“The idea that we’re ever going to go back to work like we did in 2019 is a myth. Flexibility is here to stay.” — Dr. John Howard, Director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety & Health

The global COVID-19 pandemic that has disrupted virtually every aspect of life has also created an unprecedented opportunity to profoundly transform the way we work, how work shapes our lives, and what productive, effective—and equitable—work looks like. This Toolkit is designed to help guide managers and leaders in designing high results, flexible cultures of trust and wellbeing. The time is now. Leaders who once resisted "distributed" digital or work-from-home work styles were either forced to adopt it literally overnight, or have come to embrace it as productivity has risen, even under difficult circumstances. Workers across industries are voluntarily quitting at rates never seen before, even as millions of jobs remain unfilled in what’s being called The Great Reassessment, the Great Renegotiation, or the Great Migration. Workers want time for their lives. Young workers are redefining their relationship with work, and prioritizing value and meaning over pay and climbing the career ladder. More than three-fourths of workers are stressed, overwhelmed or burned out– including managers. The long invisible and undervalued workers in the care, retail, and service sectors, where low wages, unpredictable and involuntary part-time schedules are rampant, and where women and people of color are overrepresented, have been hailed as essential.

And, as childcare facilities and schools closed down in the face of a life-threatening virus, the near impossible dilemma—and deep disadvantage—of women and caregivers who have long had to navigate work cultures, expectations, and practices designed for another era came into sharp relief. Women’s levels of stress and burnout have risen and far outpaces men, as their labor force participation, particularly among women of color, has fallen to levels not seen in 30 years.

In the face of such flux and uncertainty, this is a pivotal moment for business executives, organizational leaders, and managers to reimagine work in order to both promote equity and wellbeing across race, class and gender and make work more effective. To finally make work really work for both workers and employers. And, just as there is great promise, so is there great peril that this opportunity could be missed without intentional and inclusive planning, designing, and implementing.

What comes next in a "Corona-normal" future of work is uncertain. There is no work redesign playbook right now. And, as companies continue to feel their way forward as new virus variants emerge and recede and as public health guidance shifts, there continues to be much confusion, anxiety, and uncertainty.

That’s where this toolkit comes in. Designed to be a useful and practical guide for managers and organizational leaders as they continue to develop and refine what’s next in a “Corona-normal” future of work, this toolkit draws together evidence-based research, expert advice, and the best of what we’ve learned so far. It provides a framework for designing work for equity and effectiveness, and offers practical strategies, case studies and trend analyses for the three dominant emerging types of work: hybrid, digital and essential. (This Toolkit uses the terms "digital" or distributed instead of "remote" work, as "remote" implies real work is being done in a place somewhere else.) With links to curated resources, the Toolkit aims to help managers make the most of this pivotal and potentially transformative time for both work and workers.

One thing is clear: there is no going back. We’ve seen each others’ bedrooms, laundry rooms, children, partners, and pets in the background of Zoom or Teams calls. We’ve become digital nomads and moved around the country. We’ve finally been forced to see how essential frontline workers—the grocery store clerks, care workers, retail workers, and restaurant workers who make up the majority of the U.S. workforce—struggle to make it in increasingly precarious jobs and applauded their efforts as “heroic.” (Just over one-third of the workforce was able to work digitally at the height of the pandemic, the BLS reports. Everyone else was on site or out of work.) We've been forced to confront how, without a universal care infrastructure for our children and our disabled, ill or elderly loved ones, the ability to work is close to impossible for far too many. COVID-19 showed that the future of work is already here. And that’s a good thing, because pre-COVID work didn’t work, with outdated systems, practices, and expectations, and growing precarity driving dangerously high levels of work stress—in one job for the professional class, and in cobbling together several low-paying, low-hour gigs for the working class—and perpetuating dangerously destabilizing inequality in an increasingly diverse workforce.

Work is changing. We can finally make it work—make it equitable and effective. Here’s how.

Designing for equity leads to greater work effectiveness, regardless of whether leaders seek to redesign hybrid, digital or essential workplaces. To guide leaders as work continues to rapidly shift, here are five foundational principles that can serve as a framework to drive equity and effectiveness drawn from emerging research and the pandemic experience.

1. Create a Culture of Trust, Connection, and Purpose. Ask for and respect worker preferences. Give employees more autonomy and control over their time. For essential workers, that means working with their input to provide a stable schedule and giving at least two weeks’ notice so they can plan. Knowledge workers increasing productivity under trying circumstances during the pandemic has proven clearly how giving them more control over time, manner, and place in when and how they work is good for both employee health and company productivity. Recognize that authenticity and social connection, whether virtual or in person, is critical. Define the purpose of the organization and make sure everyone is clear why and how their work matters.

