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And we thought the return-to-office debate was getting quieter.
On September 16—National Working Parents Day, no less—Amazon announced that it wanted to go back to the way things were before Covid-19, and expects everyone to come to the office five days a week starting in January, except in extenuating circumstances such as illness. The announcement prompted days of headlines and post after post on LinkedIn debating what the impact would be elsewhere. As we noted in our coverage, Amazon’s decision makes them a true rarity among big tech firms: Just 7% of all large technology companies have a full-time office requirement, and that’s been generally trending downward since early 2023 (it ticked up slightly in the last quarter from 5%). No other industry group has as few full-time attendance mandates in place as big tech.
So why would Amazon do it? CEO Andy Jassy wrote a lot about culture in his memo, and how being back in the office was important for the company’s teams. But as we explored in our piece, “culture” means different things to different people—and different companies. It’s not necessarily about bonding with coworkers or how satisfied people are with their work—it can also be about intense, hard-charging levels of performance, as has been Amazon’s reputation.
When some executives talk about culture, former Slack executive and future of work expert Brian Elliott told me, it’s a reference to “your level of dedication to our endeavor—and how hard are you willing to put your nose to the grindstone.” (It’s worth noting that research does not clearly suggest that working together five days a week actually improves culture. In fact, more recent academic research says a hybrid schedule is best when it comes to job satisfaction and productivity.)
Whether or not other companies see Amazon’s move as something they should follow, it’s clear we’re not done talking about remote work. Bloomberg reported this week that new Starbucks CEO, Brian Niccol, whose own remote work arrangement drove headlines for days after his contract was made public, praised the “power in having everybody together” in an address to employees, but said he wouldn’t tell them which specific days to be at the company’s Seattle headquarters. And at our Future of Work Summit, the issue was of course a key topic of conversation once again, with smart insights from Pinterest’s Doniel Sutton, Neiman Marcus Group’s Eric Severson and Aéto Strategy’s Tim Oldman about the power of place and how to make hybrid work in a new world of work. You can watch the panel discussion in its entirety here.
AI + SKILLS
Forbes’ Alex Konrad has the story of 20-month-old startup Mercor, which is now valued at $250 million following a $32 million Series A led by Benchmark and investments from the likes of Peter Thiel, Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey and two OpenAI board directors, Quora CEO Adam D’Angelo, and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers. Initially a manual service to match and place temporary talent, Mercor’s marketplace now depends on its own large language model, and the use of artificial intelligence to help vet and interview job candidates. (It has conducted more than 100,000 interviews, evaluating 300,000 people in less than two years.)
Salesforce said last week that it’s committing another $500 million to investing in generative AI ventures, raising the total amount it has earmarked for AI startups to $1 billion in the last 18 months, Salesforce told Forbes’ Richard Nieva exclusively. The news came the same day the company said it was announcing $23 million in new grants to U.S. school districts and global education nonprofits to help with skills like AI—and the day before the company opened its annual Dreamforce event, a massive tech gathering in San Francisco. At the event, the company said it would be offering its premium AI courses and AI certifications free of charge to anyone through its free online learning platform, Trailhead, through the end of 2025. It also plans to open a pop-up AI Center for in-person community AI training courses and a dedicated floor designed for employees to skill-up on AI tools and agents.
Missed our Future of Work Summit last week in New York? Here’s our live blog recap, and many of our panels are now available to watch on video. A few highlights related to AI and skills include this panel discussion with IBM’s Nickle LaMoreaux, LinkedIn’s Aneesh Raman and Deloitte’s Anthony Stephan (moderated by yours truly); a conversation with top leaders from Blackstone, Accenture and OneTen about skills-based hiring, and a discussion between three of our AI 50 listmaker founders about AI, jobs and the future of work.
PERKS + PRACTICE
Last week was National Working Parents Day, and Forbes contributor Michelle Travis highlighted new research from Ph.D candidate Hillary Cookler of the UCLA Anderson School of Management, who created an online database that rates the 500 largest U.S. public companies on the transparency and quality of their paid parental leave policies. Among the top 10 companies, she reports, are Salesforce, Workday, Adobe and HPE.
BURNOUT + MENTAL HEALTH
Forbes senior contributor Jack Kelly examines reports from the Wall Street Journal that JPMorgan Chase and Bank of America plan to limit and more closely track young bankers’ hours after an investigation by the paper examined a continued culture of overwork on Wall Street following the death of a junior banker. JPMorgan will now cap junior investment bankers’ hours at 80 a week in most cases, while Bank of America is implementing a new timekeeping tool for young bankers. Don’t miss our conversation about burnout and long hours—a true highlight of last week’s Future of Work Summit—with Brigid Schulte, the author of a new book titled Over Work; Joe O’Connor, the cofounder of the Work Time Reduction organization; and Annie Dean, global head of “team anywhere” at Atlassian.
