Reimagine Work Summit 2021

She explains how we can truly be our best.

Arianna Huffington: ‘Not since the Industrial Revolution have we rethought work’

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Arianna Huffington on the future of work

Arianna Huffington: ‘Not since the Industrial Revolution have we rethought work’


not since the Industrial Revolution have we really, really soft work, and that's very important because if you look at the industrial Revolution, that's when we started revealing machines and after machines revealing software. And, uh, we are now beginning to realize that the human operating system is different. Downtime for the human operating system is not a bug. It's a feature. And when we recognize that we see the connection between performance and recovery between productivity and recharging, so that there is no trade off between the two, the one supports the other. This is completely different from the way we've run both workplaces and what we celebrate. You know, we talk about you snooze, you lose. I'll sleep when I'm dead. You celebrate people who work 24 7 who are always available, even though all the data shows that if you're always available, you are not going to be operating from your best. You're not going to be a creative, innovative or empathetic. And Arianna, in your view, has the pandemic made the burnout problem better or worse. I mean, I hear people on both sides of that question Well, it has made it worse in the sense that there are even fewer boundaries between work and home, especially for working mothers who have to navigate home schooling and work. But it has also made us much more conscious of the things we can leave behind. Like how can we marry Kander, our lives post pandemic? Do we need all this problem, you know, doing? Do we need to have to sleep with our phone bar back? You know, we are questioning a lot of assumptions and and we're seeing the results and the fact that the SEC has a new rule around human capital of disclosures that they haven't had since 1977 around attraction, development and retention of human capital is a very clear indication that all stakeholders are now involved. And Nichols job is truly the most important job next to the CEO because everybody understands that the well being of employees is central to the bottom line.

Twitter’s Jennifer Christie and MLB’s Michele Meyer-Shipp explain.

How Twitter and Major League Baseball are making a push for diversity and inclusion 

Jennifer Christie and Michele Meyer-Shipp explain.

Twitter and Major League Baseball make a push for diversity

How Twitter and Major League Baseball are making a push for diversity and inclusion

Jennifer. I'd love to start with Twitter, which, like many tech companies, has struggled to diversify its leadership and its technical ranks, but which has made some big, ambitious promises for to increase its workforce diversity by 2025. And, uh, and last week you committed to having 25% of leadership roles being held by women are underrepresented minorities. What? What changes have you made so far to reach these goals? And what sort of heavy lifting or names? Yes, thank you and hi, everybody. It's great to be here. I will say that we benefited from the fact that we started, um, really refreshing our approach to diversity and inclusion a few years ago. So we were already on a path laying foundations and working on how we build trust and accountability, uh, and and provide more transparency around our initiatives and our efforts to our employees who we call tweets. And so, at the beginning of last year, so well before we realized what 2020 would hold for us, we announced some pretty aggressive workforce representation goals to hit by 2025. And so that meant that by 2025 we wanted at least half of our workforce globally to be women. And we wanted at least a quarter of our workforce in the United States to be underrepresented minorities with black employees comprising at least 10% of our workforce. It's a very aggressive goals. We had made a lot of progress that those were aggressive goals to set. And then, as you know, Maria, we've just announced as well about those leadership goals that we have. And, you know, I think that leadership is definitely an area that we're focused on, and a few things that we're doing to try to address that one is that for the last few years, very much tracking with our efforts on inclusion and diversity, we've been decentralizing our workforce. We recognize that we were really focused on hiring kind of in one location, really in California, and it limited our ability to tap into much broader, uh, more diverse, frankly, talent pools of tech talent that are really across the globe. Michelle you joined Major League Baseball in October. In November, Kim Jong made headlines as the first woman to be hired as the general manager of a major league baseball team, but We've also seen headlines recently about, um, sexual harassment from the now fired just met general manager, um, Seattle Mariners CEO, resigning this week after, uh, bigoted comments. So how has that all affected your job and what you want to focus on at really baseball? So, you know, I did definitely indeed, coming at an interesting time. I mean, I think one of the things I'll point out that, you know, Twila just mentioned, you know, for me stepping in, you know, we were in the middle of, uh, being the first professional lead in the midst of trying to pull off a season and a pandemic, not in and of itself. The health and safety of our employees was our primary focus. Um, and obviously, we also I also stepped in at the time when we were going through all of the upheaval around racial justice and equity. Um, so that was something I had to step into right away. Um, the good thing for me and what I was very optimistic about was the fact that we've our players are owners are our teams had already started down the right path and engaging in a meaningful dialogue about diversity equity and inclusion and about racial equity. Um, so this was not a situation where I had to come in and troubleshoot they were already on it. Our players alliance was formed and launched, and some really great actions were underway, um, to address and deal with these issues. And I'd add that, you know, this wasn't something that you know, the events of the summer. We're not, um it wasn't a wake up call for us, because actually, amazing baseball has been doing a lot prior to me coming in to address issues of racial justice across baseball, you know, on issues around, you know, the news in the recent weeks around sexual harassment claims and conduct. You know, that is not becoming those claims predate me, and they actually go back a couple of years. Um, so the good news is, you know, baseball has really strong policies and practices in place around, you know, the workforce in the workplace that we're trying to drive, which is one of inclusion and belonging and psychological safety

So long Silicon Valley. Here are the new tech hubs.

