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The New Recruiting: How Companies Are Adapting for 2021

When the pandemic hit, the crisis forced the 850-store retailer Party City into a furlough process. Six months later, the company has rehired those employees, launched recruitment for the holiday season and has hit 98% of its hiring goal, according to Matt Battista, Party City’s director of talent acquisition. “There wasn’t a playbook–we knew it would be challenging to hit our hiring numbers this year, given the state of everything going on,” said Battista, whose company is now at roughly 22,000 people. “We had to be strategic.” Battista was joined by four other experts in recruitment for a recent From Day One webinar, moderated by Fast Company contributing editor Lydia Dishman, on how companies are adapting their recruiting techniques in the age of remote work and COVID-19. Each panelist also shared strategies for how their company plans to adapt into the new year. Leah Daniels, SVP for Appcast, a developer of programmatic job-advertising technology, laid out data her company has tracked about how COVID-19 has affected recruitment and the workplace. To start, there’s some good news: “You have to be in awe of the entire recruiting industry in how much change it has absorbed and that it’s been done in a positive way,” she said, which includes such techniques as virtual interviews. Despite talk about remote work becoming a more permanent fixture, “the data isn’t supporting that,” said Daniels. Just 2% to 3% of overall jobs were designated as fully remote prior to the pandemic. Today, it’s only slightly higher, Daniels said. “The takeaway for me is that companies are still hedging their bets that remote work isn’t here to stay. Even if you work remote today, you may not be working remote tomorrow.” Company recruitment, she added, has not fully embraced the “work from anywhere” attitude for the long term. The expert panelists, top row: Lydia Dishman of Fast Company (center) and Genil Washington of Stanford Health Care. Center row: Caroline Dudley of Accenture, Zachary Larson of G4S, and Matt Battista of Party City. Bottom row: Leah Daniels of Appcast (Image by From Day One) Data also revealed that the CARES Act, the $2 trillion economic-relief program, impacted recruiting, with companies struggling to bring on new employees at a time of generous unemployment benefits. Though the CARES Act benefits have largely ended, many parents are still preoccupied with child care and remote learning. “There are still a group of people who haven’t reentered the workforce,” Daniels pointed out, and those workers are predominantly female and people of color. That disproportionate effect has presented an obstacle to corporate efforts toward diversity, equity and inclusion, she said. Though remote work may eventually recede to a significant degree, the panelists offered many insights into how company recruitment has adapted for the present and what new tools may stick around. Party City set up a virtual hiring platform and started leveraging text messages to reach out to potential job applicants, which resulted in a 500% increase in responses. As Daniels put it, more companies are adopting the “gig-economy approach” to hiring, “where you can frontload a good portion of the process through the application, the acceptance, the background check, and even sometimes doing touchless, no-interview hiring.” Caroline Dudley, managing director of North American recruiting for the professional services firm Accenture, thinks about the full job-candidate experience–“How can we make sure they have a connection to the company, a seamless experience, and can be moved at a pace that is authentic to the company needs and views?” Accenture utilizes tech tools to seek candidates from a “broader starting point” and make the process as intentional as possible. That approached has produced opportunities for more diverse hiring–to meet goals of 50/50 gender parity and more racial diversity–through digital sourcing, referrals and partnerships with organizations like the National Society of Black Engineers. Genil Washington, director of talent acquisition at Stanford Health Care, emphasized that a company’s priority on inclusion can be used as “a compelling value proposition” for diverse job candidates. On Stanford Health’s career page, “we’re really tracking where people spend their time so we’re serving content that’s meaningful,” she said. “That also aligns with how people relate to our mission, vision and values.” Daniels pointed out that only 1.5% of job ads talk about diversity programs, which she views as a lost opportunity. All the panelists noted that internal promotions are an important part of recruitment. Zachary Larson, senior director of HR Shared Services–Recruitment Center for G4S, a security-services company, described the company’s internal software, Promote Me!, which alerts current employees to open positions. The company also supports lateral moves in which employees can add to their skill sets. The speakers agreed on the unexpected benefits of virtual interviewing. Battista said Party City’s process of mass hiring for the holidays has gone well with an increased show rate. At Accenture, more company leaders across the globe can sit in on interviews. G4S utilizes pre-recorded interviews, in which candidates record their responses to prompts beforehand. Those videos can be shared with various hiring managers. For candidates with limited access to the internet, both G4S and Party City developed strategies to promote inclusion. G4S offers a link to its virtual interview, as opposed to an app that needs to be downloaded. The company also offers brief troubleshooting for tech issues and switches to phone communication if they cannot be resolved. Party City doesn’t require a camera for interviews, but found candidates overwhelmingly had access to video. “We had a little over 500 interviews and every single one of them was virtual–none of them opted to do it by phone,” Battista said. These shifts in recruitment have set a different tone for the future, especially in the health-care industry. “While I do understand the metrics that remote work isn’t here to stay, we are looking, at least in health care, to more opportunities to enable a more remote workforce,” said Stanford Health Care’s Washington. It’s particularly impactful given the company’s location, in Silicon Valley, where a diverse workforce can’t necessarily afford to live. “From a tech perspective, tech talent for Black and Latinx people may not reside in the Bay Area,” she pointed out. As far as the traditional recruitment metrics, panelists said their companies relaxed or shifted them to respond to frequent changes brought by the pandemic. Daniels compared the past six months to a rollercoaster, with some companies far exceeding sales goals and others stopping business and needing to completely realign. “The goals stopped being goals, and became moving targets,” she said. “One of our goals,” as Dudley put it, “became agility.” 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 | November 03, 2020
Lifting Productivity and Connection in a Pandemic World

We hear a lot about employee engagement, but why is that important? Because in one sense, it’s the ultimate return on investment. Engaged employees bring more revenue, more profits, less turnover and, given their engagement with the company’s mission, often have a we-can-do-more-with-less attitude. Yet how do we help employees work smarter, not necessarily harder? Alexandra Powell, director of U.S. client culture and engagement for Reward Gateway, proposes an approach relying on recognition, rooted in morale and motivation. This is valid especially in the current climate. A lot of workers may feel tired, burned out, or overwhelmed as we enter the ninth month of the COVID-19 pandemic. “Enthusiasm may not carry the day right now. We need to be strategic and make good use of our resources,” Powell said in a presentation at From Day One’s recent virtual conference on the workforce of the future. Good communication is what has the biggest impact on morale. “People want to know what is going on around [the company],” Powell said. “And we know there's some unique challenges right now with many of us working from home.” Reward Gateway's Alexandra Powell, director of U.S. client culture and engagement  (Photo courtesy of Reward Gateway) Similarly, appreciation can boost an employee’s motivation. “Seventy-five percent of people said that both morale and motivation would go up if leaders just said ‘thank you’ more,” Powell said. That gesture of gratitude is the cornerstone of recognition, which in a workplace situation takes many shapes. It can be a simple peer-to-peer gesture of appreciation all the way to employee-of-the-month or game-changer awards. In everyday workplace life, peer-to-peer gestures count for a lot. The stakes are low and they’re easy to do. For peer-to-peer recognition, e-cards can be a good start. Powell praises a client who has implemented a system of e-cards that employees can exchange and that are available for everybody on a team to see. “What I want to point out about these e-cards is that they're tied to specific values,” she said. This means that when one is highlighted for doing something great at an organization, they are going to be called out for how they contribute to specific issues, say, the customer experience. “This is a really great way to make recognition a little more meaningful than a thank-you note,” Powell said. For manager-led recognition, small tokens of appreciation can come in gift cards of as little as $5 or $10, which are meant to reward the employee for, say, covering a co-worker’s shift due to a scheduling conflict or having a perfect attendance during Zoom meetings. “Rewards can sometimes be an administrative nightmare for organization,” Powell said. “So one of the ways we help our clients with that is making sure it's all online, using technology to support us. People can acquire all of those rewards, and then they can spend them out in a catalogue on the things that are most meaningful to them.” While recognition is important, it’s more than a simple reward system that harkens back to memories from our time in school. Beyond the item or gift awarded, one has to make sure people hear specific praise, especially when they’re feeling overwhelmed. What drives moral and motivation: detail from the presentation by Powell (Graphic courtesy of Reward Gateway) It’s important to convey such communication with real facts and data, since miscommunication can be costly. One solution can be something as simple as a company blog, with the CEO asking employees, “What do you want to hear from me?  What are the things you’re curious about?” A weekly theme can be implemented and employees are encouraged to contribute as well. This creates accountability on both ends. “You don't need to be perfect. Have fun and use personality,” said Powell. “It doesn't need to be as formal and professional as it might have felt like it needed to be ten years ago. And the more you can get people feeling that they're speaking directly to leadership, the better.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this session: Reward Gateway. 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 | November 03, 2020
How HR Leaders Improve Business Performance Amid High Disruption

Plenty of data shows that creative, flexible leaders succeed at a higher rate than reactive, defensive leaders–especially in times of disruption and uncertainty. The data, too, reveals what Dave Osh, CEO of the leadership-advisory firm Varlinx, called “a sad reality”: 80% of leaders are in the reactive stage, while only 20% are in the creative stage. “I made it my mission to help organizations make the one big shift from reactive to creative,” he explained of his company, which focuses on high growth in the midst of high-complexity work environments. “Leadership effectiveness is your one competitive advantage that no one can copy.” In this shift from reactionary to creativity, Osh asserted that HR leaders play a crucial role. He outlined the steps a company can take to make this transition, and why HR is so essential to the process, in a presentation during From Day One’s September virtual conference on managing change and building resilience. The transition requires three steps. The first is to assess your leadership effectiveness, the second is to decide an individual and collective “one big shift” the leadership team will take, and third is to make that shift with concurrent coaching. “Leadership is contextual,” as Osh put it. To outline the ways to assess specific leadership effectiveness, he offered the Leadership Circle case study of Jeff Hilzinger, the CEO of Marlin Capital Solutions, a small-business lender based in New Jersey. Hilzinger’s leadership effectiveness regresses creative to reactive between 2007 and 2010, said Osh. Why? Hilzinger’s promotion from COO to CEO raised the stakes, and the company struggled to perform in the Great Recession turmoil. Varlinx founder Dave Osh (Photo courtesy of Varlinx) To make a change back to creative leadership, Hilzinger decided on his “one big shift”: to align the executive team to be more collaborative and less critical. “He scaled his leadership effectiveness from the 30th to the 95th percentile over the following seven years,” Osh said. “Assessing, tracking and boosting leadership effectiveness was the secret sauce of building an effective leadership team.” Another Leadership Circle case study is Accent Energy, an Ohio-based power utility. Departments worked in silos, data wasn’t shared, and communication was lacking–all issues that slowed the company's growth, Osh said. “The leadership team decided to dissolve the silos within the organization,” he said. “They chose the reactive/creative framework as a common language for alignment.” Once a company has committed to its “one big shift,” it should follow through with concurrent coaching. Osh explains this as a hybrid of executive and team coaching that addresses needs of the entire team. “Concurrent coaching is super effective because it optimizes the team for the team members, and it optimizes the team members for the team.” A reactive team works independently–much like a golf team, which performs without a coach– and a creative team works interdependently, more like a basketball team working closely with its coach. As an example, Osh pointed to legendary coach and business executive, Bill Campbell, whose leadership style was chronicled in Trillion Dollar Coach. Osh has found that this three-step process results in companies that are more resilient and able to take on unexpected changes like the COVID-19 pandemic. Creative leaders listen closely to their employees, are flexible with strategies and tactics, and aren’t afraid of change. Reactive leaders, on the other hand, can further cut off collaboration, insights or critique when the company needs it most. The process offers a new role for HR leaders to spearhead and support a holistic leadership change that results in a more effective, collaborative and healthy workplace for all. “You, the HR leader, finally have the power to enable your organization to reach to the next level,” Osh emphasized. “You now have the framework to make a ripple effect of high-performance across the organization and beyond.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this webinar: Varlinx. 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 | November 03, 2020
How a Corporate Partnership Distributes Vitamins to Change Lives