WHAT’S NEXT: Daisy Auger-Domínguez
Daisy Auger-Domínguez, a longtime HR executive who, until last August, was chief people officer of Vice Media, has held senior roles at Viacom, Google, Disney and WarnerMedia, and currently serves as a fractional chief people officer and serves on several advisory boards. She recently released her second book, Burnt Out To Lit Up, a guide for managers who are struggling with burnout. Excerpts from the conversation below have been edited for length and clarity.
What’s on your plate these days besides the new book?
Well, I’m trying to not burn out while promoting a book about burnout. I intentionally created what I’m calling this my portfolio career right now so that I could have the flexibility I need.
Did you have HR leaders in mind specifically when you wrote this? They’ve had to deal with a perfect storm of hybrid work, the politicization of DEI, the current economy, labor shortages, and the like.
I can’t not. That’s the world of work that I’ve lived in. This book is not about Vice, but it is about my experience leading through a pandemic, restructuring, a bankruptcy, all of those things which eventually led to my burnout.
Little did I know last year that burnout was going to be the topic that it is right now across every industry. But what I was seeing were the toxic tensions existing with leaders and how hard it was for us—as leaders and managers and really even individual contributors—to contain that and manage that and still operate.
When we think of helping with burnout, too often we hear about meditation apps for employee assistance programs, rather than changing the root causes leading to employees’ burnout. What should they be doing instead?
Part of what we have to acknowledge is the root structural problems of overwork and old, dusty standards of professionalism and success in organizations that cannot be fixed with a mental health day. Mental health things are great and they’re necessary. I’m a big advocate of them. But what you’re talking about are structural changes that HR alone cannot lead.
So what could it look like to make those structural changes? Does it look like the four-day workweek? Does it look like hiring more people instead of putting that money into more therapy benefits?
This is simple, but it’s the interpersonal tensions that exist in the workplace that make work harder for people. It’s something that leadership can address and change, but we don’t. What I mean by that is having two or three people who are doing the same job. If Jena steps in and does some of Daisy’s work, I’m going to be pissed off because that work is mine and then there’s going to be overload. No one’s going to know what they’re doing. This happens across every organization.
Collaboration can be healthy if it’s not about getting in the way. But what happens is leaders are not clear on what needs to get done. … A CEO who’s not able to hold their teams accountable—not just for the work product, but for how work gets done—that … is the biggest we’ve heard of all of the burnout factors. It’s a lack of clarity in decision making, a lack of clarity in goal setting. People going after a million different goals and then coming back and being told, ‘no, no, no, actually…’
What’s your biggest piece of advice for a really burned out manager? What is the thing they should do first?
Get really clear on what’s important to you. Regularly check in with yourself to spot your signs of burnout. What does that look like? What are your body’s fire alarms telling you when you’re stressed or exhausted or frustrated?
Only you know what your stressors are and when your social battery needs to be replenished. We need to tune in to that as much as possible. Tune in to the moments where you feel like your inner Hulk is coming out.
STRATEGIES + ADVICE
LinkedIn is using your data to train ChatGPT—here’s how to turn it off.
Are you a secure leader? Here are four traits that define success.
Make your workspace quieter with these design ideas as tech drives more interest in avoiding workplace noise.
FACTS + COMMENT
Boeing said Wednesday that white-collar furloughs will affect a “large number of U.S.-based executives, managers and employees” to help cut costs and avoid a credit-rating cut after its largest union decided to strike. The Wall Street Journal reported the furlough could impact tens of thousands of workers.
1 out of 4: The number of weeks out of a month that Boeing will furlough its executives, managers and other white-collar employees for the duration of a strike union employees voted to authorize amid negotiations over pay and pension.
About 33,000: The number of Boeing factory workers represented by Districts 751 and W24 of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers union (IAM), which announced September 12 its members had voted to reject a contract offer from the company
“The response from people is it’s not good enough,” Jon Holden, who leads the Machinists Union that’s striking against Boeing, told the Seattle Times about the reaction from members to a previous contract proposal
VIDEO
What The Fearless Fund Settlement Might Mean For The DEI’s Future
QUIZ
Which company quietly moved its headquarters from California to Texas, with court filings showing that it now has 188 full-time employees working in the southern state?
- Fanatics
- Quora
- X
- Illumio
Check your answer here.