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Is it too noisy in your office these days? Or too quiet? Either situation can be distracting, especially if people in your workforce have grown accustomed to working from home over the past four years.
Last week, I published a story that dug into the problem of office distractions, and how the pandemic reshaped our relationship with workplace noise, even after years of complaints about open-plan office designs. Workers take more Zoom meetings, often speaking louder in those video calls. All those days spent “collaborating” onsite, as more workplaces are mandating? That can also boost noisy office chatter.
On the other hand, hybrid work policies can mean fewer people in the workplace, making that one chatty phone call in an otherwise silent office even more distracting. Meanwhile, after years of working from home, our expectations for what it can be like to do uninterrupted work have been forever altered.
My story explores not only what companies are doing to redesign their spaces to help—for instance, Intuit Mailchimp installed five “libraries” for quiet space in its new Atlanta office—but also the business opportunity this latest workplace challenge presents for entrepreneurs. Sound-insulating phone booths or “pods” are being widely adopted, with makers like Framery almost doubling sales between 2020 and 2022. I spoke with the founder of a generative “soundscaping” company that uses sensors to adapt background sound in real time to how distracting or stimulating the environment is.
One of my favorites: a dial-shaped device prototyped by the “Makers” team at software firm monday.com that sits on the corner of workers’ computer monitors and shows how much uninterrupted time a user still needs. The company is using it internally but says there’s potential for a commercial product (I want one I can use when working at home to alert my kids when I’ll be done!).
As we start summer’s biggest holiday week—and many working parents battle summer child care issues—I spent last Thursday in Washington, D.C. at the National Child Care Innovation Summit co-hosted by the Chamber of Commerce, its foundation, and the Department of Commerce. I wrote about a few highlights of the event here and share excerpts from a brief interview I had with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who is leading the Biden administration’s funding allocation of the CHIPS and Science Act, below. On that note, this newsletter will be back in your inboxes July 15 as we take a break for the 4th. Enjoy the holiday!
HUMAN CAPITAL
Streaming giant Netflix recently made changes to its “culture memo,” updating a widely read 125-page powerpoint presentation about the company’s famous “freedom and responsibility” culture published in 2009, with a new document shared last week by chief talent officer Sergio Ezama. “Over the last 15 years, we’ve revised it four times in the quest for excellence,” he wrote, noting the update reflects some 1,500 comments the company has received about the original document. Senior contributor Jack Kelly shared his take on the memo and how to cope—and thrive—in a culture like Netflix’s.
Facebook parent Meta must face a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging it prefers hiring foreign workers over U.S. citizens, a federal appeals court ruled Thursday. The lawsuit was brought by a software engineer who alleges that Meta refused to hire him because it allegedly “prefers to hire noncitizens holding H-1B visas to whom it can pay lower wages,” Forbes’ Cailey Gleeson reports, citing court filings. Meta has previously denied wrongdoing, according to Reuters.
WAGES + PAY
Chime, the largest digital bank in the U.S., has acquired Salt Labs, a two-year-old fintech startup, reports Forbes’ Jeff Kauflin. The startup awards hourly employees loyalty points for the shifts they work, and the points can eventually be exchanged for rewards such as NASCAR tickets, trips and financial investments. Chime is hiring most of Salt Labs’ 30 employees, including cofounder and CEO Jason Lee, who previously cofounded DailyPay, a company that lets workers access their wages shortly after a shift.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Forbes’ Rashi Shrivastava spoke to Dario Amodei, cofounder and CEO of Anthropic, about the company’s most intelligent AI model yet, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which it recently unveiled. “We’re always trying to improve our models by improving every ingredient that goes into them, the architecture and algorithms, the quantity and quality of data that goes into them, the amount of compute that’s used to train them,” Amodei told Shrivastava. Here’s what you need to know about the new model.
LEADERSHIP + COACHING
Fans of Brené Brown take note: The bestselling author announced a partnership June 26 with coaching platform BetterUp, bringing her “Dare to Lead” curriculum to BetterUp’s platform. Brown will join the company’s science board, which also includes Wharton professor and guru Adam Grant, positive psychology expert Martin Seligman and Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson.
WHAT’S NEXT: COMMERCE SECRETARY GINA RAIMONDO
Forbes spoke briefly with Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo at the National Child Care Innovation Summit, an event the Department of Commerce co-hosted with the Chamber of Commerce and its foundation in Washington, D.C. on Thursday. We chatted about the provision in the CHIPS and Science Act that ties funding for new semiconductor manufacturing facilities in the U.S. with workforce child care plans—and other ways business, policymakers and nonprofits can work together to improve the child care crisis. Excerpts from the conversation below have been lightly edited for space and clarity; for more of what was said at the event, check out my coverage here.
How much do you see receptivity to this issue from businesses changing?
Look, we had five [C-suite executives] here today. Four with me and one on the screen who wanted to be here. I don’t know if you would have had that five years ago. We had this event—we wanted 300 people, we had over 450. The Chamber is hosting it. I don’t know if that would have happened five years ago. This was thought of as a social issue and a women’s issue.