2. Have a Plan. Design with Intention. Ask workers what they want and need though anonymous surveys and build together from there. Those currently in leadership positions, surveys show, are more likely to want to return to the old ways of working that brought them success. Some may even be designing new ways of work to ensure they fail. Don’t. And recognize there’s a big difference between embracing change, with experimentation and agile adaptation, and allowing it, as if it were a gift. This is a time for re-imagination. Remember the magic words: "What would it take?" And go from there.

3. Managers Must Learn to Manage in a New Way. Give managers training to focus on tasks and performance outputs, not inputs like time and attendance, to manage a flexible workforce with caregiving demands, to tame excessive work demands, to build the soft skills of social connection, and to better define roles and communicate clear expectations. Recognize that this is hard. That managers are already exhausted and need resources and support. Transformation won’t “just happen.” But it’s worth it. Most managers,research shows, have tended to reward attendance, long hours and input, even when that same research found that digital workers were more productive. But that phenomenon, what social scientists call proximity bias and masculine “ideal worker” facetime cultures, has left many women, people of color, and caregivers out. In a hybrid setting, without training, strategies, and norms, that bias could turn digital workers into a second-tier workforce. Using data and helping managers shift mindsets and learn new skills are key to creating equitable cultures of psychological safety as well as productivity.

4. Prioritize Diversity, Equity, Inclusion, and Fairness. Systematic, evidence-based approaches to hiring and retaining employees, assigning tasks, and growth assignments and promotion can break down the confirmation bias—leaders favoring those who think, look and act like them—that is so rampant in workplaces, and build the best, most effective workforce. Research has found that men taking breaks to schmooze male bosses explains one-third of the gender gap in office promotions! And that men are far likelier to be given career-enhancing assignments and women, and women of color in particular, expected to do the less glamorous "office house work." Disrupting those patterns with new systems to promote equity should include practices like blind résumé review, structured interviews, reviews, using data to ensure promotions are based on clear performance metrics and expectations, expanded and virtual mentoring and networking opportunities, and assigning tasks intentionally, not just to the person who happens to be walking by the boss’s office at the moment. If what gets measured is what gets done, make leaders accountable for diversity, equity, and inclusion metrics and reward them. Gartner Human Resources finds this “consequential accountability” can close gender and racial and ethnic disparities an average of 13 and 6 years, respectively, sooner than organizations without them.

And as work moves into the next normal phase after the pandemic shutdowns, organizations must prioritize re-hiring the women and caregivers who’ve been forced out of the workforce because of the lack of care. Research shows having at least two women candidates in a pool of finalists increases the chances of a woman being hired by 79 percent. Some organizations, like Amazon, Hubspot, JP Morgan Chase, and others offer or have ramped up returnship programs, while others are working to create them with organizations like Path Forward.

5. Get the Basics Right. Fair pay. Fair hours. Living and equal wages. Safe working conditions. The right to organize. Pay transparency. Work-life boundaries. Systems that ensure respectful cultures—in person and virtually—free of harassment where all can thrive. Track worker care responsibilities—73 percent of U.S. employees are caring for a child or loved one after all. Support benefits and practices that promote wellbeing and quality of life. With the Great Realignment and technology continuing to rapidly change the way we work, it’s time for companies to support universal, portable benefits, and public policies for paid leave, health care, and investments in care infrastructure that enable workers to do good work—and live good lives.

• Go Slow and Be Intentional
  As Stanford economist Nick Bloom says, “We’re in the middle of a revolution in the way we work.” Just 2 percent of the workforce worked digitally before the pandemic. After two years and counting of working differently in the pandemic, a majority of employees who can, want either a fully digital or a hybrid work arrangement. Essential workers want the option of doing some administrative tasks offsite digitally. And a majority of companies say they’re planning to make that transition.
• Get the Digital Tools Right
  Digital work will only work if workers have proper equipment, good space to work in, reliable internet connections and training to use digital tools. Make that happen, with audits, assessments, and subsidies, where needed.
• Watch Your Language
  Try not to use the word “remote” to describe digital work. That implies the “real” work is done in an office. Instead, think of a “distributed” digital network work model, where the work doesn’t rely on being done in a particular place.
• Survey Staff and Respond to their Needs
  Start by understanding where people are and what they need. Different groups may want and need different work arrangements. When a number of firms began announcing return to worksite plans in the past two years, many hadn’t asked their employees about what they needed or wanted, and didn’t seem to realize that many childcare facilities were still not open or closed for good, that summer camps weren’t running and school plans were still uncertain. That fostered ill-will, and the sense that employers were out of touch or uncaring about the lives of employees—a moral injury that could drive workers away.
• Communicate Transparently
  Give at least 30 to 45 days of advance notice of any change of work model. That employees are brought in on the planning and thinking through the model, the reasoning made clear. And that there is regular evaluation, feedback and adapting. Be honest that no one has this figured out, and we need to figure it out together as we go.

