move.) Both Apple and Google had already booted Parler from their app stores. “It was the nuclear option,” given the “extraordinary circumstance” of the assault on the Capitol, said Columbia University First Amendment scholar Katie Fallow. In an internet environment dominated by the giants, the maverick site Parler will face a difficult road back, in part because it was so poorly constructed that a hacker says she was able to scrape 99% of the posts from the service, thus pulling back any presumed cloak of secrecy for its users. Have the events of January inspired social media to grow a conscience? To some degree. “What we’re seeing is a shift from the platforms from a stance of free-speech absolutism, towards an understanding of speech moderation as a matter of public health,” said civic-media professor Ethan Zuckerman of the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, in comments to the AP. Yet more radical reforms may be necessary, especially since ascendant Democrats in Washington are contemplating a punishing wave of regulation. “Until social media companies are willing to fundamentally change their sites by making them far less attractive to people seeking to post divisive content, deeply troubling posts will continue to spread quickly and broadly,” wrote tech journalist Greg Bensinger in the New York Times. Washing Out the Stain of the Trump Brand In a movement that became a stampede, brand-name businesses and other organizations moved swiftly to disassociate with Trump’s businesses, which were already struggling during the pandemic. The PGA of America announced that it would terminate an agreement to play next year’s PGA Tournament at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, N.J. Losing the PGA event, one of the big four tournaments on the pro golf tour, is a major blow to the Trump Organization’s golf businesses, which reportedly account for nearly half of the company’s revenue. Real-estate giant Cushman & Wakefield, which handles leasing for many of Trump’s properties, declared this week that it “would no longer do business with the Trump Organization.” Other business partners cutting off Trump were Shopify, which ran the president’s e-commerce stores, and Stripe, which processed payments for Trump’s campaign website. With a hint of relish, Trump’s former hometown of New York City terminated its contracts with him to run two ice rinks, the Central Park Carousel and a golf course in the Bronx. “Inciting an insurrection against the U.S. government clearly constitutes criminal activity,” declared Mayor Bill de Blasio. “The City of New York will no longer have anything to do with the Trump Organization.” Since it was Trump’s speedy 1986 renovation of the decrepit Wolman Rink that launched him as a media celebrity, the end of the contract is particularly symbolic of Trump’s fall from local hero to persona non grata. Bankers were deserting Trump as well. Deutsche Bank, one of the last of Trump’s institutional lenders, “is moving to distance itself from the President’s business and is unlikely to lend it more money,” a source told the Wall Street Journal. New York-based Signature Bank said it was closing two of Trump’s personal accounts and put out a statement telling him to resign. Since Trump has more than $300 million in personally-guaranteed debt coming due in the next four years–he has haughtily called it “a peanut”–he could be facing a financial crisis of his own before long. To raise cash, his company has been attempting to sell the long-term lease on his opulent hotel in the Old Post Office building in Washington, D.C., as well as his stake in two office towers in New York City and San Francisco. Essentially, by refusing to abide a peaceful transition to private life, the president sabotaged the potential recovery of the Trump brand. “Through his encouragement of rioters who ransacked the U.S. Capitol, Trump has made his company a pariah and driven away allies who could have brought it revenue and post-politics credibility,” the Washington Post concluded. Hitting Pause on Campaign Contributions A parade of companies moved briskly to suspend political donations to the 147 Republican members of Congress who objected to certifying the election results on Jan. 6. Among those was Walmart, which has 1.5 million U.S. employees and has become a bellwether on social issues in recent years. Other companies cutting off contributions were Marriott, Dow, Airbnb, and Morgan Stanley. (Hallmark went a step further, asking two Republican senators for its money back.) “This is spreading like wildfire,” Yale management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld told the Associated Press. “The U.S. business community has interests fully in alignment with the America public and not with Trump’s autocratic bigoted wing of the GOP.” While many other corporate donors shut off the campaign-finance spigot for now, some were more circumspect in doing so, pausing donations to both parties (even though that also penalized lawmakers who voted to uphold the election). They included Google, Goldman Sachs, Ford, Citigroup and Coca-Cola. The de-funding moves came surprisingly fast. “It looks like it is sincere for many of the corporations,” Craig Homan, a campaign-finance expert with Public Citizen, a liberal consumer-advocacy organization, told the AP. “There was no big public push or pressure to get Marriott and others to announce they would