In 2013, Walgreens launched a 30-day program with a simple concept: when you purchased vitamins from a select end-stand display inside its stores, a donation would be made to Vitamin Angels, a global public-health and nutrition organization dedicated to improving health for nutritionally vulnerable pregnant women and children. Seven years later, the Walgreens and Vitamin Angels partnership is a permanent fixture of stores and has reached more than 250 million lives. Vitamins Angels recently joined Walgreens Boots Alliance as well, meaning the fundraising partnership will be launched in several new countries. “One of the biggest benefits of this partnership is the impact we can have together,” said Dana Glim, director of brand marketing for Walgreens. Glim joined a From Day One panel that convened experts across corporate social responsibility, brand management, brand marketing and corporate citizenship. The topic at hand was supporting mothers and babies in the midst of a global pandemic and how the Walgreens and Vitamin Angels partnership has not only grown but is meeting the changing needs of vulnerable mothers during COVID-19. The panel opened with a slideshow led by Brittany McMeekin, associate director of business development at Vitamin Angels. McMeekin outlined the drivers behind malnutrition and undernutrition and how it harms children in their developmental years. With COVID-19, she said, “We’ve seen declines in access to child health and nutrition services, disruptions to food supply chains, loss of jobs. And food insecurity is expected to nearly double by the end of this year. All of this has severe implications for child malnutrition rates.” Vitamin Angels serves women in all 50 U.S. states and more than 70 countries, so it adapts to that need differently across the world. “Accessibility and affordability are the areas we’re really focused on,” explained Scott Minger, SVP of business development at Vitamin Angels. He added that the organization offers one of the lowest-cost, highest-impact services when it comes to global malnutrition. The cost to reach a child with life-changing nutrients through its Vitamin A Program is 25¢. The From Day One panel, clockwise from center top: moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, Dana Glim of Walgreens, Scott Minger and Brittany McMeekin of Vitamin Angeles, and Dan Cohen of Cause Partners (Image by From Day One) Vitamin Angels operates alongside corporate partners, with Walgreens being one of the most significant. “As a health-care company, it makes a lot of sense as we are trying to improve the health of communities,” said Glim. But she noted the company isn’t best suited to identify where the need is greatest and how those vulnerable communities should be served. “Therefore, the partnership with Vitamin Angels, who has similar goals and ambitions, helps us focus our efforts in the right places.” Glim said the company has found the opportunity to “connect cause to a customer purchase” particularly impactful. “It was this idea of purpose beyond purchase–it was a really simple way for customers to engage and give back.” It has engaged both customers and employees. For employees, “this cause and campaign is one they get most excited about,” Glim said. For customers, the partnership offers both an emotional and rational appeal. “What we have found with partners is that we’re ensuring the donation feels authentic, it feels tangible, and it’s something the customer can really understand and see the benefit of,” she said. “Those are the most important components for a customer to engage and participate on an ongoing basis.” The Walgreens and Vitamin Angels partnership is expanding globally at a time when expectations for corporate responsibility are on the rise, according to Dan Cohen of Cause Partners, a company he founded to help nonprofits and companies form mutually beneficial partnerships. COVID-19 prompted “an acceleration of the existing trend,” he said, “That corporate social responsibility is not just something that companies do, it is a part of who they are. It is built into the DNA of the company.” He pointed out that the Walgreens and Vitamin Angel partnership is a good example of mission-driven alignment, especially at a time customers want to understand the values of companies and how they live up to them. Cohen also offered advice to brands hoping to move the needle on child malnutrition. “Step No. 1 is to identify the areas of greatest need and the potential for highest impact,” he said. “Sometimes they are not the same.” Secondly, a company should identify credible partners to fill the need identified. It should then let that partner do its work without much interference. “These organizations fill a need, they know what they’re doing, and they’re effective,” Cohen said. “You really want to avoid, as a corporate leader, to drag nonprofits out of scope.” Cohen noted that “cash is king” when it comes to supporting nonprofits, but that shouldn’t entirely define these partnerships. “Think about what other talents and treasures exist within your organization,” he said, “that can help another organization have impact.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partners who sponsored this webinar:  Vitamin Angels, Walgreens, and Cause Partners. Thank you as well to everyone who attended this webinar live. If you missed it, please check out our replay here and 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 | November 03, 2020
Discovering the Hidden Talent in Your Own Company

For many companies, especially in the most competitive job categories, homegrown talent is more valuable than ever. So how can employers do a better job of realizing the potential of these workers by identifying, training, coaching and mentoring them–all while keeping a steady eye on diversity and inclusion? In panel discussion about finding hidden talent within an organization, part of From Day One’s conference last week on the future workforce, moderator Myla Skinner used her own career trajectory as an example. Skinner, chief of staff at the education-advocacy organization OneGoal, described herself as “a professional product of an organization that invested in me when I didn’t even know the skills and talents that I had–and helped me grow those I had.” It’s important for a company to define its talent philosophy as well as its career building blocks. “We want to enable employees to own their career, create paths that are flexible. We want employees to get cross-functional and cross-business experience,” says TJ Kreuziger, global leader of talent acquisition and contingent workforce solutions at 3M. In terms of spotting employees with potential, the digitalization of the workplace has provided new tools. “I think [digital workplaces] offer fantastic new avenues not only for collaboration and engagement, but talent identification as well,” said Shaun Slattery, director of customer change management at LumApps, an employee communication and collaboration platform. “We gain visibility into skill sets and means of engagement and mentoring behaviors and things like that,” he said, which “we might not be able to witness and other means, especially in distributed work environments.” The speakers, top row from left: moderator Myla Skinner of OneGoal, TJ Kreuziger of 3M, and Stephanie Neal of DDI. Second row, from left: Shaun Slattery of LumApps, Jennifer Dove of NBCUniversal, and Curtis Brooks of DXC Technology (Image by From Day One) Part of the purpose of finding hidden talent is to offer those employees a pathway to growth and advancement. “If you want to retain talent, and you want a good leadership base and a future pipeline that’s going to be diverse, it’s going to be critical that you’re building it from within,” says Stephanie Neal, director of the Center for Analytics and Behavioral Research at the leadership-consulting firm DDI. Retention is particularly important in maintaining progress toward diversity. Curtis Brooks, principal for talent, culture and employee experience at DXC Technology and until recently a VP at U.S. Bank, recalls observing something peculiar happening in the banking company’s diversity-and-inclusion efforts. “We were good at sourcing and bringing in mid-level talent from African-American and Hispanic communities,” he said. “What we noticed is that they were leaving at a higher rate from the organization than non-Blacks and Hispanics.” The company looked at it as an opportunity to improve the system, shifting from “what” to “how” types of questions: How could they surround the individual with support, making sure they’re getting opportunities to develop? How could we give them opportunities for contact with senior leadership? That’s where leaders step in, but it’s an acquired skill. “Only one-third of leaders will say they’re good at building talent,” said DDI’s Neal. “They recognize that they need help. It's not a natural skill for them. So I think this is really a prime opportunity for us to continue to ensure they feel–and they know–that they're the talent scouts for their organization.” From the employee perspective, how can they find opportunities to learn new skills and apply them in new places, perhaps even internationally? Said Slattery: “The good old intranet,” which can provide a digital infrastructure for employee-resource groups (ERGs) or private online communities, where employees can come together and share resources. “We’re advising customers to have an internal job board, where you raise the visibility of opportunities,” he said. “Internal referral networks can be really important. The individual might not see [the opportunity], but the network may know.” On that note, NBCUniversal is in the process of relaunching its internal careers site. “It’s just got a lot of new robust features and functionality and transparency. For any role that's listed at NBC, you can actually look up who the recruiter is that’s working on it with their email address and shoot them a note directly,” said Jennifer Dove, the director of talent acquisition for Peacock, NBC’s streaming platform. She noted that openings go on the internal job board 30 days before they are opened to the public. “What we're trying to encourage is maybe even a conversation that happens before someone's 100% committed to apply to the role.” Peacock went from zero employees to more than 800 in just about a year, Dove said. In recent months, almost 70% of the new hiring has drawn from current employees within the larger company. While employers should do all they can to develop talent, ultimately employees have to find their own way. “I believe in hiring people I believe in,” said Brooks. “It is probably 90% up to the individual to identify where he or she wants to take their career, and to take the necessary actions to develop themselves in their career.” Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Angelica Frey | October 30, 2020
What Makes Your Company an Appealing Place to Work in Uncertain Times

Prior to COVID-19, there was no shortage of discussion around the evolution of workplace benefits and amenities–from in-office chefs to unlimited PTO policies, it was clear the office experience was changing fast. The pandemic put all that on hold, if not completely changed the future of how we work and interact in offices. It raises the question: what makes a company an appealing place to work in such uncertain times? That was the topic last week during a From Day One conference on the workforce of the future. “We are working in a mostly remote environment … it’s a different world, a different environment,” said moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, kicking off a panel discussion. The journalist wanted to know, in the midst of tremendous change, “How does your company encourage employees to bring their whole selves to work, and how do you communicate that to potential hires?” For companies requiring in-person interaction, safety is key, according to Kayla Nall, manager of talent acquisition for Delta Air Lines. Company leadership needed to be quick and agile to create safety procedures for both its frontline workers and traveling customers, like blocking off middle seats, requiring masks, and instituting elaborate cleaning procedures. “Our executive leadership have hosted open forums for people to voice their concerns, and I’ve seen Delta be much more agile to make changes,” Nall said. For companies that shifted to fully remote work, flexibility is key. Shradha Prakash, vice president of future of work and organizational design for Prudential Financial, said the company allows for flexible work schedules to meet different employee needs. Those decisions are democratic and don’t require a number of approvals, she added. Non-work meetings among employees can also be effective. “It can bring humor and human touch into the day-to-day, which we would have otherwise done across cubicles and in the office,” Prakash said. The panel, clockwise from upper left: moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company, Jon Schlossberg of Even Responsible Finance, Kayla Nall of Delta Air Lines, Shradha Prakash of Prudential Financial, and Scott Dettman of Avenica Other panelists echoed the importance of leadership staying engaged with employee needs and honestly sharing their own situation. Scott Dettman, CEO of the recruitment and career placement company Avenica, occasionally has his small children make an appearance on Zoom. He summed up the company leadership style as “heart first.” Jon Schlossberg, founder of Even, a responsible earned wage access (EWA) provider that helps employees plan their finances, emphasized the importance of leadership connecting with employees in an authentic way. He also pointed out the three main reasons employees cannot bring their full selves to work: family obligations, a lack of diversity and inclusion in the workplace, and money. “Our economy has a bunch of question marks around it, so people are very concerned with money,” he noted. Even has addressed these issues in various ways. The company formed a task force around diversity and inclusion; the matter is being treated as a core business concern. Even also allows employees to live wherever they want without making salary adjustments, invested in new benefits to support remote work, and added new financial benefits. At Prudential, health and wellness benefits are becoming more inclusive, according to Prakash. On a larger scale, she expects the ability to live and work from anywhere to be prioritized as an important benefit across the board. “This is definitely going to change a lot of compensation and rewards we provide to employees,” she added. Delta has allowed the return to the office to be voluntary, said Nall. The company has also rolled out a health-and-wellness app and offered employees ten free counseling sessions. “There are solutions we are just now getting to, as we hit six months working from home, to see what benefits work for a workforce spread across the country and still needs the level of care we used to get in person,” she said. The panelists shared different recruitment experiences during COVID-19. For Schlossberg, the increased awareness around economic disparities made recruitment easier, given the mission-driven values at Even. At Prudential, there’s “a shift in focus from experience to skills,” Prakash noted. “We’re looking at skills that can be used interchangeably in new roles, so there is more cross-functional movement and internal mobility.” There’s also the question of communicating a company culture in the age of remote work, particularly to new employees. Avenica is holding more “informal hangout sessions” as opposed to panel interviews for potential employees, Dettman said. “We are also becoming more and more conscious about what is said about us and what our digital profile is.” He believes companies should be responsive to their reputation online: “It’s about the experience we create for our internal employees and how that manifests in the larger ecosystem that really has the biggest impact.” Measuring employee engagement and positive company culture remains an important question, and Dishman asked panelists to share any tools in that regard. The majority said their companies use employee net-promoter scores (eNPS), which measure how likely an employee would be to recommend the company to a friend or colleague. Delta, for its part, is taking a more holistic approach to its employee resource groups (ERGs): “It’s not just working moms, it’s working families. It’s not just a Black resource group, it’s how we can support our Black officers and directors or colleges in the frontline,” Nall outlined. In employee surveys, Avenica asks: “What one thing can we do to make Avenica a better place to work?” Dettman said. “We’re looking for out-of-the box suggestions.” The company also relies on its key strategic partnerships to hold the business accountable for an inclusive environment that meets the needs of both employees and customers. Dishman asked the panel if career development still matters in the midst of great instability. There was resounding affirmation that it does. At Schlossberg’s company, he said, “we found there’s been a slight decrease on the importance of base pay and an increase in opportunities for advancement.” “I think career development should also be seen in a different light,” Prakash offered. “It should not just be seen as a ladder in which you are advancing, but how you are growing your skills to be a better professional in the future. It’s important for us as leaders to take the stress off people, as people are working harder and proving themselves harder in order to survive this uncertainty.” 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 | October 29, 2020
A Team Builder Counts the Benefits of Diversity