• Divide Time Between Collaboration and Concentrated Work
  Decide when and how your team will collaborate. Will your team have “core hours” where everyone is expected to work synchronously? Dropbox, which has shifted to a “virtual first” company, asks employees to be online between 9 am and 1 pm Pacific for collaborative work. Will you “time shift” to accommodate different time zones or work-family schedules?
• Protect Time for Concentrated Work
  Digital work heightens the focus on tasks. Set priorities and communicate them, then schedule work blocks of 30 to 90 minutes in your calendar to share with your team. If something comes up, move the blocks. That will help ensure the most important work gets done and not spill over into evenings and weekends and workers can have time for their lives.
• Practice Good Meeting Hygiene
  No, you don’t need an hour and a half meeting every week because you’ve always had one. No, not everyone needs to be invited. Be deliberate about when and how long to meet. Every meeting should have a purpose, action and outcome. Prioritize discussion, debate, collaboration, ideation, and decisions. All other work can be done asynchronously. And be mindful of Zoom fatigue and meeting overload across organizations. Some organizations, like Citigroup, have instituted Zoom/meeting-free Fridays. And give people the choice to appear on screen or off.
• Set Availability Protocols
  One of the biggest sources of stress and anxiety for workers is anticipating an after-hours email from a boss. And, the pandemic showed that many workers tended to work longer or extended hours because communications protocols weren’t clearly defined. We all want to relieve cognitive load and get a thought into an email or Slack message, but workers wondering if they need to respond to a manager’s email leaves the brain in a hyper vigilant mode and can lead to burnout. Set times to communicate and be clear when responses are expected. Consider having team members communicate with weekly write ups—what they planned to do, what they did, rather than over-rely on meetings or synchronous work out of habit.
• Make Boundary Management a Priority
  Avoid what can often feel like an endless, “shapeless work day,” as the American Psychological Association calls it. Normalize taking breaks throughout the day. Clearer expectations and communication and focus on tasks can empower workers to decide they’ve done enough for the day and log off. Set rituals to both begin and end the work day and create better boundaries between work and life. And encourage taking time to rest, reset and have a life, on weekends and on vacation.

• Train for Performance and Output Management, not Attendance and Hours
  Too many offices and managers rely on “input” management styles, using long work hours and face time—virtually or in real life—as a marker of good work. That’s reinforced biased notions of who a good worker is and who gets promoted, typically men and those without care responsibilities. Manage instead by outputs. That will require dissecting jobs into tasks and setting clear priorities, expectations, standards, and goals, being flexible and adapting to changing conditions, and managing excessive work demands.
• Design Systems that Promote Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
  Especially now, when millions of women and those with caregiving responsibilities—particularly women of color and single mothers—remain out of the workforce because of a lack of childcare, make sure that you prioritize making flexible digital work work for everyone. Systematic, evidence-based approaches to hiring and retaining employees, assigning tasks and growth assignments, and giving promotions can break down the confirmation bias—leaders favoring those who think, look, and act like them—that is so rampant in workplaces, and build the best, most effective workforce. Where possible, use blind résumé review, structured interviews, and base reviews and promotions on clear performance metrics and expectations.
• Screens Can Be an Equalizer
  Surveys show that more workers of color favor digital work than their white peers. They cite a reduction in stress from microaggressions and code-switching and a greater sense of belonging and that digital work, done well, is more equitable. Pregnant and disabled and neurodivergent workers report that digital work keeps the focus on their work, performance, and contributions, not on their situation or condition, which can spur unconscious bias, disadvantage, and all-too-common discrimination. The flexibility to control their own schedule and work at times when they are at their best, as well as avoiding what can be arduous commutes, enables many workers to be more productive.

  Everyone’s head is the same size in a virtual window. It’s easy to turn on live transcript functions. It’s easier to be more intentionally inclusive in conversations and meetings—to see who’s talking and when, to track and give credit to the person with the new idea rather than the typical dynamic of a male, white, or more senior person who later says the same thing and gets acknowledged.