no longer make campaign contributions. They did it on their own–they shocked everyone in the campaign finance community.” The impact of these moves will be mostly symbolic, however, since corporate contributions make up only a fraction of total campaign donations–and are likely to start flowing again when the 2022 Congressional races heat up. (Major tech and media companies have donated to the Biden inaugural committee.) Even so, several groups intend to keep the heat on. The Leadership Now Project, a pro-democracy a coalition of business leaders, plans to encourage companies to withhold funding from elected officials and media channels deemed to have spurred the insurrection. Talking to Employees About Yet Another Crisis As they have done so many times in the past year in response to the pandemic, racial injustice and economic recession, business leaders were obliged to tell their employees where they stood. In one notable case, Visa CEO Al Kelly went beyond the standard condemnation of violence and addressed the misinformation that inspired it. “Absolutely no facts since the election have surfaced to suggest that Biden’s victory is not totally legitimate,” Kelly said in a memo to employees. “We at Visa stand 100% behind the result of the election and the collective voices of the citizens of this country.” Since workers tend to trust their employers for information more than other sources, business leaders have a potentially strong role in rebutting noxious myths and conspiracy theories. “When major events like this happen, with millions of people watching, the workplace spillover is inevitable,” noted three business professors writing last week in Harvard Business Review. Executives may be uncomfortable about addressing events that bring up strong emotions and opinions among employees–and wind up saying little or nothing. “Resist that tendency. You need to instead lean into this moment of disbelief, frustration, anger, fear, and anything else people might be feeling–not only today but from here on out,” they counseled, offering specific advice to managers about talking to their teams. “This is yet another opportunity for managers to put those corporate ideals into practice on the ground.” The fallout from Jan. 6 may apply in extra measure to Black employees, who not only saw a white mob assault the U.S. Capitol, but could plainly see racial inequities in how the law-enforcement response was much more restrained than the often brutal tactics used recently on racial-justice protestors. "No one can tell me that if it had been a group of Black Lives Matter protesters yesterday that they wouldn't have been treated very differently than the mob that stormed the Capitol," Biden said in the aftermath. "We all know that's true–and it's unacceptable."  Shoring up Democracy as a Business Value In the aftermath of the assault on democracy, which is likely to continue for some time, does Corporate America have a greater interest in repairing the damage? Yes, writes Harvard professor Rebecca Henderson, author of Reimagining Capitalism in a World on Fire. “This week’s events have demonstrated that we cannot take our democracy for granted,” she writes. Citing polls that suggest that 45% of Republicans approve of the assault on the Capitol, implying that they see nothing wrong with trying to overturn an election by force, Henderson contends that “this belief is a fundamental threat to the long-term health of our economy and the strength of American business.” Without good government, corporations wouldn’t be able to rely on free and fair markets, public infrastructure, and the other conditions business needs to thrive. She suggested three initial steps for business leaders to take: speak out in support of democracy, act collectively, and address the roots of the problem. In a post-truth era, can business help lead the U.S. back toward a fact-based culture? There’s reason for optimism about that, writes David Kirkpatrick, editor-in-chief of Techonomy. “Conspiracy theories undermine the landscape in which business operates. It is, by definition, grounded in the world of facts. There is, truly, a bottom line. Otherwise, CEOs cannot properly run companies,” Kirkpatrick writes. “It’s only possible to make progress as a business if you know what is going on. Understanding that helps explain why business leaders now recognize they must speak out to try to remedy the unhinged and haywire direction in American public debate, and the ascendancy of fact-free opinion and irrational action.” Asking fundamental questions about the role of business in a democracy would be a good thing to do even at the startup level, when companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are being launched. “The U.S. has a long history of racism and class division, both of which were rapidly accelerated by tech booms,” writes Brooklyn-based venture capitalist Charlie O’Donnell in a thoughtful post on Substack. O’Donnell proposes that before VCs pour money into a venture, they should feel obligated to consider how a disruptive new business will affect workers, consumers, and society. “Should this matter to venture capitalists? Aren’t we all just it in for the money alone?” he asks. “Well, it’s kind of hard to make money if the long-term consequences of your investments threaten the free and open democracy that underpins our society.” Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time