“We’ve been saying it for years now that, maybe in a lot of ways, we were ahead of our time,” said Keia Clarke, CEO of the New York Liberty WNBA team, on how the women’s basketball league led the way in being socially progressive, more so than the other leagues in professional sports. “I stand proud in the fact the we ourselves are embracing it, but for the first time, there’s some media attention.” Clarke spoke at the From Day One virtual conference last week on building the workforce of the future in a conversation with Daniel Roberts, editor-at-large at Yahoo Finance. Clarke and Roberts talked about the benefits of a diverse workforce, the challenges and opportunities of coordinating the recent WNBA season during a pandemic, the evolution of the league’s approach to social justice, and how women’s basketball can serve as a model for other business leaders. This year, the Liberty were set to play their first season at Brooklyn’s Barclays Center, moving from a previous home base in the suburbs, but Clarke and her team were forced to make other plans because of the pandemic. This year’s WNBA season commenced at a single site in Bradenton, Fla., known as the ‘”wubble,” a reference to the NBA Bubble in Orlando. New York Liberty CEO Keia Clarke, left, in conversation with Daniel Roberts, editor-at-large of Yahoo Finance (Image by From Day One) “Everyone’s job was flipped on its head. So at that point, my role really became focused on making sure the team stayed on task, that the team stayed together, that the team stayed healthy. It’s really hard to control people’s mental capacity, mental space at a time like that,” said Clarke, who became CEO in June after rising for a decade through the team’s ranks. Clarke and her team used this unique year as a reminder that leadership is centered around people–and people give their best when they are cared for. “It was that constant reminder to myself, most importantly, as a leader of people, that they were people first, before they were employees of the New York Liberty. And I needed to treat them as such in this time that the whole world was going through.” This is the same approach the league took when tackling racism. From prominently displaying Black Lives Matter on their game-day courts to partnering with the African American Policy Forum and the #SayHerName campaign, WNBA players forged a new path for athletes and companies taking on anti-racism work. “I think we’ve all seen–as a country, as a society, even globally–the racial tension, as of late. Especially with the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor … this goes back to having diverse voices is important always, but especially in a crisis situation,” Clarke said. About 80% of active WNBA players are Black women, as is Clarke. The WNBA front office and league staff overwhelmingly reflect the players on the court. The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sports (TIDES) gave the WNBA high marks in its 2019 annual report card. The women’s pro league received an A grade for gender hiring and an A+ for racial hiring. While Clarke admits that gives her a level of authenticity when championing the league and social justice, the Liberty are still focused on having a diverse staff. Said Clarke of the team's owners: "Leadership has been so assuring and so trusting" (Photo courtesy of the New York Liberty) “We were at a point where we have majority women, our staff is pretty small. But we were almost all women and we were almost all minority or biracial,” said Clarke, who told her team, “We actually need a white male on our staff, or we need a couple more white males on our staff. Because, we don’t want to look at this thing, you know, with blinders on, when we’re trying to really sell sponsorships, sell tickets, market community social responsibility. There are so many things in this business that you need all of the voices.” When building a work team, Clarke said, it’s important for companies to promote growth at all levels in the hierarchy. Clarke encourages all staff to bring their education, experience, and expertise to the table regardless of their current position. In that way, she’s broadening the reach of the Liberty while also creating a culture in which staff is learning and progressing. At the league level, there remain improvements to make in terms of diversity. While the league boasts high marks in the latest TIDES report, the scoring rubric indicated that percentages are trending down. One example is among bench bosses. Of the 12 WNBA teams, only three women served as head coach in the 2020 season. Only two WNBA head coaches were Black and none were Black women. These statistics have caught the attention of the Women's National Basketball Players Association (WNBPA). “The consistent lack of diversity is unacceptable,” the union tweeted. “After nearly 25 years, the pool of retired players with interest and experience in coaching and front office positions is clear and extensive.” Clarke praised the WNBA for being ahead of most leagues when it came to embracing LGBTQ+ communities, but said that longtime fans didn’t always feel that was the case. “What I’m told is they were completely holding down the fort in terms of support of these women [players] and for many, many years, they were almost ignored,” Clarke said, while giving credit to fans for the celebratory culture that exists now. Clarke eagerly awaits the day she and her staff can welcome those same loyal fans to Liberty games at Barclays Center. When fans do return, Clarke is confident the team will succeed across all metrics. She credits owners Joe Tsai and Clara Wu Tsai, who also own the NBA’s Brooklyn Nets, for a commitment to putting the women’s team on the same footing as the men’s team. “Leadership has been so assuring and so trusting in really spending a ton of their mindshare on making sure that we have the resources that we need to be successful,” Clarke said. “It’s changed everything, and everyone’s outlook.” Editor’s note: You can watch From Day One’s video of the conversation here, a Yahoo Finance video report here, and Daniel Roberts' story about his interview with Clarke here. Erica L. Ayala is a New York-based multimedia journalist who specializes in women's basketball, women’s hockey, and social justice in sports. Her work has been featured in the New York Times, Sports Illustrated, and The Athletic.

erica ayala | October 26, 2020
Why Burnout Is Such an Affliction for Millennials

When Anne Helen Petersen’s editor at BuzzFeed News suggested she was suffering from burnout, Petersen was taken aback and upset. But quickly those words rang true: she realized she had pushed herself to the limit on work and increasingly struggled to tackle basic tasks on her never ending to-do list.  And she would soon find out she was far from the only one hitting the wall. The story on millennial burnout that Petersen wrote for Buzzfeed in 2019 has been read more than 7 million times. Its impact led to her book Can't Even: How Millennials Became the Burnout Generation, published last month. Petersen joined Fortune features editor Kristen Bellstrom to discuss her investigation into millennial burnout for a From Day One's October conference. Bellstrom was quick to point out that Petersen’s book launch coincided at a time “burnout is front and center” due to the pandemic. Together they discussed why burnout has come to afflict a generation, how it has long affected poor and minority communities, and the structural changes needed to address its prevalence. The conversation kicked off with a definition of what burnout is: “It’s that feeling of running so hard, working so hard, you hit the wall, you scale the wall and you keep going,” Petersen said. “It’s a marathon on top of a marathon, like it’s never going to end.” She added later that “it’s directly related to precarity and economic instability in particular–so we adopt all these strategies, like working all the time, to cope with that instability.” Millenials are not the only people who burn out, Petersen noted. But the generation has come to be defined by it due to their high-stakes childhood geared toward getting into college (“childhood as resume building,” as Petersen put it), followed by the amount of debt they’re burdened with after school. Because they graduated in the midst of the Great Recession, many millennials had trouble securing stable jobs. COVID-19 struck just as many millennials, now in their 30s, finally found some economic stability.  Fortune's Kristen Bellstrom, left, interviewing author Anne Helen Petersen (Image by From Day One) Petersen’s BuzzFeed article focused on burnout seeping into a predominantly white, middle-class population. Her book takes a deeper dive, showing how burnout has long defined poor, marginalized and minority communities. “I interviewed a ton of people about how their different backgrounds–where they grew up, whether English was the first language in their home, race, class, all those things–textured that feeling of burnout,” she said. “The thing about middle-class burnout is that you can always throw money at it … and that’s just not available to a lot of people.” Bellstrom and Petersen got into how the prevalence of burnout affects the workplace, particularly in corporate America: “A burnt-out workforce is not a good workforce,” said Petersen. She noted that millennials internalize the need to be a responsive worker to prove their value–which can mean checking and answering emails all day. Managers and leaders should provide empathy and flexibility, modeling “unavailability” to break up a perceived 24/7 workday. “A lot of things you do as a manager–those trickle down to practices other people adopt as well,” Petersen said. Bellstrom pointed out there’s growing awareness of burnout in Corporate America, even further emphasized by the pandemic. Petersen noted that in response to market instabilities from the 1980s into the 2010s, “companies, to figure out some sort of control, meant workers had less control.” That led to layoffs, outsourcing, and increased focus on core competency. “Work, for the worker, was less in control and more precarious.”  A culture of overwork and insecurity will require major changes to fix. “There are no easy answers,” Petersen said. She laid out smaller personal fixes, like restricting news consumption to the mornings and evenings, unplugging from the digital world through things like gardening, and directing energy toward helping others. But the bigger challenge lies in economic instability and decline of social safety nets. “You can’t fix that with an app … we have to think bigger, we have to think about the larger systemic fixes,” she said.  Their conversation touched on Petersen’s next project, a book being co-written with her partner, technology journalist Charlie Warzel, about remote work. “We’re looking at the ways ‘work from home’ can exacerbate a lot of problems already in place, the burnout already built into the structure,” Petersen said. “It can make work even more fluid into all these corners of your life–or it could actually help us decenter work, just slightly, from its place of prominence in our world.” 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 | October 23, 2020
Can Companies Ignore Politics? Not Anymore