• Build and Maintain an Empathetic Culture
  Know your team and their caregiving and other responsibilities and interests outside of work. Give grace and space. Expand virtual mentoring and networking opportunities to create authentic connections. Support not just physical health and wellbeing, but mental health. Trust. Don’t micromanage or surveil. During the pandemic, surveillance software, known as “bossware” or “tattleware,” that takes screenshots or tracks employee keystrokes, skyrocketed 50 percent. But that kind of mistrust can dampen morale, lower job satisfaction, and lead to higher turnover.
• Flexibility is for Everybody
  Prior to the pandemic, flexible work was often stigmatized as something for women, mothers, or caregivers, an accommodation for “lesser” workers. That wasn’t true then, it certainly isn’t true now. Recognize that surveys show most workers want and need flexibility and control, where possible, over the time, manner, and place of work.

• Have a Hybrid Plan
  Don’t just expect hybrid work to happen. Work with workers, managers, and teams together to decide how best to get the most important work done. How many days in the office? When? Organization wide? By team? Experiment and iterate. Listen and adapt. At Slack, which, like many organizations, has adopted a hybrid future, some teams require more regular in-person collaboration every week. Others schedule one week of being together per quarter. The key is each team has the autonomy to figure it out for themselves, based on the work they do.
• See the Office as a Tool
  As Harvard Business School professor Tsedal Neeley, an expert in distributed digital and hybrid work strategies, advises, think of the office as a “tool, not a destination,” and leverage the best of both virtual and in-person settings. In the office, focus on purposeful, “hyper social” connecting, meetings, networking, collaborative work, and brainstorming. During digital work time, focus on quiet, concentrated work, writing, research, and written communication. Some companies are using the switch to hybrid work to completely rethink the office. Microsoft, for example, is redesigning its space with people who aren't in the office in mind.
• Use Data
  Use data to track how tasks are assigned and promotions decided, and assign tasks intentionally, not just to the person who happens to be walking by the boss’s office at the moment. Data can also shed light on who tends to talk in meetings and for how long to create awareness and open the door for more inclusive conversations and ideation—which Boston Consulting Group research shows leads to more innovation.
• Leaders Set the Tone
  Hybrid plans are likely to fall apart or result in a two-tier workforce without leaders modeling effective hybrid work and communication styles. If managers are always in the office, more junior workers, or those who can, will likely follow suit, which is likely to reinforce confirmation bias and reinforce “good-old-boy” network patterns of promotion and hierarchy. Some companies, like Synchrony Financial, have decided that no one, including the CEO, can work in the office five days a week in order to counter proximity bias.
• Zoom One, Zoom All
  To leverage how screens can be a great equalizer, some hybrid organizations are sticking with all-virtual meetings and collaborative work settings, where all have access to the same information and communication tools and it’s easy to see and include every participant. Managers can mention they’ll be hanging out online for another five to 10 minutes for anyone who’d like to have a more informal “hallway chat”—that way, digital workers are less likely to be left out of any after-meeting huddles where ideas are shared or decisions can be made. (Which, in fact, is not where ideas should be shared or decisions made. Remember meeting hygiene: discussion, debate, decisions, collaboration, and ideation all should happen during meetings. If not, you need to ask, why are you meeting at all?)
• Build Connection with Onboarding, Mentoring, and Sponsorship
  Intentionally use in-office days to set up meetings and informal coffees or lunches for new or younger employees, who may be st and the need to belong, to connect them to those more senior in the organization and help build relationships and better understand organizational culture as well as get them and their work “noticed.” Do the same with women and caregivers and workers of color who may feel marginalized or stressed in-office settings.

• Get the Basics Right
  Fair pay. Fair hours. Living and equal wages. Safe working conditions. Benefits that support stability and quality of life. The right to organize. Pay transparency. Work-life boundaries. Systems that ensure respectful cultures—in person and virtually—free of harassment where all can thrive. Research shows that companies that pay workers well tend to have higher labor productivity and can be just as profitable or more than companies that don’t. If you’re not sure what to pay, check out the MIT Living Wage Calculator.

  Paying well is good for business. Research shows that worries about finances can make it difficult to focus at work and even reduce a worker’s cognitive capacity—equal to going without a good night’s sleep. Other studies have found that when workers aren’t worried about money, they’re more productive and make fewer mistakes.

• Make Schedules Stable
  Many hourly, retail, and service workers, many of whom are women, mothers, and people of color, are often given unpredictable schedules—different numbers of hours every week, different shifts scheduled at different times, and with very short notice. That means workers often have no idea when they’ll be working and how much they’ll earn from week to week, making it difficult to pay bills, arrange child care or plan for their lives.

  The unpredictable schedules are often the result of algorithmic scheduling—companies using technology to attempt to match labor with demand in order to keep labor costs low. But what this now-common practice ignores is that unstable schedules are not only bad for workers and their families but also for business. Companies can see labor costs on their books, but they fail to see the “future lost sales” of disillusioned customers who can’t find experienced workers to help them and never make a purchase. Research has also found that stable schedules have not only increased productivity, but also sales.