Stephen Koepp | January 14, 2021

HR and the CEO: a Newly Critical Relationship for Success

It’s safe to say that the past year has expanded the role of HR–and probably in an enduring way. The onset of the pandemic, the abrupt shift to remote work, and the social-justice movement all brought human resources front and center. Among other things, companies had to face an issue–employee well-being–that could simply not be ignored. With HR breaking out of its departmental silo, the situation has presented an opportunity for HR leaders and top management, particularly CEOs, to align in creating a people strategy that’s more intentional. It’s a prospect that the cofounders of Emplify–a company that helps leaders measure, diagnose, and solve their employee-engagement challenges–had already taken advantage of, ultimately finding that such an alignment is beneficial to the bottom line. In a From Day One webinar moderated by Lydia Dishman, a contributing editor for Fast Company, Emplify CEO Santiago Jaramillo and Chief People Officer Adam Weber made a persuasive argument about why HR should be closely coordinated with the business decisions made by top leadership–and then outlined steps that companies can take to strengthen this relationship. “A trap sometimes for CEOs is that they only hear the positive things for a sustained period because of their role,” Weber said. “What can cause tension is that HR often knows the truth that the CEO may not be aware of. So how do you create environments where the CEO is willing to name their own blind spots?” Inviting HR leaders into the C-suite can be the first step. “CEOs can invite and give context about the business and what it means, and HR leaders can make business cases that tie the solutions to problems they so clearly see and feel to how it will help people and help the organization as well,” Jaramillo said. The speakers, clockwise from top right: Emplify's Adam Weber and Santiago Jaramillo, and moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company (Image by From Day One) Expectations of leadership and company values are changing, but many in the C-Suite have not caught up, Weber and Jaramillo assert. They believe a promising place to start in building strong HR and CEO relationships is by prioritizing and collaborating on manager development. “It can be that shared ground that CEOs can have with HR,” Jaramillo said. “HR plays a super-important role in the organization, but after initial onboarding, it’s the manager that has the overwhelming influence on employees,” Jaramillo added. Managers keep employees engaged, which has significant impact on a company’s financial performance. So what does it look like for the CEO and HR leader to collaborate on manager development? Data and surveys are a start, but there needs to be collaboration to prompt larger, company-wide change, the Emplify leaders say. Jaramillo shared best practices over three steps. The first is to gather important context through engagement data. The most accurate way to make these assessments, he added, is through anonymous surveys that employees know is confidential, ideally carried out by a third-party provider. “Your data is only good as the questions you ask and how safe people feel being honest,” he said. Measuring engagement, Jaramillo and Weber stressed, is different from measuring satisfaction. Satisfaction often relies on the status quo, while engagement digs into employee goals, the impact they desire. “It’s about measuring the heart-and-mind sentiment employees have for their work,” Jaramillo said. After a company has harnessed true employee engagement to understand their strengths, weaknesses and challenges, CEOs and HR leaders should align around their priorities to create a focused strategy. “When that [alignment] happens, 80% of the battle is won,” Jaramillo said. “Now it’s about simply executing and making improvements around that area.” The final step, according to Jaramillo, is developing a personalized development path for each manager. Some managers might need coaching, for example, or resources for remote-management skills. “Human behavioral change happens best with a coach,” he stressed. Beyond focusing on manager development, alignment between CEOs and HR leaders can have a positive impact on company culture. To a large degree, the complementary management roles of Jaramillo and Weber serve as an example of that kind of relationship. Said Weber, author of the new book Lead Like a Human: Practical Steps to Building Highly Engaged Teams: “I’ve been a bit of the cultural heartbeat, making sure our people are cared for and that the atmosphere of our company feels a certain way, and Santi represents the practical and strategic needs of the business and the pace and urgency needed to achieve goals.” He characterized it as a “head/heart combo.” Jaramillo, for his part, outlined what makes Weber a strategic HR leader: He balances mission, business and people, as well as being data-driven, which Jaramillo calls “the language of the C-suite." Weber focuses on engagement, training and development (as opposed to just hiring and firing), and partners closely with Jaramillo in regard to company well-being. The pair know firsthand the benefits of alignment and how it improves the development of other employees. “It works, when done well,” Jaramillo said. “It’s an amazing opportunity and the time is now to align around this.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this webinar, Emplify. You can watch a video of the conversation here. Please visit our conference page to register for more upcoming events. 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.