The volatile fumes were building up for months. Formerly freewheeling tech companies Facebook, Google and Pinterest had all clamped down on employee speech in response to a rise in social activism. But the match was lit late last month, when Brian Armstrong, CEO of the cryptocurrency platform Coinbase, issued a proclamation that his company would be a politics-free zone: no political debate in the office, and no social activism on the company’s part. Coinbase would focus instead on its core mission. If workers weren’t comfortable with that, they could take severance packages. At least 60 of them did, about 5% of the workforce. In a follow-up memo, Armstrong said he was fine with that: “I think it will result in us having a stronger and more united team.” In making such a black-and-white declaration, Armstrong kicked off a pitched debate among business leaders and workers struggling to navigate an increasingly difficult grey zone in a polarized America. Some Silicon Valley investors and executives welcomed the Coinbase CEO’s  statement, which came after a season of employee activism, including a walkout at Coinbase. “Enough is enough. The pendulum swings and it swings back,” tech investor Cyan Bannister told the Washington Post. “Sometimes people just want to have a safe place to go where they don’t have to think about this stuff anymore because it’s literally everywhere.” Former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo took the opposite stance, pointing out that Silicon Valley’s culture used to “welcome lively debate about ideas and society,” he tweeted, condemning the clampdown. “This isn’t great leadership. It’s the abdication of leadership. It’s the equivalent of telling your employees to ‘shut up and dribble.’ Which position will prevail? As an indicator, the backlash against social activism probably shows which way we’re headed: forward. Corporate America can’t turn back the clock on diversity, whether that applies to people or opinions. And America’s multiple crises–pandemic, economic and social–have cast a bright light on inequities that can’t be ignored. Here are some of the different ways that’s taking hold: Listening to Stakeholders “Companies have stepped up on a number of issues in recent years, particularly on topics that affect their employees and customers–gun safety, marriage equality, access to reproductive healthcare and immigration policy,” corporate-responsibility expert Susan McPherson, founder and CEO of McPherson Strategies, told From Day One. Ignoring those issues doesn’t cut it anymore, especially in a time of upheaval. “While companies have historically leaned heavily out of talking politics, the fact is that politics is unavoidable this year, and impossible to separate ourselves from entirely. It would be a mistake for leaders not to prepare for and lean into the conversation,” according to Sarah Sheehan, president and founder of Bravely, an employee-coaching firm. Focusing on Fixing Society Only days after the Coinbase commotion, JPMorgan Chase, the largest U.S. banking company (2019 assets: $2.7 trillion), took a leap in the other direction. The bank said it would commit $30 billion over the next five years to address racial inequity though loans and other programs. Chase is not alone–giant businesses including Microsoft and Kaiser Permanente have made similar commitments to affordable housing and other issues. What prompted such a focused effort on JPMorgan’s part? “The murder of George Floyd was a sea change, I think, in the attitude of Americans and people about the injustice that has taken place here,” said CEO Jamie Dimon at the LBJ School of Public Affairs 50th Anniversary Forum. A coalition of pro-immigration activist groups blocked the entrance to a Microsoft store in New York City in 2019, demanding that the company cancel its contracts with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (Photo by Gabriele Holtermann-Gorden/Sipa USA via AP Images) The failure until now to address the problem, Dimon said in an interview with journalist Pattie Sellers, is symptomatic of America’s inability to come to a consensus on how to fix things, from health care to public education to infrastructure. “We have failed as a nation. We’re no longer good at public policy. Our incompetence has become a little bit of a joke around the world … We can’t keep up,” he said. “Public policy takes analysis, details, understanding. To me, this is the single most important thing that Americans have got to do in the next 20 years.” Backing Democracy Corporate leaders can figure out how to deal with either four more years of President Trump or a President Biden, but the prospect of a contested election and a loss of confidence in election integrity is bad for business. Michael Porter of Harvard Business School says there is “an essential role for business in addressing political dysfunction,” citing data showing that political gridlock is causing “a disastrous decline” in U.S. competitiveness, the New York Times reported. Business leaders have responded swiftly. “What we're seeing this year is an enormous focus on protecting our democracy and promoting civic engagement, from Old Navy's decision to pay employees to be poll workers to the recent Leadership Now Project statement calling for civility and patience ahead of the election,” McPherson wrote in an email to From Day One. “Business leaders understand that the health of our economy depends on the strength of our democracy. With so much at stake this year, every company should do their part to encourage employees to vote (safely!), instill confidence in our elections, and promote patience until every vote is counted.” Making Promises–But Keeping Them? Responding to the Black Lives Matter movement, many companies were held accountable for commitments that didn’t reflect their earlier behavior–or seemed unlikely to be fulfilled. They need to tread carefully here. “Social-justice issues are macro illustrations of pretty standard corporate values of integrity, respect and inclusion,” Janine Yancey, founder and CEO of Emtrain, a workplace-culture platform, told From Day One. “Look at most companies' values and codes of conduct and you'll see these values reflected. And employees are watching to see if company leaders are ‘real’ about these values and they actually mean something within the organization. Or conversely, whether they're just inauthentic window dressing for PR, lawyers and regulators.” Picking Their Battles While the Coinbase position was at the extreme end of the spectrum, there is probably a point of peril if business leaders forget they have a business to run. “As a founder, I want to build a company that contributes to positive change in the world. And to attract top talent and to understand and serve a wide customer base, a business can’t simply ignore all the social issues employees and customers are reckoning with,” wrote Jessica Lessin, founder of the tech website The Information. “Still, I don’t think a company should be forced to be on the front lines of every major social issue. Leaders have to strike a balance, define a culture and stick with it.” How to approach that challenge? “While it is not necessary for corporations to take a stand and invest in every social issue, employees and consumers are no longer willing to accept companies who haven’t taken a stand at all,” Melanie Newell, SVP of Rocket Social Impact, told From Day One. “Companies must dig deep to understand what is currently most important to their stakeholders and in alignment with their brand values to determine where to invest their time, resources and dollars. Determine your priorities, define how to invest in them and share that plan.” Editor’s note: Bravely, Emtrain and Rocket Social Impact have been sponsors or partners of From Day One. Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time

Stephen Koepp | October 20, 2020
Instead of Layoffs, Companies Can Launch Rapid Redeployment

Since the pandemic struck last spring, tens of millions of Americans have been thrown into unemployment. At this point, 25% of U.S. adults say they or someone in their household lost a job because of coronavirus-era layoffs, according to a Pew Research Center survey. While the impact on the workforce this time was historically brutal, the pattern repeats itself in the business cycle when employers try to cut losses by reducing staff. Such moves may shore up the companies in the short run, but painful reductions in force have long-term consequences for the employer’s reputation and employee morale. Yet there is a way to reduce layoffs through a method that could be more widely used: rapid redeployment. This method involves the immediate shift of a group of workers from one function to another to accommodate business change. It’s an internal tool that allows companies to retain tribal knowledge and enhance competitiveness by having employees undertake different projects that may require a new set of skills. COVID-19 has inspired a wave of experimentation in this area, which now needs to be embedded in corporate culture. “We need to make sure that what we've learned and been forced to do over the last few months is something we continue to do,” says Jeanne Schad, talent solutions and strategy practice leader at Randstad RiseSmart, which focuses on outplacement and career transition services. Schad spoke at From Day One’s September virtual conference on managing change and building resilience. Rapid redeployment is a good way to make a company more agile. “You have this dichotomy happening in the organization where some parts of the business are less busy or idle, and other parts are busier and needing to do things in a new way,” Schad said. “So with the assumption that people have transferable skills, we shifted people around to fit whatever the business needs were at the moment.” Jeanne Schad of Randstad RiseSmart (Photo courtesy of Randstad RiseSmart) In creating an agile workforce, established companies can borrow a page from companies in startup mode. “Those companies that are acting like startups and operating in this agile way, are actually doing quite well right now,” said Schad. Employees in an agile workforce are encouraged and feel safe contributing outside of their job responsibilities, and are constantly learning new things and encouraged to do things differently. “They have an orientation to the idea that they need to continuously learn in order to maintain their value, and that that's part of their responsibility to themselves into their own careers.” Rapid redeployment can take many forms: internal gigs, stretch assignments, the deployment of teams to fill determinate roles, or by the tactical breaking-up of teams for the sake of internal assignments. All told, organizations that deploy these methods “are creating visibility into new opportunities within the organization for employees, and they're encouraging those employees to contribute in new ways.” Career development is what, ultimately, helps keep the workforce agile. Rapid redeployment has been an effective solution for companies throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. But what about when masks come off eventually? “Employees are already developing their careers through these projects, these internal gigs, these stretch assignments, these new things they've been asked to do during the pandemic, and they're probably already leaning into this,” Schad said.  “So our first recommendation is just call that out to your organizational leadership. Encourage employees to own their development and give them the time and the tools to learn,” she said. In the long run, employers should add career-development tools to the company’s learning system, making sure to democratize them and make them available for everybody. Online learning and upskilling allows for people to bring skills into the organization, and leads to unexpected talent emerging from unexpected places. And let’s not forget the role of managers. “This may be a culture change for your organization to share talent versus holding on and hoarding talent. So it's important for you to make sure you acknowledge that to your managers, and you empower them with tools to have more frequent and better-quality career conversations with their employees,” Schad said. We’ve been through economic upheaval before, and so we know we can recover. This is the third major economic crisis in the span of less than a century. What’s more, the previous two, the Great Depression (1929–33) and the Great Recession (2007-09), were both fertile ground for major innovations. The 1930s saw the technology industry take shape, with Hewlett-Packard and Polaroid getting their start. Similarly, services like Uber, WhatsApp and CreditKarma emerged in the midst of the recession. We will see this type of agility come through during COVID too, said Schad, who offered examples of the ways companies have been adapting to the new reality. She cites restaurants becoming grocery stores; health-care providers with multiple locations allocating their resources to underserved areas; and, during a recruiting and hiring freeze, seeing recruiting specialists use their already honed interpersonal skills for customer-facing roles. Yet, we’re less than a year into the pandemic, so we can expect even more substantial innovations, Schad predicted. “It’s when underperforming companies go away that capital that [was] spent on them–not only the money, but the human capital–can be released to other, higher-performing areas of innovation.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this session: Randstad RiseSmart. 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 | October 14, 2020
How Coaching Influential Workers Can Propel Lasting Change

Throughout this year, several crises pushed U.S. companies to reexamine their ways of doing business, from moving employees to a remote-work environment to increasing their commitment to anti-racism in the workplace. For some companies, this transformational time provided an opportunity to make systemic change. But how best to do it? When a company tackles a deep cultural shift, it has to go beyond the Human Resources office or directives from the C-suite. And it can’t be taught through training alone. There’s another way: coaching, when deployed in the right way and through the right framework, can prove to be a highly effective solution to drive systemic behavioral and cultural change. That’s what an expert panel of coaches gathered to talk about in a webinar hosted by From Day One and AceUp, a company that facilitates a culture of coaching. Paul Tripp, an executive coach with AceUp, likened effective coaching to the narrative quality of a Disney ride. “As the individual grows, so does the company and their training,” he said. “It’s a bit like a ride where you go along and see different things as you move.” Companies often start with the idea that they want individualistic coaching, according to Tripp, but he views coaching in three parts: as a company priority, a learning-and-development priority, and an individual priority. “Often the entryway is through the individual, like turning someone from a subject-matter expert into a manager,” he said. “But I think it’s more synergistic that that–when you deploy coaching it’s important to look beyond the individual.” Our speakers, clockwise from upper left: Paul Tripp of AceUp, Belinda Tribley of Aclero, Kvon Tucker of Consciously and moderator Lydia Dishman of Fast Company (Image by From Day One) Kvon Tucker, CEO and founder of Consciously, a purpose-driven leadership coaching firm, put it this way: “When I think about coaching and using it inside of organizations, I think of it as a strategic lever for the broader change the organization wants to create.” Coaching should be utilized as one mechanism for company change, but “it cannot be the only thing that creates that shift,” explained Belinda Tribley, the founder of Aclero, a human-capital consulting and coaching firm, and executive coach for AceUp. “You have to tie in all sorts of underlying infrastructure as well.” The buy-in has to come from the top, panelists stressed. “I want to know, where are the leaders at?” asked Tucker. “In my opinion, if they’re not personally invested in this change, if their purpose or their values are not attached to what they want to accomplish, then that systemic change isn’t going to happen.” Once a company prioritizes coaching as an important component for the courageous conversations that lead to broader culture change, it can be utilized in multiple ways. One of the most important elements is finding the most influential people in the company, who are not necessarily the ones at the top of the org chart. Tucker said he listens for the employees mentioned most among the company, then works to get them on board with a coaching strategy. Tripp seeks out a diverse range of employees beyond senior leadership, including the “steady Eddies,” the “high-risk, high-reward” employees, and organizational influencers. Tribley added that coaching within teams offers opportunities to establish clear communication structures based in respect, which can impact the broader company. Coaching can effectively complement training, including diversity and equity training. Tripp shared a saying from his colleague: “Training without coaching is entertainment.” He followed with a story about a three-hour training session he led at a technology consulting company on how to onboard a client. He followed the session with group coaching–and found the real needs of the team were to figure out roles and responsibility. “The coaching really allows people to talk and identify those systemic things that come forward from training,” he noted. Tribley noted that coaching effectiveness can and should be tracked with various tools: board reports, turnover statistics, shifts in employee competencies that are of strategic importance or represent the company's cultural values. Engagement surveys can measure “how comfortable people feel bringing their whole self to work,” she said. Still, all the panelists stressed that coaching is not a cut-and-dried procedure with the same outcomes over the same timeframes. It’s a more fluid, bespoke experience–one that Tucker called a journey–which looks different for everyone. “The relationship with the client and the organization is most important,” Tucker said. “At the tail end, when the client knows how to use the coach more effectively, you can run even faster whether it’s the organization or individual.” Tucker cited a successful coaching relationship with a company that had a prevalence of fear in the workplace. Through coaching, the company committed to shifting toward a culture of courage. Tripp talked about utilizing coaching to help a Fortune 500 executive, a white man in his 40s, to kickstart a companywide conversation in the wake of George Floyd’s death. “It affected hundreds of people,” he recalled. “When the coaching conversation has the ability to touch upon issues that are difficult, that we haven’t talked about before in Corporate America, either through awareness of participation, that’s success.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this webinar: AceUp. Thank you as well to everyone who attended this webinar live. If you missed it, feel free to check out our replay here and 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 | October 13, 2020
The Future Workspace: What's in Store for Flexible Offices