• Cross Train
  Instead of hiring part-time workers and sending them home or laying them off when demand falls off, research by Zeynap Ton, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and founder of the Good Jobs Institute, has found that companies can offer more stable jobs by cross-training workers to work in different departments to better meet fluctuating demand. For instance, Wegmans, the grocery store chain, never laid workers off when the pandemic hit, instead it trained workers for new tasks—learning to bake bread or cut seafood or working as a runner to help customers with curbside pickup. Cross training is a way of upskilling workers and offering potential paths to advancement. The key is to have good systems, Ton says. “Simplified work, empowered standardization, giving enough time, which I call operating with slack, and cross-training are all part of a system that enables people to shine and be a lot more productive and contribute higher,” Ton told Charte “But you can’t just do one and not the others.”
• Provide Pathways to Advancement from Within
  Offer on-the-job training, development, and opportunities to improve skills to help the upward economic mobility of workers, ensuring they don’t get stuck, as many do now. Surveys show an often wide disconnect between employers and essential workers and, in workplaces where workers are treated as expendable, little trust. But treating workers well and providing opportunities to advance from within leads to greater job sat and lower turnover, which, in itself can be a huge cost savings.

“In the pandemic, people have talked a lot about essential workers, but we actually treat them as essential jobs. We treat the workers as quite replaceable. So that's the most important thing. Remember that all the people who are working for you are actually people and should be treated as such … My hope is that there'll be a set of companies who say, ‘Wait a minute. We can actually operate in a very different way’—and not just being distributed or remote or out of the office, but actually caring for our people in a different way because the business benefit is—we're going to be more profitable and keep people around longer and be able to attract better people. And the human benefit is the human beings actually are healthier, enjoy what they're doing, which then also benefits the business in the end.” – Laszlo Bock, co-founder and CEO of Humu, a human resources company, and former vice president of people operations at Google told NPR

Unlike most peer competitive economies, the United States has few worker and family-supportive public policies and instead leaves workers and families to sink or swim very much on their own. The prevailing idea of the last 50 years is that the “market will solve all.” That business knows best, and the government should play a limited role in our lives. Yet that approach has driven income and wealth inequality to among the highest levels of peer countries. Even many corporate leaders in the United States and abroad are now realizing that in their focus on short-term returns for shareholders they’ve lost sight of the stakeholders and the human workers who, since the 1970s, have been working harder and harder, are more and more productive, and yet have reaped less and less of the fruits of that labor. Recognizing that, some private equity investors will now only invest in companies that create good jobs. Many in the business community, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, are beginning to see, after the devastation of the global pandemic, that child care is vital infrastructure that requires public investment, and that the current patchwork system squeezes parents, caregivers, and providers alike as it shortchanges children—and us all. Leaders in the growing gig economy, including Lyft and DoorDash, are realizing that, without supports like universal health care and a guarantee of paid time off, these flexible jobs make for unstable, unhealthy, often impoverished and trapped lives. These and other business leaders are pushing to untether benefits from jobs and employers and instead tie them to individuals, so individual workers could keep benefits as they move from job to job. Many see how that would actually build on the Great Reassessment and unleash entrepreneurship, creativity and innovation. Denmark’s “Flexicurity” model, for instance, gives businesses freedom to hire and fire workers, but the country has built a safety net with sufficient income and training that’s bouncy enough to support workers between jobs and help them transition into a new one.

In the United States, again unlike other peer countries, businesses can voluntarily choose to provide family-supportive policies like paid family leave. That approach leaves out 80 percent of the civilian workforce. The unpaid Family and Medical Leave Act leaves out more than 40 percent—though most low-wage workers can’t afford to take unpaid leave anyway. The fact that one in four mothers in the United States returns to work two weeks after giving birth because the United States is the only advanced economy that does not guarantee paid maternity leave, is nothing short of cruel. Even as many corporate leaders lobbied in 2021 against the care infrastructure investments proposed by the Biden administration because of its corporate tax provisions, businesses know the status quo is unsustainable. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce and leaders from more than 200 businesses have argued in support of a national paid family and medical leave policy.

There is widespread consensus that gone is the old social contract—the implicit agreement that workers would work hard for employers who paid them fairly and provided the supports like paid annual leave, retirement savings, and health care they needed not only to survive, but to enjoy quality of life and thrive. Many business leaders recognize it’s time for a new social contract, not only for a corona-normal world, but for a rapidly changing future of work. And that must include rethinking the old “market will solve all” approach, and reimagining how investing in well-designed, well-funded, and well-implemented universal worker and family-supportive public policies is not only the right and moral thing to do, but good for human beings, the economy, society, the planet—and business, too.