Emily Nonko | January 11, 2021

What It Takes to Build a Truly Transparent Workplace

One employee posted a photo of her young son at her desk, explaining why the demands of homeschooling were prompting her to temporarily switch to part-time work. Another very bluntly shared that she’d be late for a meeting–after staying out too long the night before and oversleeping. The disarmingly honest and personal posts by Kintone employees appeared on a widely viewable company portal. Such candor on the forum is appreciated and encouraged, a key element when it comes to building workplace transparency and a healthy corporate culture, said Dave Landa, CEO of Kintone, a tech company that provides an all-in-one workplace platform for teams. Transparency is “the necessary foundation for accountability and inclusion,” Landa said in a presentation about building a transparent workplace, speaking at From Day One’s December conference on inclusive leadership. “Culture is like the wind–so it was written in a Harvard Business Review article on leadership recently. It is invisible, yet its effect can be seen and felt,” Landa said. “When it’s with you, the sailing is smooth. When it’s against you, everything is a lot more difficult. And just like the wind, culture–company culture–can be elusive to grasp. Leaders cannot mandate culture; you can’t just say it and it is so,” Landa said. Then how do leaders create and manage it? “You have to be very intentional about it,” he said. “First off, you need to define that culture explicitly. You then have to establish policies, the right policies, that will help support it and guide it along toward that clearly defined culture.” As follow-up, “The next thing you need to do is create and give examples and activities to encourage that culture. And finally, you really need to provide tools and methods to continuously maintain and develop that culture,” Landa said. Dave Landa, CEO of Kintone (Photo courtesy of Kintone) Four elements are held above all else at Kintone to achieve the desired teamwork culture: Sharing a common vision; being oneself and taking responsibility; embracing individuality; and finally, transparency, Landa said. That’s why the company supports the public portal as a place for employees to share everything from the aforementioned employee explanations and admissions to information about what days and times they’ll be unavailable to work, to what they’re doing to make their work-from-home setups more convenient. Key to the ethos and practical implementation, Landa added, is complete honesty, whether it’s about lateness or expenses or other issues. “We have a few maxims that we always share to try to capture some of our beliefs and policies,” Landa said. “So first one, of course: It’s okay to mess up. But just don’t try to cover it up. And then, correct actions. Don’t blame people.” He emphasized the concept of “public first, private second,” explaining: “That’s really just a mindset. Anything that you’re going to be saying or doing should be public first by default. And that is really something that drives a lot of what we do.” Kintone additionally fuels that drive, Landa said, by “pursuing these elements intentionally to help build the empathy and the trust necessary for developing great culture and effective teamwork.” ‘It’s certainly not always easy,” he acknowledged. “And oftentimes, there are conflicts between these different elements. And it’s really important to work on balancing the different values that they represent. But for us, it gives us our true north that we’re always working toward.” Whether it’s at Kintone or other companies, transparency tends to increase worker happiness, which in turn increases productivity, Landa said. “So happiness, trust and productivity–they’re kind of like the antioxidants for organizations.” The ethos is mandated from the top. At Kintone, Landa said, high-level weekly executive meetings are open for other team members who want to participate or listen in. Notes are then shared from that meeting, with employees given the opportunity to question or comment online. Even expense procedures have been made more transparent in order to achieve company and cultural goals, he said. “We switched from a traditional, hierarchical, sort of opaque system–where managers approve expenses and then it moves on to finance for their review and approval–to a system where all company-card expenses are shared publicly together in a workbook at the end of each month within our central expenses space, which is on our publicly accessible portal,” he said. A slide from Landa's presentation (Graphic by Kintone) “Individuals essentially utilize those workbooks to then create their expense-report records,” he added. “Although there’s still pre-approvals for larger expenses, we have been able to eliminate a lot of the approval process and a lot of the onerous, time-consuming manager approval process by making this expense report transparent.” Kintone brings that transparency to its issue-resolution process, called the “aspiration engine.” Said Landa: “Basically, it encourages team members to identify places where we can do better. It brings team members together to very transparently identify causes for this issue–without affixing any blame, just looking for the actions or the causes that might have brought us to where we are, and then landing on and assigning the action, steps, to help bring this issue toward a very clearly stated, better vision.” “We do this on a regular basis,” he said. “And we really try to make it so that nothing is off the table. Any issues that folks see where we can do better, let’s start working on it.” While portals, threads, apps and other technological tools are key to realizing cultural and teamwork goals, the themes of commitment and communication need to inform every aspect of corporate efforts, Landa said. “The more you can centralize communications, the better off you are in creating a holistic transparency environment.” Returning to the comparison between culture and the wind, Landa said: “If you want transparency to be a key part of that culture, then you need to really fill up those sails with the policies to support it, the examples to encourage it, and those tools and methods.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this thought-leadership spotlight: Kintone. Thank you as well to everyone who attended this conference live. 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.