Why do you think that’s changed?
It’s just a labor market reality. Everyone is struggling to find workers. Everyone knows unless you figure out a way to get women to work, we’re just not going to get the job done. You heard [Manish Bhatia] from Micron saying women start and then when family comes along, they move into more flexible jobs. He was saying we want them to stay in the engineering jobs and the tech track. We can’t afford to lose our brightest minds away from the tech track. [Suffolk Construction CEO John Fish’s] statistics are unbelievable. He was basically saying there’s 0% unemployment rate in the trades. 500,000 open jobs. An aging population. You need women. I think it’s kind of a crisis point. They understand it’s a brass tacks business issue.
What other potential industries could you see expanding what you’re doing with the CHIPS Act and tying child care and government funding?
Honestly, I think it should be everyone. The panel up there was very interesting to me as I sat there listening to them. You could not have a greater diversity of industries. You had semiconductor manufacturing. Etsy. Construction [Suffolk]. Logistics [UPS]. And then [IBM is] tech. They’re all struggling with this issue.
If you look through history, social norms change in moments of crisis. [Traditionally], we think child care, we think women; we think child care, we think social [issue]. We have a labor force crisis. It’s driving inflation. It’s reducing growth. It’s preventing companies from expanding at the rate they need to. I hope in this moment of this child care crisis, we change our thinking and say: ‘This isn’t a women’s issue, it’s an everybody issue. Let’s solve it.’ It isn’t rocket science, right? We can figure this out.
Is your biggest goal with the child care provision in the CHIPS Act to build out the marketplace or to build out employer-sponsored care?
Actually, neither. The reason [the CHIPS Act provision was added] was to protect taxpayers. If I’m going to give them all this money, they have to be successful. And I know for a fact they won’t be successful unless they figure out a way to hire women. … Every chips facility—they’re gigantic—it’s maybe 6,000 to 10,000 workers. The unemployment rate is zero [in construction]. You need women. … I have to make sure that I’m a good steward for taxpayers. These projects have to be done on time, on budget. And they’ve got to convince me that they’re going to find a way to get women on the job.
There was an announcement today about collecting more data. Tell me, specifically, what you think would be helpful in getting there.
I’m not a statistician, but the folks at the Census will figure out exactly what to collect and how to collect it. But the concept of what I wanted to do is you can’t make good policy unless you have the data. Whether you’re federal government, state government or industry. We can’t make good policies and investments unless we have the facts.
How do we solve the child care issue for gig workers?
I don’t know if I have an answer. That’s part of the point of this summit. Everybody get together, share experiences. … But I think some of it is facilities. There’s just a lack of spots. If you’re a waitress or a construction worker, you need a place to bring your kids. What we heard today is some of it’s regulations. The regulations [make it] hard to build a child care facility that’s compliant. It’s expensive. We need the people to work in the facilities. I think the answer to your question is just more spots in child care. Fixing supply.
You made a comment to Massachusetts Governor Maura Healey [who was on a panel at the summit] about how she worked with education, labor and commerce together to address child care. How can you do that at the federal level?
That’s a great question. I work extremely closely with Julie Su, who’s the acting Labor Secretary. There’s some folks here from the White House. We are, under the president’s leadership, working together. … Business is ahead of the politicians on this one. Businesses are telling us—all of them, from Etsy to IBM and everything in between—‘Help us, we have a business need.’ You heard them all: ‘We can’t grow.’ Policymakers need to catch up to that and realize … they have to wake up and get real and listen to the business community [that] is telling them this isn’t a social issue. This is how we compete.
FACTS + COMMENT
Washington, D.C.’s pay transparency law officially went into effect Sunday, making it the sixth state or district in the nation where pay transparency laws that require employers to disclose salary information in job listings have gone into effect, according to Payscale. (Several other states, including Vermont, Maryland, Minnesota and Connecticut, have passed similar laws that go into effect in the future or only require that companies provide pay ranges upon request.)
About 33%: The percentage of workers that will be impacted by pay transparency laws by 2025, according to a CNBC report citing Payscale senior employment counsel Lulu Seikaly.
84 cents: The amount per dollar that women earn compared with men, according to data released by the White House earlier this year.
“The year 2022 was known as the year of pay transparency, but 2024 is giving it a run for its money, as we are seeing more action on the legislation front,” Payscale’s Seikaly told CNBC.
STRATEGIES + ADVICE
A new study says men can benefit from challenging sexism at work. Here’s why.
Try these best practices for managing multiple generations in the workplace.
Avoid these five traps when transitioning into a new executive role.
QUIZ
A report by Reuters alleged that Taiwanese manufacturer Foxconn, a major producer of Apple devices, has been excluding married women from assembly jobs at its main iPhone plant in which country? (Foxconn denied the claim in a statement to Forbes, reported Cailey Gleeson.)
- Taiwan
- China
- India
- Vietnam
Check out if you got the answer right here.