Here’s a good place to start:

• Universal Care Infrastructure: Child care, home care, long-term care
• Paid Time Off: Paid family and medical leave, paid sick days, paid annual leave
• Flexible Work
• Stable Schedules
• Universal Health Care
• Equal Pay
• Fair, Living Wages and Living Hours
• Pregnant Workers Fairness
• Federal Unemployment Insurance System that Works
• The Right to Organize for Decent and Dignified Work Conditions
• Human-centered Immigration Reform

When the pandemic hit in 2020, Blackbaud, a global cloud software company that's driving digital transformation in the social good community, thought of itself as a predominantly “in person” culture. Like many companies, Blackbaud learned to pivot to a new way of working 100 percent remote, or distributed digital, during the pandemic. As the pandemic wore on, leaders began a deliberate process to reimagine the future of work; they designed a new, flexible, digital, and productive culture with transparency, employee input, care, and intention. “We built it on a premise of trust and wellbeing, which is really key,” said Maggie Driscoll, chief people and culture officer.

The company initially planned to transition to a hybrid model of work in mid-2021. But as the pandemic dragged on, and as leaders continued to ask employees about their preferences and continued researching best practices, in November 2021 they decided instead to formally transition to a flexible, digital, remote-first workplace.

The decision has yielded surprising benefits to diversity, equity, inclusion, talent acquisition, and internal upward mobility: No longer will positions be assigned by office locations or tied to Blackbaud’s headquarters in Charleston, S.C.—not even leadership roles. That opens opportunity for those who, often because of family responsibilities or personal reasons, couldn't physically move in the past. “No longer do we look at a role based on location and geography. We look at a role based on experiences, skills, and execution,” Driscoll said. Both employees and the company are reaping the benefits. In 2021, applications were up more than 50 percent, she said, with an increase in diverse candidates, 80 percent of new hires went into distributed digital, or remote positions, and 40 percent of Blackbaud employees saw career progression.

Some other key lessons Driscoll said the company is learning as it redesigns work:

• Communication and Connection. CEO Mike Gianoni began weekly 30-minute virtual sync meetings with about 175 of the company’s top global leaders every Monday to share business updates, strategies and answer any questions in real time to make sure managers have what they need to support employees. The company instituted monthly live town hall meetings to discuss timely topics and give employees an opportunity to ask questions. In addition, Blackbaud's quarterly all-hands meeting, which include customer presentations, went virtual.
• Listen. Learn. Act. Adjust. The company engaged employees from the very beginning, Driscoll said, asking what challenges they were experiencing, particularly with caregiving, and what they needed. The company responded in kind. They created cross company teams, like Together Anywhere, focused on ensuring employees had the right tools, technology and resources to succeed in a digital setting. When school closures and the childcare crisis upended the lives of many employees and their families, the company shifted to further support caregiving employees’ schedules and workload, and launched an innovative virtual after-school program, taught by volunteer Blackbaud employees and customers.
• Be Willing to Pivot. Even after deciding to move to a hybrid work model, the Workforce Strategy team continued researching and surveying small groups of employees about what they wanted. And when the team decided, with employee input, that digital, or remote-first, would be a better option than hybrid, they enhanced the leadership training curriculum with Engagement Labs to figure out how best to do it. “One of the learnings of the last two years is that it’s OK to say you don’t know the answers,” Driscoll said. “To stop, pivot, and change, and let your people know why.”

To navigate through the pandemic, Deloitte, the global audit, consulting, tax, and advisory professional services network, drew on key lessons learned through its own consulting work with other companies and, perhaps most importantly, saw the challenges presented by the pandemic as an opportunity to take equity and the way they worked to the next level.

“We have so much opportunity to take this and make it amazing,” said Denise Shepherd, Deloitte’s Workforce Strategy and Solutions leader. “For my internal team, our whole tag is ‘Better in Hybrid.’ Our lens is always the combination of these two things—virtual and in person—can actually drive a result that’s better and more equitable.”

As Shepherd explained, hybrid’s virtual element opens up new possibilities beyond geography for connections and mentoring. It can level the playing field for many professionals, including caregivers who may need more flexibility in their schedules, or who may prefer working in a distributed digital manner. And, she said, hybrid forces teams to think through the life cycle of a job and decide when they really need to be together to move projects forward, and when it’s better that they’re doing head-down concentrated work on their own, a philosophy Deloitte calls “together when it matters.”