The new breed of coworking business had only just launched when suddenly everything changed. In the first week of March, the New York company KettleSpace released its first mobile app. The company had developed a new model combining the best of traditional coworking with the flexibility of coffee shops, in which KettleSpace partners with leading hospitality brands to create a network of on-demand, perk-filled working and meeting spaces for its members. Only two weeks later, hospitality and office spaces alike shuttered across the city due to COVID-19. “When we broke for business on March 13, we had about 20 locations open and thousands of paying members,” said CEO and co-founder Nick Iovacchini. “We made the decision to get in front [of the pandemic] and voluntarily cease all operations and pause all of our revenue, which was literally going from having a thriving business on the rise to having a business that couldn't function.” The past six months have been a whirlwind and a challenge for the KettleSpace team. Iovacchini and I spoke for a From Day One webinar that not only looked at the unexpected evolution of his business, but what’s happening within the back-to-the-workplace process and how the pandemic has fundamentally changed the office and coworking industries. The sudden halt in KettleSpace’s business offered the opportunity for Iovacchini (pronounced yo vah KEY knee) to become an expert in those matters. “We’ve been on the phone with hundreds–approaching 1,000–different people in company leadership about the return to work initiative,” he told me. “We’ve jumped in and are asking, What are you worried about? What are your people worried about? What are you thinking? And how can we be helpful?” KettleSpace CEO Nick Iovacchini, left, was interviewed in a From Day One webinar by journalist Emily Nonko (Image by From Day One) Iovacchini detailed several themes that have emerged. Safety is first and foremost. That’s followed by commuting concerns, and the evolving concept of a corporate headquarters. We’re thinking differently about how to be in workspaces. There’s “remote-ish,” as Iovacchini dubbed it–a combination of in-person and remote work. There’s the exploration of hub-and-spoke models with a primary office along with satellite offices closer to where people live. There’s the “episodic gatherer group,” those workers who need in-person time for collaborations, brainstorming and culture building. Finally, some workers are deemed “geo-independent,” in which they don't have to be tethered anymore to a specific city or office. While many of us remain wary of returning to the office, surveys indicate that most would prefer a mix of working at home along with periodic visits to the workplace. Younger workers in particular favor a return to the office. “All of this is really balancing the idea that you have to do right by your employees and your team,” Iovacchini said, addressing company leaders weighing those decisions. “You also have to check the requisite boxes with your leadership team and your management team and the various stakeholders that the focus is on health and wellness. This has got to have an HR component, a financial component, a real-estate component. So that all has to be aligned–and it’s challenging.” Providing space for employee concerns and challenges is crucial, he said, as well as maintaining extreme flexibility into an unpredictable future. The value of flexibility proved itself in KettleSpace’s own business evolution. During the webinar, Iovacchini announced that KettleSpace has partnered with New York University to create safe, flexible spaces within walking distance from the school’s Brooklyn and Manhattan campuses. The company also built mobile app to integrate with NYU’s existing tech that allows students to reserve seats inside these spaces. “The fun part of all this was, not only were we all in uncharted territory together, but we're also on a three-week timeline to get all of this done,” he said. “We were able to open hundreds of COVID-spaced workstations around campus as well track utilization based on their needs.” It wasn't the type of partnership KettleSpace envisioned for itself in its founding. But it has proven that the flexibility of co-working will have plenty of value in the return-to-work phase. KettleSpace has started to reopen selected locations across New York City, where the company is taking extra safety precautions to protect everyone in their spaces. KettleSpace has updated its platform to require pre-registration and a health assessment before members can work in its locations. KettleSpace hopes that its original partnerships with hospitality companies, which include restaurants, hotels, and other high-quality retail assets, could bring much-needed revenue into these businesses after COVID-19 dramatically reduced capacity. He also expects corporations will begin subsidizing individual co-work spaces for their workers, away from traditional offices. And he believes that the mindset of legacy office landlords will have to change. “There is no playbook for this,” he said of working in the era of COVID-19. “You have to take on that lean startup methodology of: there's no playbook, but we're gonna go transparently and creatively to solve this. And I think that as a startup founder, that's something that's in our DNA.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partner who sponsored this webinar: KettleSpace. Thank you as well to everyone who attended this webinar live. If you missed it, feel free to check out our replay here and 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 | October 01, 2020
Working From Home, Can They Dream Outside the Walls?

Over the last six months, millions of American employees have proved that they can do their work remotely, and generally better than expected. But is working from kitchens and basements fulfilling in the long run? Have their aspirations become homebound? These questions aren’t prompted by a slump in productivity. “Within the banking environment, we've seen an increase in productivity for sure,” said Cassandra Mitchell, a VP and corporate responsibility officer for KeyBank. Instead, the issue has come up because the transition to WFH hasn’t necessarily brought with it the structures for providing reward, recognition and belonging, according to the speakers on a From Day One webinar last week titled, “Turning Workforce Aspirations Into Company Policy: Why Employee Fulfillment Matters More Than Ever.” Far from being a carrot-and-stick type of dynamic, these rewards do not merely consist of career advancement and monetary gains. Rather, they emerge from dynamics where bosses act like leaders and coaches and where the human component is as critical as the professional one.  “The good leaders that I've worked with,” said Curtis Brooks, VP of training and development at U.S. Bank, “have really mentored me not necessarily in a formal way, but more of an informal mentoring, and then have really provided me an opportunity to network and meet higher-level and different-level people within the company. Providing that visibility was important.” Since the onset of the pandemic, job-seeker behavior has changed: workers yearn for stability over a hustle-type of work culture. “They want to stay where there’s stability. They're not as inclined to go and look for another opportunity, if they feel that where they are is pretty solid,” said Carmen Bryant, director of U.S. marketing at Indeed, the employment search engine. “So keeping the employees you have engaged is going to be really important.” The speakers at From Day One's webinar on employee aspirations, led by Lydia Dishman, upper left, an editor and writer for Fast Company (Image by From Day One) To make work more intriguing, there is a lot that managers and directors can do. Among the techniques: dialing up fresh assignments, giving more autonomy, delegating more responsibility, providing more access to confidential insights, or providing an opportunity to spend a quick assignment in an unfamiliar area of the business. “We can make it worth their while to stay,” says Annalisa Esposito Bluhm, head of executive and strategic corporate communications at General Motors (and until this spring, the automaker’s head of employee engagement). Bluhm pays particular heed to the needs of younger works, who demand a different kind of stimuli than their elders. The challenge, she said: “How do we create assignments that meet the new employees’ definition of meaty and compelling and exciting, but [that] also gives them a way to still build the skills that are requisite?” One idea she has considered is to give them tasks that could be above their level. “It’s calling upon us to get super creative in trying to find ways to provide that growth, either through partnering or by recalibrating assignments or saying, Hey, we've got this special project and you're leading” A similar approach served KeyBank’s Mitchell well. Early in her career, she had a supervisor, an HR manager, who took her under his wing and went above and beyond with coaching and mentoring. “It was a combination of [the supervisor] getting me exposure to the right leaders, [and] allowing me to work on projects that, honestly, I probably wasn't necessarily prepared for,” Mitchell said. “He said he took a risk on me and allowed me to develop throughout that process.” Especially in pandemic times, Mitchell is a proponent of taking advantage of the educational tools offered by employers. All of KeyBank’s employees have full access to the library of Udemy, the online-course provider, she said. “We encourage our employees to really own their career.” If fulfillment has a polar opposite, burnout may be it. Working from home, panelists agree, has resulted in increased productivity, but that may come at a cost. “We see a lot of benefits for those who can work from home. Among our salaried workforce, we're hearing that people like having the flexibility to cook dinner and be on a conference call, and not have to be on a commute,” said Bluhm. And yet, “At the same time, that idea of boundaries is gone. My commuting time has now become working time.” Indeed’s Bryant advocates for setting mandatory unplugging time periods. With limited opportunities for getting out of the house during the pandemic, she explained, employees tend to not make use of the PTO policies and just keep working. To some degree, employee engagement or distress can be measured. Hertz uses the metric known as net promoter score (NPS), which essentially asks whether workers would recommend their company to a job seeker. “We have over the last several years been able to tie those really, really closely to the employee engagement surveys that we do on an annual basis. The higher the engagement, the higher the NPS score” said Jennifer Cockrum, a VP of HR at Hertz. “During the pandemic, we’ve been really keeping an eye on those Net Promoter Scores, and focusing on those areas where we see a huge delta. If we see something that they had traditionally been medium to high, and now they're very low, we will actually conduct skip levels or focus groups, with the employees trying to understand if there's something there that's a stressor to them, that we can help with as an organization.” Brooks sees the act of learning grace and empathy as a way to protect the employees from burnout. “We're rolling out coaching programs, for example, ‘boss to coach,’ so teaching our leaders how to be coaches, teaching our leaders how to manage and lead in a virtual environment, and making sure that they're engaging their team,” he said. “So [it’s] really giving people the tools and resources, the empathy, the grace to say, Hey, I want to help you, we see you, we recognize it. And we want to do whatever we can from a company perspective, macro, and whatever we can do from a micro perspective.” Coming to terms with uncomfortable conversations is crucial in developing a solid relationship with employees. “A lot of times leaders don't like having these uncomfortable conversations, when there is a very clear course correction or performance concerns, but I believe it becomes less frightening or challenging when you have the conversations along the way,” said Mitchell. Quarterly performance reviews, rather than annual ones, are a good way to normalize those candid conversations, panelists said. “We have to set shorter-term goals. You know, everything changes so quickly. And if you think about, when we set our goals back in January, in February, I mean it's kind of laughable how different everything is,” Cockrum said. “For me, it's really just about being empathetic and really having the conversation around the goal. Here's the goal, here's what we need to be. Help me understand what's preventing us from getting to that particular goal,” said Brooks. “And based on what you hear, now you know what path you need to take.” Editor's note: From Day One thanks our partners who sponsored this webinar: Indeed and Culture Amp. Thank you as well to everyone who attended this webinar live. If you missed it, feel free to check out our replay here and 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 | September 29, 2020
What Happens When Corporate Culture Has to Change

For many companies, this era of multiple crises has focused attention on the strengths and weaknesses of their mission, their values and other fundamentals. A strong corporate culture, as robust as it might be, is useless if it does not adapt. Adaptable companies, on average, bring in 15% more in annual revenue than those in the same industry with a more rigid corporate culture, a University of California, Berkeley, research paper reported. How does a corporate mission like PepsiCo’s, which is “Create more smiles with every sip and bite,” look like in 2020? And with everyone talking about the importance of empathy in Corporate America, what does that really mean? “When Corporate Culture Needs to Evolve,” was the topic of a panel discussion among corporate leaders at From Day One’s September virtual conference, which focused on managing change. For many leaders, the multiple crises of 2020 brought dramatic shifts in their roles in support of their employer’s culture, they told moderator Lydia Dishman, an editor and writer for Fast Company. “It was supposed to be a big year for my department,” said Christine Salerno, the global head of social impact for Marsh & McLennan, who had created the department a decade ago. “It’s really all about engaging our employees, inspiring them to give back to their communities,” she said. After the pandemic struck, however, Salerno’s team pivoted to focus on disaster relief for the company’s employees, creating a COVID-19 support fund that has granted more than $2.5 million to thousands of company workers affected by the pandemic. The company’s CEO, Salerno said, felt it was important to make a statement that “we are a people-first company.” The speakers on From Day One's panel on corporate culture at the September virtual conference (Image by From Day One) A people-first approach calls for a culture of communication. “Rather than having business calls [some teams have] have calls just to talk, just for people to express themselves and say what they're feeling,” said Randy Martinez, director of strategic diversity management at CVS Health. “And we're seeing people latch on to certain leaders and reach out and say, Hey, do you mind if we spend some time talking about this? And I do it.” Curtis Stancil, an HR business partner director at Sodexo, the global food-service company, said this communication is particularly crucial in companies that have made layoffs or furloughs. “With the current state of affairs we have to not only keep our employees that are remaining engaged but optimistic about the future and [about] how we can still have growth opportunities and still benefit those that we're serving, even under this dire situation,” Stancil said. Several months into the pandemic, with the killing of George Floyd in police hands, corporate leaders needed to respond not just to a health crisis but a surge of expectation that they should be addressing social injustice as well. In the first phase of the pandemic, CVS focused on setting up testing sites in underserved communities. But after Floyd’s death and the ensuing protests, the company’s approach to systemic inequity became broader. “Suddenly we found ourselves investing $600 million, but to address inequality faced by Black people in disenfranchised communities,” said Martinez. “And we find ourselves now right in the middle of the conversation and culture shaping conversation for the company. Our purpose is to put people on a path to better health.” CVS employees then take the conversations into their own hands. “There are book clubs that are starting inside the company, based on the social injustice issues that we're dealing with, so it's creating a conversation. And then from that people are breaking off into one-on-one discussions,” he said. At Even, a responsible earned wage access (EWA) provider that helps employees plan their finances, the surge in concern about social justice spurred the company’s co-founder Jon Schlossberg to refocus Even’s commitment to the issue. “As the CEO of the company, I have the pleasure and the responsibility of being able to set the company's objectives,” said Schlossberg. “And one of the first things I did is put together a task force to create a company-level objective for the company to be anti-racist, and more inclusive. And make that objective equivalent to our business objectives. Because I believe we have to show our clients that we walk this walk. But also, I think everyone is well aware of all of the research, which shows a more inclusive and  diverse workforce is going to lead to better business results.” The role of the manager is crucial in shaping company culture. “For me, when it comes to learning, mentorship or sponsorship, during this time it has been absolutely critical that we defined what the role of the manager is now,” said Rosa Santos, a VP of talent management and organization development at PepsiCo. Companies can have “very specific leadership frameworks and models,” she said, “but when it comes to actual leading through these tumultuous times they get completely shaken up,” she said. Her company responded by reframing the directions. “So we define specific meanings or expectations that are very basic for our managers. I specifically said, You need to be a source of optimism and stability for employees. You really need to stay connected and engaged at this moment in time, you really need to lead by example.” Yet this does not just have to do with mere output and performance. Schlossberg wants to get rid of the ideal of bringing one’s “best self” to a work environment, the idea of hyper-optimizing one’s potential. For a lot of employees, it can mean repressing the rest of their lives. “Tons and tons of people can't even bring their whole selves,” said Schlossberg. “They have to put on a show for the people that they're surrounded by at work,” he said. “[Now, during the pandemic] you can see more of people's whole selves because oftentimes your video is in their living room with them. So, really, our approach has been, what work do we need to do to understand people's lives, their whole selves?” Angelica Frey is a writer and a translator based in Milan and Brooklyn.