Sheila Flynn | January 08, 2021

The Future of Work, 2021: What We've Learned

In 2020, in every conversation I had about the impact the pandemic would have on work, I heard a version of this statement: “COVID-19 is going to accelerate the future of work.” But with the year ending—and the pandemic still sadly out of control—here’s what we still don’t know: Exactly what will that future be? What is clear is that work–or at least what we used to think of as office-based, white-collar work–underwent an astounding and sudden transformation as the first shelter-in-place orders came down in mid-March. Before the pandemic, perhaps 5% of American workers could be classified as remote. By May, according to the Economist, that figure had risen to 62%, and even as late as October, nearly half of American workers were still putting in their hours in spare bedrooms and on kitchen tables, connecting with their colleagues through the digital lifelines of Slack and Zoom. What did we learn? That the sudden absence of the workplace did not mean the absence of work being done. One survey from the employee-visibility software company Prodoscore found that productivity between May and August of 2020 was actually 5% higher than the same period in 2019. Orders were fulfilled, timesheets were filled, emails were sent—more emails, almost certainly, according to research that found that the average workday grew by nearly an hour during the pandemic. Because those of us who used to work in offices lived through the transition, adjusting to the realities on the fly (often painfully), it can be difficult to comprehend just how radical this forced experiment and its conclusions have been. There are a lot of reasons why, until a 200-nanometer virus from China showed up, that white-collar workers gathered in offices each day. Among them: the sunk costs of real estate, a sense that innovation and creativity required physical proximity, and the ingrained belief that this was simply how things were supposed to be done. But the unstated assumption that work simply wouldn’t be done as much (or as productively) at home—and away from the eyes of managers—was probably the biggest reason why offices remained sacrosanct workspaces. We now know that this isn’t true, and likely hasn’t been true for some time, thanks to applications that can make work and collaboration doable at home. A recent study by two researchers at Harvard of call-center workers between January 2018 and August 2020 found that while remote workers were less productive initially than those in offices, by the end of the study—when nearly every worker being surveyed had been forced home by the pandemic—those who switched to working from home became more productive than they had been in the workplace. The takeaway here is that while workers are individuals with different productivity levels, where the work takes place isn’t the deciding factor, and indeed good workers may become even better when they’re allowed to work from home. Bryan Walsh of Axios (photo courtesy of the author) And many of them have made it clear they want to keep doing so, even when vaccines finally take COVID-19 off the table. A recent report from Glassdoor found that 26% of workers surveyed wanted to continue working at home, 70% favored a hybrid combination of office and remote work, and just 4%–yes, 4%!–desired a full-time return to the office. Workers are also voting with their feet. A survey by Upwork from October found that as many as 23 million Americans, or more than 10% of the adult population, are planning to pack up and move thanks in part to the freedoms of remote work. They’re migrating mostly from dense, costly cities to cheaper places that might be far from the office. Another report from Upwork found that those working from home because of COVID-19 were saving an average of nearly 50 minutes a day that they used to spend commuting to work. That matters, given that a number of studies have confirmed what most people know from grueling experience–that commuting is among the least enjoyable activities people regularly do. Give workers the option of not sitting in traffic or a crowded train every workday, and being able to move to a place where they can get more house for the same amount of money–which in turn makes remote work easier, since satisfaction with working from home is linked to having a dedicated home office–they will take companies up on it. Firms that can get over the need to have eyes on their employees will benefit from a much broader shift to remote work as well. One study found that companies can save as much as $10,000 per employee annually in real estate costs by switching to full-time remote work. Many top tech companies, including some that until recently were touting the creativity-enhancing benefits of their sumptuous Silicon Valley campuses, have announced their openness to much wider remote work. And companies that embrace remote work may be able to get away with paying employees less if they move to cheaper cities, which many workers are willing to do, even as they’re able to expand their hiring pool to the entire world. So what will the future of work look like, once it’s no longer being dictated by a new virus or old assumptions? Pay attention to that 70% of workers in the Glassdoor survey who say they’d prefer a hybrid future: freedom to work at home sometimes and in an office-like environment at other times. Some kinds of collaboration really do require workers being eyeball to eyeball, and sometimes you just need to get out of the house. It doesn’t make financial sense for companies to maintain large corporate offices in expensive downtowns if they’re rarely more than half full, which they won’t be, especially if workers have fled to cheaper cities hours away. But working outside of the home doesn’t have to mean working in a central office. Satellite offices, co-working spaces, even cafes–all of them will be a better and more efficient option for when collaborative work is needed. The bigger challenge may be for managers. As McKinsey & Company managing partner Kausik Rajgopal told me in August in a From Day One webinar, there’s a risk that a company’s culture could splinter if one group of workers remains in the office while another works from home. That’s why it’s important for a manager “to be thoughtful and think about each member of the team as an individual, and figure out what may be most helpful that they stay motivated and operate in a sustainable way.” That includes figuring out effective and fair ways to evaluate employees who work remotely and onboard workers who might never see the inside of an office. No one would want to re-experience 2020, but if we’re fortunate, it could help give birth to a white-collar working world that is more humane to employees and more productive for employers. Provided, of course, we’re all willing to shell out for a decent chair. 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. You can read his new piece for Axios about the coming tech-driven productivity leap here.