Some other key lessons Shepherd shared include:

• Focus on Human-Centered Solutions. Throughout the pandemic, Deloitte has relied on a series of personnel surveys, virtual huddles, debates, and town halls to better understand what employees are grappling with and how the organization could support them. In response, the organization offered $500 “productivity subsidies” so professionals could better outfit their home or digital work set-up, in addition to a commuting subsidy for those who work in an office to commute in a safe way. “That was important to create equity,” she said.
• Build With Your Workforce. “Sometimes organizations have a tendency to think about change from a top-down lens,” Shepherd said. “We flipped that. One of the things we’ve learned is if you use your people's collective knowledge and wisdom, you’re helping yourself on the back end. People already know what you’re trying to accomplish, and it limits the risk that you’re going to introduce something that’s not going to work. We learned that lesson from our clients.”
• One Size Does Not Fit All. When the organization decided to transition to a hybrid model of work, Deloitte’s surveys showed that, in general, people did want to be together some of the time—though not as often as leaders might have expected. So, instead of coming up with a one-size fits all solution, Deloitte came up with a framework that gives teams autonomy to think about when to be “together when it matters.” To make it work, teams must set and communicate explicit norms and expectations for the moments that they would benefit by being together in person, such as brainstorming, collaboration, or fostering culture and connection.
• Use Data to Monitor, Assess, and Adjust. Deloitte plans to use data proactively, to better match professionals’ hybrid work preferences with client project opportunities that match those preferences. Data from a newly created hybrid workplace index also will be used to watch for any potential challenges. “We’re trying to drive this equitable experience,” Shepherd said, “so we can both serve our clients effectively and have our people feel included regardless of whether they’re in the room or not.”

Long before the pandemic, Jen Piallat, the then-owner of Zasie, a French bistro in the Cole Valley neighborhood of San Francisco, decided to treat restaurant workers with respect. Restaurant workers, the majority of whom are women, with Latinx women the most represented, are notoriously underpaid and are more than twice as likely to live in poverty as the general workforce. They’re often given unpredictable schedules with little notice, kept in limbo, on-call, or sent home with no pay if demand drops. In contrast, Piallat paid a living wage and offered stable schedules, paid time off, 60 percent off meals, and a host of other benefits.

When she became concerned that hardworking front-of-the-house servers benefit from tips while the just-as-hardworking back of the house kitchen staff typically make much less, she decided that all 38 members of the staff should reap the benefits of their labor. She raised menu prices by 25 percent and shared the proceeds with the workers: servers get 12 percent of their sales for the day, and kitchen workers 12 percent of the entire restaurant’s sales. Now, at the top of their menu, a note proclaims, “Zasie is Proud to be Tip Free! All of our menu prices include a living wage, revenue share, paid family leave, fully funded health & dental insurance, paid time off, and a 401(k)—with employer match for all of our hard working employees. No Tips Expected.”

So, once the pandemic hit, the restaurant was able to pivot and survive on take out and outdoor dining. Even as workers quit their jobs at unprecedented rates and “help wanted” signs littered the doors of restaurants and retail stores across the country, Zasie lost only four employees—two who wanted to return to Mexico, and two who switched careers. “They don’t move to other restaurants, because we’re as good as it gets,” said Megan Cornelius, a one-time Zasie server and now one of three co-owners, along with long-time Zasie General Manager Mario Rojas and Executive Chef Francisco Romero, who bought the restaurant from Piallet in January 2020. “We were doing a lot of things right before the pandemic,” Cornelius said, “so watching them be so effective during the pandemic was another reassurance that we were doing the right thing.

Some key lessons Cornelius said she wants others who employ hourly, retail, frontline, and essential workers to know:

• Value Humans. “We just don’t value humans enough—people’s time, their efforts, the things they have going on in their personal lives. In this industry, in particular, you do feel expendable,” Cornelius said. At Zasie, before the pandemic, valuing humans meant making sure the jobs and working conditions were good. Knowing everyone’s names, birthdays ,and families and caring about their lives. Closing the restaurant and throwing a killer staff Christmas party. During the pandemic, that meant giving grace to employees who felt uncomfortable coming in, not firing them, as others may have. That meant paying 75 percent of employee salaries even when the restaurant was closed, while many waited for unemployment benefits. And offering workers weekly free staples and groceries from the restaurant.
• Be Honest. During the pandemic, Zasie owners shared transparently with staff about finances and the sacrifices they were all making and how they were supporting staff. Employees responded in kind, sharing reduced hour shifts, even working on cleaning and refinishing projects to help the restaurant make it through.
• Doing Right by Workers is Good Business. “If you’re doing the right thing for employees, the right thing’s going to happen to your business,” Cornelius has learned. When Piallat raised prices before the pandemic, business didn’t drop off because the restaurant was transparent that the money was going to make workers’ jobs better—and clients not only liked that, but became even more fiercely loyal. (A lot of children and pets in the neighborhood are actually named Zasie in honor of the place, Cornelius said.) “A lot of times, business owners say they’re investing in business. But investing in employees is one of the best investments you can make. It can be expensive. But turnover is expensive,” Cornelius said. “It costs a lot of money to retrain people constantly. And we don’t have to do that.” Restaurant sales are back to pre-pandemic levels, even as all Covid restrictions have yet to be lifted.