Angelica Frey | September 29, 2020
Productivity and the Pursuit of Happiness: How Compatible?

In the six months since COVID-19 forced us into remote work spaces, the digital workplace “happy hour,” where the intention is good, but interactions are awkward, has become a mainstay. There’s a good argument to scrap that digital happy hour altogether. Replicating past workplace habits for our new socially-distanced lives isn’t necessarily the best way forward, according to experts who have studied productivity and well-being in the midst of the pandemic. “The replication strategy doesn’t work,” said Elena Grotto, SVP of business transformation and employee experience at Edelman. “What does work is a reinvention strategy. We know that this makes sense coming out of a trauma.” Grotto was joined by four other experts for a conversation on “Productivity and the Pursuit of Happiness” at From Day One’s September virtual conference. Moderated by Alana Semuels, senior economic correspondent for Time, the speakers had plenty to discuss, given that remote workers now operate without traditional workplace boundaries and have plenty of demands and distractions at home. The group discussed the best “reinvention” strategies to promote both output and well-being, new opportunities for technology in the digital workplace, and the contested role of surveillance tools. Above all, there needs to be “intentionality” in the new digital workspace, according to Adam Weber, chief people officer and co-founder of Emplify, which provides employee-engagement software. “What happened in moving remote was that the workforce turned very transactional,” he said. “The subtleties of relationships started to dissipate and it felt very business-focused.” That attempt to throw together an all-employee digital happy hour, for example, could be replaced by randomized one-on-one interactions or thematic-based groups, he suggested. “It’s adding intentionality to make things feel very human.” Speakers on the panel about productivity and happiness at the September virtual conference (Image by From Day One) Weber shared other findings from Emplify regarding employee well-being during the pandemic. Nearly 70% of the workforce is feeling burned out, the company found in a survey. Edelman’s Grotto shared research from her firm to back up that sentiment: employees now navigate a 5% increase in internal emails and a 13% increase in meetings, with more attendees in each meeting. Parents spend an additional 27 hours a week on chores, childcare and education. A lot of burnout stems from disorientation, lack of role clarity in the workplace, and increasing demands of home life while feeling guilty about taking time off. Given that Emplify’s move to a four-day workweek was widely noted, Weber suggested companies need to be more assertive about employees taking time off. Forced PTO, as opposed to flex or optional time, is one strategy, as well as setting “no-meeting blocks” and investing in manager-employee relationships. “One small thing we’re recommending is that employees write down their priorities for the week, share them with the manager, and have the manager re-rank the priorities,” he said. Amie Major, head of talent management for E*TRADE Financial Corp., explained how the company leveraged internal communications to organize and distribute resources that could benefit employees during their transition to remote work. “We’ve always provided resources around counseling or stress management,” she said. “We did a lot of work to curate, bubble up, and tap into those resources we had and drive more frequent communications around it.” For example, the company created new website pages focused on work-from-home content to centralize timely information and resources to support employees through change. Besides keeping employees informed through channels like Slack and weekly newsletters, E*TRADE has also replaced the traditional water-cooler chat with “virtual coffee chats” in which employees opt in to be matched with someone who has similar interests. Employers are showing plenty of openness to new digital platforms, said Rob Ryan, senior director of strategic development for LumApps, which provides a social and collaborative intranet platform for companies. LumApps found that clients who already had a “pro-social digital workplace” prior to the pandemic were able to “meet that challenge head on and get out urgent news and communications around policy changes in a personalized approach, which of course drives engagement,” he said. Responding to the pandemic era, LumApps provided new tools and solutions addressing onboarding, mentoring, training and virtual networks–all while trying to maintain the “working out loud” fashion many employees enjoy about in-office work. Virtual lunch corners, for example, allow employees to see who is in certain lunch groups, join, and engage through posts and questions. Sysco Corp. got equally creative, according to Janet Duncan-Rumsey, regional VP of human resources. Sysco, which sells and distributes food to restaurants and other clients, created entirely new tools to help its sales people engage potential clients. Rumsey called it “virtual prospecting,” which means to develop a value proposition through seminars and relevant information to pitch and engage clients digitally. That shift happened as the company offered employees daily sessions on education and mental-health support. Discussion of changing the way we work while maintaining productivity led to the question of surveillance tools. Most panelists spoke out against Big Brother-style surveillance and monitoring, as Weber put it, as it poses a threat to employee well-being. “We all want highly productive environments, and yet the old way of productivity was to command, control and force more velocity,” he noted. “But when you listen to what everyone is saying it’s the opposite–it’s talking about the whole person, well-being chats, it’s ways to create rest.” “Creating systems that are thoughtful for the employee and acknowledge their current experience is the way to unlock productivity inside of a person,” he emphasized. Listening and empathy is key because the role of the employer is changing. As Grotto pointed out, employer trust increasingly hinges on companies taking a stand on social issues and serving as arbiters of news about the pandemic. She urged employers not to fall back on past practices while determining the best steps ahead. “Definitions of the pursuit of happiness and productivity have changed so drastically, so the key implication for employers is that as you make changes, your data must be fresh,” she said. “Data [from] before January serves very little purpose now–we need a new benchmark.” “Be bold,” Weber added as a message to employers. “The world right now needs people who are deeply authentic, who are human, honest and care for the whole employee. This is the time to challenge the status quo.” 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 | September 29, 2020
How to Create Psychological Safety in the Workplace

At a time when workers feel threats all around them–pandemic, economic, emotional–strong leadership is needed more than ever. But what kind of leadership is best suited to a situation where the future is so uncertain and our current reality keeps changing? The kind of leaders who make their employees feel safe, according to Amy Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at Harvard Business School and author of The Fearless Organization: Creating Psychological Safety in the Workplace for Learning, Innovation, and Growth. While no leader has a crystal ball to predict when our uncertainty will end, Edmondson has compelling suggestions about how workplace leadership can evolve and adapt to current-day demands. In conversation with Sharon Epperson, CNBC’s senior personal finance correspondent, Edmondson shared key insights from her book during From Day One’s September virtual conference. While The Fearless Organization was published in 2019, before the pandemic, the lessons hold true today: fearless, empathetic and authentic leaders contribute to a productive work environment that can also weather disruption and uncertainty. This year has put even strong leadership values to the test–“The phrase that is sticking in my mind this year is to be patient. This year is different,” Edmondson said. The one silver lining, she noted, is that we now recognize leaders everywhere–not just in the C-suite–and our concept of strong leaders is radically changing. Harvard's Edmondson, left, speaking with CNBC's Epperson at From Day One's September virtual conference (Image by From Day One) Top-down, patriarchal leadership styles are far from what we need today, according to Edmondson. “We can get through this as long as we minimize the truly counterproductive impacts of fear and maximize our creativity, compassion, our empathy.” Any strategy from a leadership team should start in that honest, human space. From there, leaders need to make space for what their employees are going through and adapt accordingly. One strategy Edmondson recommended is establishing multimodal communications, from digital chats to phone check-ins, as well as recording all virtual meetings. It’ll give employees more flexibility to access information in different ways and at different times. During stressful company decisions like restructuring or layoffs, leaders should resist their instinct to downplay the situation or avoid it altogether. “Leaders come clean … it’s about making the message clear,” she said. “Hiding is not your best solution.” The same attitude of straightforward honesty will help as employees navigate returning to offices, she noted. The decision to go beyond top-down declarations applies as well to today’s social-justice movement. Employees increasingly expect their employers to take a stand. Companies need to admit when their leaders don’t necessarily have the answers to issues of racism, as well as acknowledge that many diversity initiatives haven’t translated to true inclusion, Edmondson said. “Setting the stage and articulating this as a truly important aspect of our values and what we’re trying to make progress on,” she said, “starts at the very top. A multifaceted, diverse team needs to go ahead and start listening more broadly to get that work done.” Fearless organizations are the minority in American business, Edmondson observed. But she shared examples of companies getting things right: Barry-Wehmiller Companies, a global supplier of manufacturing technology and services, and Pixar, the animated-film studio. At Barry-Wehmiller, workers are empowered and trusted, with the company giving them a say in capital decisions. Pixar is known for an internal culture of openness and honesty, viewed as an important component to developing a strong product. As Edmondson pointed out, there’s significant data that a culture of fearless leadership not only creates a healthier work environment, it leads to better performance. And when a workplace culture of fear and secrecy goes on too long, it’s bound to impact public perception. (Volkswagen cheating on its government emissions tests is one example Edmondson brought up.) As we continue to adapt to uncertain times, the qualities of fearless organizations will increasingly be sought out by potential employees. Epperson, who also teaches at Columbia University, imagined those students bringing up the values of a fearless organization in job interviews. “What is the definition that they want to hear back from that hiring manager?” she asked. “They want to know this is an organization where you matter,” responded Edmondson. “Your voice matters, your ideas matter, and we will be committed to your growth and development.” 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 | September 29, 2020
How Did We Decide That Big Business Gets Whatever It Wants?