Bryan Walsh | January 05, 2021

Employee Experience: How Tech Is Changing Work and Life

Juggling home-schooling with back-to-back Zoom calls. Combating video fatigue while missing face-to-face contact with coworkers. Struggling to keep up with the demands of real-time communication. Aargh! The pandemic has pushed the workforce onto a steep learning curve since the beginning–and technology has been at the center of everything. How has it changed employee experience? While progress and adjustments have been made, how could it be further improved? That was the topic at the heart of a From Day One webinar in December moderated by Fast Company contributing editor Lydia Dishman. Some of the panelists spoke from years of experience working remotely, while others hailed from more traditional industries like construction and hardware. But all agreed that the swift and seismic shift in working conditions pointed out the need for immediate adaptations across the board, with technology proving at times to be both a help and a hindrance, prompting a search for balance that continues to be negotiated. Dishman, at the beginning of the webinar, highlighted Salesforce research showing that employees working from home as a result of the pandemic had only a 1% reduction in productivity, while Microsoft research found that people were working more in the evenings and on weekends. In light of these adjustments, the webinar speakers stressed that they’re highly conscious of avoiding employee burnout, maintaining a strong corporate culture, and helping their workforce adapt to new conditions and best practices–without further disrupting their personal lives. Jamie Hillegass, director of talent, development and learning at the construction-supply company White Cap, described the particular challenges faced by her “very traditional industry” with many locations across the U.S. This included reinventing meetings for which people would fly into headquarters from all over the country to discuss important topics like succession planning. “These are things that we traditionally felt like you had to be in person to see each other,” Hillegass said. The transition to digital meetings involved “teaching the organization and the leaders who are becoming more familiar with Zoom and some other technologies how to do it,” she said. “To that point, in a three-hour session, how do you keep it motivating, and people engaged, without getting distracted or going off camera? Setting some of those rules and expectations for being on camera was a new thing for our organization.” Our speakers, top row from left: Micha Mros of HUB International and moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company. Middle row: Christine Doucet of Ace Hardware, Jamie Hillegass of White Cap, and Joey Levi of LumApps. Bottow row: Laura Sewell of Avanade (Image by From Day One) Familiarizing executives from the top down with new technology has been uncharted territory for many organizations, participants agreed, noting that the comfort level with different digital tools varied among generations. Christine Doucet, Ace Hardware’s director of employee engagement and head of the company’s charitable foundation, said: “We do a lot of communication with our store owners, and they’re not used to this technology. Not every audience is sitting in front of a computer all day.” Doucet said she started preparing them ahead of time, for example asking everyone to be on video. “I learned pretty quickly that with some audiences, like our hardware-store owners, many of which are baby boomers, I needed to spell it out, like, ‘This is the expectation, if you can. This is how it’s going to work.’” Over-reliance on video calls, however, has been an equal challenge. Joey Levi, director of pre-sales for North America at LumApps, an employee communication and collaboration platform, has been working remotely for more than 20 years, but saw things change when more colleagues connected virtually in 2020. “I did a lot of personal Zoom meetings early on,” he said. “And then they all stopped because everyone got really exhausted by them.” He later added: “On the sales side, it’s very difficult for both the prospects and customers and for salespeople, because you’re shifting into a new paradigm of trying to engage somebody. But you’re  now boxed into a meeting in a video. You can’t go to dinner, you can’t do the normal things you would do, and it does definitely bring a challenge.” One of them is a lack of feedback. “When you’re dealing