“So many companies say, ‘I could never do this.’ Well, we’re doing it,” Cornelius said. “I get that small businesses feel stretched. But these corporations, I don’t really get it. They make money hand-over-fist, and I just don’t understand how they can’t treat people better. It’s about reprioritizing, and a lot of people don’t do that because the industry has been the same for so long. People say that we’re so innovative,” she added. “But treating people well shouldn’t be innovative.”

Work and Wellbeing Initiative – a joint Harvard and MIT research-for-action initiative

Workplace Culture and Care Report – Care.com

The Caring Company: How employers can help their employees manage their caregiving responsibilities—while reducing costs and increasing productivity – Joseph B. Fuller & Manjari Raman, Harvard Business School

Back to Work Safely – American Industrial Hygiene Association

From Ideal Worker to Ideal Workplace – TimesUp and ideas42

Better Work Toolkit, a Science-based approach to designing work-life solutions that work – Better Life Lab at New America and ideas42

#NowWhat: The Sexual Harassment Solutions Toolkit – Better Life Lab at New America

Breaking the Bias: How Gender Equality will transform economies, business and finance – Moody’s

How to Improve Gender Equality in the Workplace — evidence-based actions for employers – The U.K.’s government’s Behavioral Insights Team

Hybrid Work Best Practices Guide – a joint product of the Better Life Lab at New America and the Center for Work-Life Law. For more, check out their evidence-based Bias Interrupters series.

Remote Work Revolution for Everyone – free online course taught by Harvard Business School professor Tsedal Neely

Why Working from Home Will Stick – NBER paper by Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom & Steven J. Davis

Work Trends Index Report – Microsoft

Leveling the Playing Field in the Hybrid Workplace – Slack Future Forum Pulse

Pulse of the American Worker Survey– Prudential

Digital Workplaces and the Hybrid Work Model – Deloitte

It’s Time to Get Real About Hybrid – McKinsey

The Asana Playbook for Managing Distributed Teams – Asana

How to do Hybrid Right – Lynda Gratton, Harvard Business Review

The Nowhere Office: Reinventing Work and the Workplace of the Future – Julia Hobsbawm

Tips for Managers: Making Hybrid Work – Boston College Center for Work and Family

A Better Future for Working Parents: A Playbook for Leaders and Organizations – Charter

STAR – Support. Transform. Achieve. Results – family-supportive supervisor training & research- Ellen Ernst-Kossek & Leslie Hammer, the Work Family & Health Network

Elevate Employees, Don’t Eliminate Them: Unlock value by connecting them with customers – Ryan W. Buell, Harvard Business Review

Good Jobs Strategy – Good Jobs Institute

Retailers are Squandering their Most Potent Weapons – Marshall Fisher et al, Harvard Business Review

Essential Workers comprise about half of all workers in low-paid occupations. They deserve a $15 minimum wage – Molly Kinder, Laura Stateler, Brookings

Building from the Bottom Up – Joseph B. Fuller, Manjari Raman, Harvard Business School

The Center on Education and Labor at New America is a leader on state and federal workforce development and labor policies. The Center engages in a wide array of research, policy analysis, and advocacy activities to improve transitions from education to high quality employment. Major projects include the Partnership to Advance Youth Apprenticeship, New Models of Career Preparation, and Bringing Adult Students Back To College after the Pandemic. Recent reports, articles and op-eds that touch on strategies for helping students and workers return to school and work include, Training as a Pathway to an Equitable Post-pandemic Recovery, the Public Workforce Development Systems and Gig Workers, Valuing Home and Childcare Workers, and Learn and Earn at Community College: Using HEERF Funds and Federal Work-Study to Expand Campus Jobs Programs.

Designing Effective & Equitable Public Benefits and Income Supports – New America’s New Practice Lab has published a series of human-centered reports and cutting edge playbooks that serve as models for, among other policies, effective delivery of cash assistance, unemployment insurance, the child tax credit and the earned income tax credit, building an accessible long-term care system, valuing home and child care workers and implementing public paid family and paid sick leave systems.