Kurt Andersen is 51% hopeful. With a global pandemic raging, businesses failing, unemployment stubbornly high, a divisive election looming, and racial reckoning calling, that qualifies him as downright giddy. Andersen, author of the new bestseller Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History, explained at From Day One’s September virtual conference how the quality of fairness in the U.S. economy unraveled over the course of the last four decades. The super-wealthy and corporate giants hijacked the levers of power to boost their own fortunes, while the middle class and poor collapsed into chronic economic insecurity, he said in conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg. And yet … Andersen sees better days ahead. But first, how did it get so dark? Both in his book and in the chat, Andersen summoned up a portrait of American as it was in the 20th century: an engine of both prosperity and economic equality. From the New Deal and World War II, until well into the 1970s, government crafted laws, regulations, antitrust enforcement, and a progressive tax code to corral greed. “The rich got richer, and all economic boats rose together,” said Andersen. “It's extraordinary to look at the charts of productivity and growth during these three glorious economic decades after the war.” But that upward surge halted, not just because of technology and globalization, Andersen said. “Every country faced those forces. Starting around 1970, the economic right in the form of organizations like the Business Roundtable and billionaires like the Koch brothers put together think tanks to shift public opinion on marketplace rules and profits.” Over one generation, inequality increased. “You could always lose your job,” Andersen said. “But the fear of losing your job in layoffs simply to raise the share price of a company hadn’t been an obvious way to do business in America.” By the 1990s, employees quaked in the face of outrageous college tuitions, unaffordable health care, and the death of union power to protect them. “There's a reason young people are more left on economics,” Andersen said, “not just because they're young. It’s because nobody under 40 has lived in the much fairer economy in which I grew up–in which if you play by the rules, went to college, did the work, you were probably going to do okay.” So where were the watchdogs? For their part, Democrats failed because of both good faith and political cynicism. The anti-business sentiment of the 1960s gave way to “magnanimous compromise,” in which liberals demurred that perhaps free markets weren’t all bad. “The upshot was there was no longer an economic left anywhere in the vicinity of power,” said Andersen. Andersen, left, and Goldberg spoke at From Day One's September virtual conference (Photos courtesy of the authors) The urban elite at first fared well. Maybe the Pittsburgh steel industry or Detroit auto industry were suffering, but not them. Goldberg pointed out how being so open-minded, which opened the door to the evil geniuses, inspires fury in millennials and those who follow them. The anti-war movement in the late 1960s and early ’70s left a lingering fissure between say, yuppies, and the “people who really work for a living and get dirty,” as Andersen said. In the South, the evil geniuses set out to turn white Southerners from Democrats into Republicans. Then came step two. “Let's turn white racists elsewhere into Republicans, and they did that pretty successfully,” says Andersen. Meanwhile, Democrats embraced cultural issues–racial equity, feminism and environmentalism. Now we’ve got problems. Andersen believes Republicans are waking up to how their greed and ruthlessness has started to strangle the golden goose by making too many people economically insecure. He favors a Biden win to get things back on track. “Pollsters often ask about generic Democrats,” says Andersen. “Well, Biden is the embodiment of it. But where is his party now? A lot farther to the left on economics than 10 years or even five years ago.” If Biden wins, he faces the same situation Obama did in 2009, saving the country—“in this case from a public-health crisis and the resulting economic crisis. That's going to put a damper on big projects.” Both Andersen and Goldberg see hope in an increase in unionizing, including at media outlets. “More big strikes have been held than there had been in decades,” said Andersen. The $15 minimum wage, which once seemed extreme, has spread across the states. “There's no union of McDonald's workers, but it happened.” The U.S. Chamber of Commerce is supporting some Democrats in this election cycle, he noted. “That to me is an indication that they’ve seen the light.” And even if Trump didn’t follow through on his promises to help the working class, his campaign team understood the anxiety. “The voiceover on his last ad in the 2016 campaign could be a Bernie Sanders voice,” Andersen said. “He was going to make your Medicare, your health care better. He was going to go against Wall Street and the banks. It's absurd. He made not even a gesture in that direction.” But at least that empty rhetoric showed a kind of consensus. Government needs to prove its worth by creating a big ambitious program–and a true universal health-care system would be a good start, said Andersen. The pandemic crisis changed the landscape. “Last spring, everybody was all for spending trillions of dollars on social programs. Once you've done that, I don't think it necessarily is so freaky and radical to do it again.” Andersen offers practical advice to employers negotiating the fray of partisan chaos, trying to keep employees unified and customers loyal: look at the polling numbers. “You won’t get everyone to agree, but you can see where bipartisan support lies. It's one thing for our politics to be over-affected by the squeaky wheel of the anti-abortion movement or the gun-rights movement. Politics is not rational. But corporations can be and are rational. I was heartened when so many companies after the Parkland massacre, just said, ‘No, NRA, we're not doing business with you guys anymore. We're not giving you discounts.’ ” And ultimately, Democrats–or those simply worried about economic inequality–can take a page from their opponents. “If I learned anything from researching this book, it's that these successful evil geniuses played a long game, keeping their eye on their prizes just extraordinarily well. Maybe it's doable in reverse.” Elizabeth Mitchell is a journalist and author whose new book, Lincoln's Lie: A True Civil War Caper Through Fake News, Wall Street, and the White House, will be published next week. 

Elizabeth Mitchell | September 29, 2020
Motivate: How to Give Your Employees an Energy Boost

Motivation is a delicate issue. The now-maligned "hustle culture" was previously sustained by a cultural obsession with productivity. Working smarter and faster is always better, the thinking goes. But the Covid-19 pandemic and ensuing economic and emotional fallout revealed the cracks in that system. Now, urging workers to try harder and stay motivated when the world feels like it's falling down feels disingenuous, or even destructive. But no workplace–or worker–would refuse a morale boost if it's delivered with authenticity. Every employee’s situation specific to them and deserves a specific set of tools. An employee who's feeling uninspired might not enjoy the new responsibility of training incoming employees, but someone who feels like they've plateaued and is seeking new growth opportunities might thrive in that situation. Someone who is coming back from a furlough is going to have a different outlook than someone in management who hasn't had a free moment since March. My guided journal Do It For Yourself offers prompts to encourage creativity and productive work, and these strategies can be applied to companies, and the people who keep companies running. Here are a few situations you might recognize, and how you might be able to respond. When Time Feels Untethered to Reality How can we respond to fatigue, indecision, and setbacks? How can employees think positively about their careers, both in the day-to-day grind and in the larger arc of their lives? There is no simple trick for them to orient themselves in the arc of time (if there was, Jeff Bezos would be selling it right now), but there are a few tools we can use to think about our careers and companies almost from an outsider's perspective. The author's motivational journal, designed for anyone seeking to boost their productivity Shuffling the same to-do list around every day often makes you lose sight of the larger goal. What is this all for, anyway? To frame the future for your workers, go big: Write a future Wikipedia entry for the company, and encourage employees to write one for themselves. Detail what you've already accomplished and where you want to go, all in third-person perspective. Remembering the big dream can help you work backwards to set daily, weekly, and monthly goals. When They Need to Be Selfish for Their Own Good There are so many pressing demands on our time, energy, and emotional resources. For some employees, work might fall to a lower priority than taking care of their family or other concerns. And you know what? It's OK. Or it should be OK. Being an empathetic manager starts by understanding that no one should be expected to prioritize their 9-to-5 over everything else. To build themselves up, sometimes they  need to do something for themselves. Maybe that looks like taking a vacation day, even in the middle of a big project. Maybe that looks like allowing employees to work with more freedom. Everyone is adapting–and the way to ensure employees' happiness in the long-term is to recognize that work should ideally be a place not to drain our limited energy, but to sustain it. When They’re Faced With a Ridiculous Deadline The wheels of business continue to turn, and with Q4 chugging along, you might be making up for lost time, turning toward larger projects, or already feeling the pre-holiday madness. What your team needs is sprint energy and a clear goal. It's easy to say, "Work faster! Work harder!" but the truth is everyone is probably already working as fast and as hard as possible. One strategy you can use to urge everyone forward is to remind them of the past. Think back: It's likely your team has seen this hurdle before (or a variation of it), whether it was a dash toward releasing a new product or meeting a quarterly quota. Remind the team of how they jumped this hurdle in the past. Maybe they formed new collaborations, reframed the goal, or adjusted the timeline. What worked once can work again. The circumstances are different and more complicated but recalling their previous ingenuity can encourage resilience in tough moments. When They Need More Human Connection "Zoom fatigue" has become so common that people are planning vacations simply to get away from their screens. This has profound effects on employee behavior. Meetings feel more like a chore than ever before. Even if your company has mastered the transition to remote work, we're more than six months into the pandemic and it's time to refine your system, or at least add more of a human touch. You can still conduct business while remembering you're all people on the other side of the screen. The next time you're having a routine meeting, try opening by asking everyone to go around and briefly talk about someone they admire. Whether their answer is a grandparent, colleague, or a Fortune 500 CEO, the act of reflecting on this person–and why they're so notable–can tell the rest of the group a lot about them and share in their goodwill. A few additional ideas for improving and humanizing Zoom and Slack: •Ask everyone to share the best thing they've read recently in the chat. •Have "blackout" times on Slack. These are specific hours where everyone logs off and commits to one task instead •Try "silent Zooming." Sounds counterintuitive (more Zoom?), but rather than having meetings that exhaust everyone with discussion, simulate your old office environment by joining a Zoom where a bunch of people gather in a library-like setting, doing their work without an obligation to say anything. •And it never hurts to shorten a meeting by 15 minutes. When They Return After a Crisis There seems to be a welcome new element of empathy going around, at least when it comes to friends, acquaintances, and coworkers. Call it a kind of communal commiseration. So many people have known someone who's had a health crisis (or been sick themselves) or been affected financially, that there's a deeper understanding that everyone is trying their best. Office griping now feels tedious among our shared knowledge of what hard things really look like. If your employees are going through their own crises, don't underestimate the power of simplicity. "We missed you." "You don't have to apologize for not being here." "Your help is invaluable." When life is moving fast, it's easy to forget to show gratitude. Take a moment and say the words. Reassure them that they haven't missed anything major and to not stress out over catching up. One saying that feels particularly apt in this moment is "things of quality have no fear of time." When Their Energy Levels Aren’t in Sync Even if days feel the same lately, there are still ebbs and flows to the work day. Research has shown there's a link between time of day and mental task alertness, and still more research has shown people are more likely to be ambitious and self-confident early in the day. To better understand the peaks and valleys of the people around you, try checking in on specific energy or focus levels. Say, for example, at the beginning of a meeting. You can ask everyone what their energy is at the moment on a scale of 1 to 10. They can say their answer or record it in the chat. At the end of the meeting, re-ask the question. The simple act of quantifying and acknowledging something ephemeral like "energy level" can clear the cobwebs. Our coworkers usually aren't ignoring us, and many office frustrations can be attributed to more personal aspects of people's lives. Opening up clearer channels of communication and not being afraid to fully own up to the fact that sometimes work is hard and sometimes everyone's exhausted can ease a burden you didn't know was there. When the Company's Future Is Uncertain One saying that feels particularly relevant during these few difficult months is "the only way out is through." So simple it could be a cliche, but it's incredibly effective. Clearly, every industry has fundamentally changed and the future is hazy. But while the natural inclination is to hunker down and cling to what worked in the past, this moment deserves the opposite: a full embrace of the future, whatever that may be. If employees are mired in the daily grind but there's been no company talk of 2021 goals, that can create a situation ripe for whispering Slack convos and confusion. And asking employees to continue at a breakneck pace without reflecting on their hard work and adaptability might get them thinking, "Well, everything else is changing, why don't I start looking around, too?" It's easy to lose motivation if they're thinking that maybe the company won't be around in a year or that they haven't had any words of encouragement from management. Even if you can't offer definitive answers, one exercise to try as the year winds down is to encourage a dialogue about what we should all leave behind–and what we want to embrace and move toward. Focus on the individual rather than the company. Have a candid discussion about the situations and work expectations that are better left in 2020, but encourage forward-looking thoughts, too. Maybe the company won't be around in a year, or maybe your workforce will undergo radical changes, but it's crucial to remember that you're here together now, and you can encourage each other now. You cannot let the precariousness of today distract you from the inevitability of the future. Lift up and encourage one another not because you're coworkers, but because you're human. Kara Cutruzzula is a journalist, playwright, and author of Do It For Yourself, a motivational journal designed to guide people through their work and creative projects.