with people in sales, a lot of times they will go off camera,” at which point “you have no idea–are they paying attention to what you’re talking about? Do they get it?” One solution he suggested: “Getting people to start to be more conversational in their approach to presentation.” Micha Mros, HR technology leader at insurance brokerage HUB International, echoed his sentiments. Like Levi, she and her team had historically worked together remotely, but “prior to COVID, we were on site with our clients,” she said. “So we got to meet them, see them, create that bond with them. And although we did use–and still do use–a variety of different software to communicate, we never really pushed people to turn their cameras on, you know, to engage in this way. And now we ask all of our consultants to make sure that their cameras are on.” Technology has not yet provided a substitute for deeper, in-person discussions, Mros said. “We do things like discovery sessions with our clients, which typically would be on site for three or four days,” she said. “We found that it has been a difficult transition to get people to stay focused for four days on camera. So there have been some struggles.” Fostering engagement with in-house employees has also emerged as a priority too, participants said. That means getting feedback from workers about their well-being, adjustments they’re making, and what works (and what doesn’t) in the new remote, more tech-heavy environment. Laura Sewell, EVP of human resources in North America for Avanade, a digital-transformation consultancy formed by Microsoft and Accenture, said she’d seen more “reliance on video and recorded-video messages to really build that connection” because workers are seeking those ties in the absence of being together in person. “And I think the other shift that I have seen is leveraging technology to conduct what I call pulse checks with our employees in real time,” she said. “We’re aggregating results to HR quickly, enabling us to respond and adapt in real time to employee sentiment. That wasn’t something we were quite leveraging as much prior to the pandemic that we’re now doing weekly.” Listening to employees and adapting accordingly has brought a decrease in formality and previously rigid schedules and structures. “We have introduced and launched what we call alternative ways of working, which enable people to work four 10-hour days [and] have a day off or afternoon,” said Sewell, the goal being to “create these flexible working schedules with some parameters around them.” Participating employees have agreed to anonymous surveys to gauge productivity, “so that we can get a better sense of whether this is working­–or creating added pressures in your life, where you find that you’re working five 10-hour days instead of having that extra day off.” The speakers agreed that the new reliance on technology and flexible working conditions are here to stay. “We have all learned that we can work remotely–that we can still engage with folks without being in the same room with them,” Mros said. “Personally, I’ve learned that maybe I don’t have to travel as much to visit with clients to get my work done, which would save them money and make me more productive. And I think that the way that we do business, because of this, will be forever changed,” she said. “I wonder how many of my clients will never return to brick and mortar. How many folks will end up being permanently remote? And from talking to my clients, a lot of them with offices in large metropolitan areas really don’t have any plans on going back,” Mros said. “If this had happened ten years ago,” added Levi, “this would be really difficult to work from home, because we wouldn’t have the ability to do this video stuff, et cetera. I also think that the trend for a lot of people before Covid was already that technology was driving them to work longer hours because it’s immediate. It’s in your phone. It’s in your hand. It’s constantly there. And so I think the benefit of knowing how that affects everybody in the organization means that the things we talked about are more about your life-work balance and making sure you understand if your employees are actually well and mentally well.” He added: “People were getting used to working on the weekends and working at night and working in the morning and working during lunch. So I think the benefit for the employee is going to be more sensitivity.” 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.

Sheila Flynn | January 03, 2021