Kara Cutruzzula | September 28, 2020
Meaningful Inclusion Can Start Small, Just by Listening

Jazmine Boatman, VP and head of U.S. operations for the global leadership-development firm DDI, characterizes herself as a “lifelong learner.” It’s a value she has brought to her own leadership as well as setting standards for long-term inclusion within the company. “If everyone could take that growth mindset of the lifelong learner into every interaction they have,” she said, “They’re more likely to have inclusive moments, both macro and micro.” It’s a simple philosophy, but for Boatman the journey of achieving meaningful inclusion within company culture can start small. “The more complicated things are, the harder it will be to execute,” she explained. “In the midst of a challenging business environment, set clear targets on what you want to accomplish.” It all starts by listening, according to Boatman. Diversity quotas often miss out on deeper, nuanced needs of employees which can lead to inclusion. But to understand those needs, leadership has to be willing to listen and take them seriously. “You have to do the diligence of understanding the different perspectives, points of view and what’s missing,” she said. “It shows up in numbers but it also shows up in just talking to people.” Companies can track employee feedback through tools like engagement data and exit interviews. Boatman views this as a crucial first step–“doing that homework”–before deploying any type of inclusion initiatives. Jazmine Boatman, VP and head of U.S. operations for DDI (Photo courtesy of DDI) She then recommends taking a systematic look at how the company functions by auditing its systems for objectivity and fairness. “Look at sourcing, selection, development, even your mentorship programs and awards,” she said. “It will give you more direction on where to go deeper.” When a company has a solid understanding of employee perspective on inclusivity, as well which systems are functioning inclusively and which are not, it can begin to explore the type of exposure and education that’s most appropriate for the company. It’s also the starting point of setting clear, specific targets and timelines to accomplish them. Maybe the company wants a certain number of minority candidates sourced by the end of next year, or to promote a certain percentage of minority employees into leadership roles, or build a more diverse board of directors. Set achievement goals alongside the timeline to get it done, Boatman urged: “It’s about setting specific targets and figuring out how to build to that, in accordance to what you need. It’s important not to set random, feel-good goals, but goals tied to your own business strategy.” This all sets the stage for inclusivity, but how do companies ensure the value is put in place for the long term? “You can't manage what you don't measure. But make sure what you’re tracking, you’re tracking at different levels,” said Boatman. For example, if a company finds there is an underrepresentation of Black employees, the company shouldn’t just look at racial demographics at an organizational level, but also at levels like individual contributors, mid-level leaders, executive leaders and teams. “Tracking demographics at that minute level is one place to start,” she said. Employee engagement shouldn’t fall by the wayside, either. “How do you get everyone involved in goal setting, and give everyone the space to bring new ideas to the table?” she asked. Quantitative and qualitative data should be held in equal importance, with employees given continued opportunities to weigh in on how the company is meeting its inclusivity goals. And as a leader at DDI, Boatman knows the value of inclusiveness must come from the top. “A leader’s role in modeling this is of critical importance,” she said. “Their job is to create a culture for this–and if they’re promoting people who do not show inclusivity, it sends a strong message that all the education prior to that was lip service.” Leaders have a unique opportunity, in the midst of COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter movement, to engage employees with a new type of leadership, Boatman believes. It’s a time companies can address their workplace culture with candor, make space for the well-being of employees, and get comfortable with uncomfortable conversations. In the midst of major changes to the workplace and our day-to-day lives, the goal of long-term inclusion doesn’t have to be impossibly complex. “Listen more and start small,” Boatman said. “What resonates with people is that they feel heard and they trust you will listen for understanding. As a leader, you might feel overwhelmed, but what I found to be helpful are the simple steps of listening and learning." Editor's note: in a From Day One conference in Brooklyn last year, Boatman said that in hiring, leaders need to beware of “Mini-Me syndrome,” in which recruiters look for people who went to the same school, for example, or have the same work experience. 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 | September 11, 2020
Can Corporate America Help Solve the Parenting Crisis?

Parents of school-age children are sharing uncharacteristic feelings for this time of year: despair, anxiety and anger. In normal times, this would be a season of pleasant anticipation, with kids about to head off to a place of learning and supervision. This year, it’s a full-on social crisis. All the scenarios for going back to school during a pandemic–remote schooling, hybrid schedules, or a return to the classroom–feel risky or nearly impossible to manage. “All the choices stink,” Kate Averett, a University of Albany sociologist who has been interviewing parents, told the New York Times. “Parents tell me about not being able to sleep because they’re so anxious, or tell me they’ve been crying a lot.” Times columnist Michelle Goldberg is one of those perplexed parents: “When I lie in bed struggling to figure out how to balance physical risk, economic sustainability and emotional well-being, I can’t make the equation work. And If I can’t do it, I’m not sure how parents with far fewer resources are doing it either.” Parents say they feel abandoned by government. This presents an urgent question for employers: In the absence of a normal system, what can they do to help the parents who work for them? The issue is not just a humanitarian one, but a practical matter. In a nationwide poll by the Washington Post-Schar School, “50% of working parents said it would be ‘harder’ or ‘impossible’ to do their jobs if their children’s schools provide only online instruction this fall,” a number that rose to 66% among parents of younger children. In another poll of parents, four out of five said they would have no in-person help educating and caring for their children at home. Those are ominous statistics. In fact, solving the parenting crisis looks like a prerequisite for jump-starting as the U.S. economy. To see how businesses are responding, From Day One consulted HR executives and other business leaders who have spoken at our conferences. The overview: Companies are assessing the programs they have and considering what they should add. Among the solutions in play: flex time, additional paid days off, increased back-up child care, tutoring discounts, nanny stipends, help with forming learning pods, and information-sharing forums on how to cope with the situation. Currently, only a tiny fraction of U.S. companies offer subsidized child-care centers or programs, but now many large employers are scrambling to explore their options. Megan Neumann, a consultant at Mercer who focuses on employer health and benefits choices, told the Washington Post she is getting four times as many inquiries from client companies about child-care and educational help as she did before the pandemic began. “Employers really haven’t ever been focused on [the needs of school-aged kids]” she said. “People have depended on the school year to provide for watching children and fostering a learning environment.” In June, the Cincinnati-based Fifth Third Bank began offering employees 30 days of subsidized child support this year, either in-home or at a care center, the Chicago Tribune reported. RELX, a global information-analytics company, has increased its offering of backup-care days provided to employees through Bright Horizons, the largest provider employer-sponsored child care, according to Amy Noelle, RELX’s global benefits leader. Working with Bright Horizons, the company also offers “the ability for parents to engage with the Sittercity website to find an instructor to lead a learning pod,” Noelle told From Day One. The reality is that most of the burden of solving this crisis will likely fall on women, which will cause them both immediate stress and potentially a long-term setback. “I have concerns looking at data that showcases how women are more impacted by child-care and elder-care constraints and what it may mean for retaining and attracting female talent long-term if we do not all take a more progressive stance in this space,” Annalisa Esposito Bluhm, head of executive and strategic corporate communications at General Motors, told From Day One. “Here at GM, empathy is everything. It's difficult for so many and we have to provide flexibility for those juggling work with family-care issues,” she added. Bluhm offered a snapshot of the situation in the Detroit metro area and her own coping challenges: “Our district started the school year virtually and will assess at the end of October. We cannot find child care for our kids–all centers are at capacity. Nannies and tutors are in high demand and difficult to come by. Those who are available are commanding a weekly cash price north of $700 per week. There is no reality where I can find support and the only option I will have is to modify my work day to help my kids from 8:30 am to noon and then work from 1 pm to 6 pm and after they go to bed to make up the difference.” What Are the New Boundaries? One of the biggest ways for managers to help their employees, including parents, is to set forth work-from-home guidelines for managers and employees. Adi Ignatius, editor in chief of Harvard Business Review, praised the “work from home pledges” formulated by IBM and said his organization would be adopting them too. The guidelines include pledges to “be family sensitive,” “support ‘not camera ready’ times,” and “to set boundaries and prevent video fatigue.” “This is a time when organizations can truly demonstrate what it means to have an inclusive culture,” Reneé Konzelman, VP of HR at Honeywell UOP, told From Day One. “Employees have to be agile and adapt to the challenges that these stay-at-home orders bring, and managers need to be flexible and understanding that the workday is no longer 9-to-5  given remote schooling obligations during the school day.” Several experts emphasized to From Day One that corporations will need to develop a host of solutions to fit different needs. “This is new territory and there will be no ‘perfect’ answer,” according to Mikeisha Anderson Jones, VP of inclusion & diversity in the Colleague Experience Group at American Express. “Teaching (and remembering) about flexibility, creativity, resiliency, and agility will become even more important.” “There is no magic bullet, rather a range of steps to help employers manage the stressors for employees,” according to Rich Maiore, president of Rocket Social Impact. “This includes flex-time and collective child-care, to mental-health apps and wellness coaching.” His firm has provided each employee with a $250 stipend to create a more functional home office or play space at home. He added: “I myself have turned my office into a panic room designed to keep pesky children out. It won’t win me Father of the Year, but may preserve my sanity.” Appcast, a talent-recruiting platform, established a set of principles focused on fairness,  flexibility and clarity about goals and expectations, Leah Daniels, SVP of strategy, told From Day One. Among the most important: “Clear communication between managers and employees about each employee’s unique situation and how the employee plans to manage through it.” Promod Vohra, chief talent strategy officer at the IT firm ACS, agreed that managers need to listen carefully to employees as they decide on new procedures. “I feel that in addition to developing broad policies, most of the employees may need individual attention, as everyone’s needs are different. We must have patience and time to hear them out. That will solve half of the problem. These are unprecedented and unpredictable times and no standard policy can cover all bases. I hope this will result in better relationships and loyalty,” he told From Day One. Where Do Parents Need Help? When it came to discovering employee needs, Robin Schroyer, health and well-being manager for CommScope, conducted a virtual listening tour. “We have a global employee population, and to understand more of what our employees are facing with their children (focused on 10 and younger), I held a series of focus groups, connecting with people around the world. I am still working to complete my qualitative analysis, but there are a few themes I have identified: vacation time, network connectivity issues in the home, quality of child learning, impact on youth psychological and social growth, health, money (childcare vs private schools), productivity, communication strategies and mental health.” Schroyer is working on solutions to many of the issues. Managers need to make sure that in adjusting schedules and workloads to respond to the needs of some, they don’t let bias creep in. Appcast’s guidelines warn of this kind of thinking: “Don’t assume that primary parents or parents of young children are working less hard or that our employees with older children or no children are picking up the slack.” Daniels mentioned a few other current necessities: “A sense of humor, empathy and recognition that the best-laid plans can go south when there are small children involved.” At a time when uncertainty and ambiguity are rampant, some companies have tried to bridge the information gap by creating a forum for sharing tips, resources and other information. At Zillow Group, where the company has been offering flexible hours to their staff, managers have also “set up parents groups and have brought in speakers to provide guidance on home schooling,” according to Scott Moore, the company’s senior manager of early-talent recruiting. Fortive, an industrial and tech giant, asked parents to share their own tips with each other, curated the information, and circulated a flyer across the organization, according to Shinder Dhillon, the company’s VP of inclusive and diversity. Since the parenting crisis overlaps with a pandemic health crisis, companies have been considering both simultaneously. At Hewlett Packard Enterprise, “We’ve been focused on building our internal communities–parents, caregivers, those living alone,” according to Samanntha DuBridge, the company’s VP of global benefits and culture/engagement. “We are also providing additional days if needed for COVID and in the U.S. expanding our backup childcare. We’ve continued to add to our mental-health offerings and added Headspace,” the meditation app. At Southern California Edison, the company has offered 10 additional paid days off, on top of already existing vacation and sick time, for COVID-related care of the employee or any member of the family. The utility is also offering a stipend of $500 for home-office gear including ergonomic support, according to Liji Thomas, the company’s head of diversity and inclusion. A new corporate charitable program that has been growing in popularity in recent years, the employee relief fund, could be a helpful source of funding to mitigate the child-care crisis. Such funds were inspired mainly by the need to help victims of natural disasters, but they can be used for other kinds of personal emergencies as well. Since March 15, E4E Relief, a nonprofit that administers these programs on behalf of employers, has awarded nearly $70 million in 100,000 grant awards to employees at its partner companies. In a time of COVID, such financial grants have helped families avoid personal crises like missing a rent payment or losing their child care, according to Holly Welch Stubbing, CEO of E4E Relief. While many employers are rushing to address this crisis, only big and prosperous companies are likely to be able to pay for substantial solutions. A more sweeping response would require a philosophical sea change in how the U.S. deals with child care, which is exactly the demand of a new cohort of political activists: the “rage moms” who are sick of being expected to do it all. Senator Elizabeth Warren, who made child care a priority issue in her Presidential campaign, told the New York Times she has experienced a new surge in support for her position. “Right now, I think women have just had it up to their eyeballs. They no longer feel isolated and one-off in how they couldn’t figure out how to make the system work, and recognize the system is broken, and nobody’s making it work,” she said. “They’re fired up. And I love it.” Steve Koepp is a co-founder of From Day One. Previously, he was editorial director of Time Inc. Books, executive editor of Fortune and deputy managing editor of Time

Stephen Koepp | August 27, 2020