I wanted to start by actually asking you guys to kind of give me the pitch. So I live in Silicon Valley, have been here for a long time. What can you say to me to get me to move to Topa or to the West Virginia? And I'd like to start with you, Ben. Sure. So Tulsa Remote was a pioneering program in 2018 when we launched with the pitch to remote workers from across the country to join us in Tulsa. And we were overwhelmed by the response from Day one Really 10,000 applications in the 1st 90 days. Um, and we've not looked back since, and we brought over 500 members to Tulsa over the last two years with a retention rate of over 90% which is probably the thing we're most proud of, and we were able to introduce them to a vibrant and inclusive community, which is my hometown. And it's been an incredible journey ever since, and we look forward to many more along the way and what's like, What's the selling point? You know, I know that you're incentivizing people, uh, with money, of course, but tell me about selling point for Tulsa. Sure, so the $10,000 number obviously grab the headlines, but we believe it so much more. It's really about the community in which we're able to integrate our Tulsa remote members into. And so the ability to really showcase why Total is a special community building off of the 15 plus years of work that we have done to build Tulsa as a very vibrant and inclusive community with things like Gathering Place, which is a half a billion dollar public private park on the city's riverfront or the arts district in our downtown community. Or the fact that Tulsa has two James Beard nominated chef last year. Those kind of hidden gem facts that you know have a big city amenities but the small town charm of Tulsa that really surprised our members and then leaning into the fact that you know there are part of a community of over 500 people that also work from anywhere and so having that ability to integrate them into this robust, vibrant community has just been what we believe that the biggest selling proposition for our program, um, Brad, let's bring you in. I know that the West Virginia program is much newer and it's just starting out. But tell me in your words, why should I move to West Virginia? Well, use the word that John Denver almost having it's clearly a place that has amazing people. I've often said if my car ever broke down, I'd wanted to break down in West Virginia for two reasons. People are kind enough to stop, and they're crafty enough to know how to fix it and then the second, our natural resources, their unparalleled in the United States. In some cases in the world, we have over 2000 miles of white water density. We have the top three ski resorts in the mid Atlantic states. We have 1.5 million acres of public land and 1500 trail 1500 miles of trails. We have the highest summit technical summit to scale east of Wyoming, with over 3500 roads courses and 500 boulder climbs. It's just an amazing place. It's a place where the Mercedes Benz World Cup from mountain biking will be held in 2021. So if you are someone that loves that entrepreneurial spirit, you love to be a part of a community you want to be surrounded by natural resources at around parallel West Virginia is indeed your home. Take me home country roads.

Chip Bergh explains why his company isn’t afraid to make its voice heard.

Levi Strauss CEO: Why we're so outspoken on social issues

the company and you have. You've been very outspoken on some social issues and of course, the country's extremely polarized. Now, um, does does it make you wonder, uh, if if If that's risky at a time, You know, your, uh, you don't want to lose any customers unnecessarily or so or or is it just now some time to live your values? Um, you know, in short, it is who we are as a company. When we did our IPO, it was part of our IPO Roadshow. I told investors, If you don't like the CEO taking a stand on ending gun violence in this in this country, this is not the stock for you. If you don't like a company that's willing to take a stand on the importance of climate change and and making real commitment to ending it, This is not the company for you to invest in. We actually believe that it helps our business. I think we've got pretty good data on that, particularly over the last couple of years. You can't stand for everything, so you do have to be choice fel. And that's one of the things that we've really tried to do is is be very, very specific about the issues that we are going to weigh in on. But it's who we are and it's an important responsibility of me and the team to make sure we're weighing in on the most important issues.

Here’s what people really think about working from home

when we surveyed knowledge workers around the globe, only 17% of those people wanted to go back to five days a week working in an office. Only 20% wanted to actually be full time remote, meaning never coming into an office. The vast majority, 63% want flexibility. They want a hybrid environment, deal with the ability to access offices and shared space for team bonding and social gatherings and creative Kickoffs. But the ability to work from home more often to get some of those benefits back from their minds. And we have very similar data from a similar research. We did, um, that shows while most of us want hybrid, we think, um, you know, when you look at what people want in the future, they're expecting their employers to let them down. And what we mean by that on this chart is you know, the blue is what each segment, whether they've been, you know, fully co located fully remote or hybrid. What they ideal level of remote should be, um, you know, based on their desires. But then, when we ask them what they expect their employers to deliver, the expectations don't meet the ideal right? And so look at that third road there. The hybrid workers, right. Many more would like to stay remote, but they're expecting their leaders and employers to let them down and actually just allow a smaller fraction. And, um, you know what's interesting and we don't have this on the page. But when you look at executive and managers actually want the same as their employees very similar numbers. And so the importance here is to communicate and to let your team know. You know what we see value in this as well, right? We see the value that Brian just spoke to, and we want to help you retain that value and are expectations are are ideal is similar to your ideal, so that's the importance of communication.

Harvard Business School professor Francis Frei explains.


How to decide where to be great, and where to fail, at work

How do you decide which things that you're going to be bad at? Especially when you think about work, right? So you're talking about these different aspects of your life within your own job, where there are things that you also decide. How does one do that? That's exactly the right question. So first is decide what you're going to be great at and reverse engineer what you have to be bad at. So don't have a meeting on, like, what should I be bad at? It's depressing. And the people who self select to attend you don't want to hang out with. But what do I like? What do we What does the team need from me in this week? In this day in this month, what can I do even more of? And then what does that mean? I have to give up. Um, and I recommend having those conversations. If you say, like, what? Where do you need? Like the best version of me? We refer to it as like you can think about super you average you and bummer you and where do you want super you to show up? And I would have that conversation with the people you work with, Where do you need like us to really kill it? And then let's reverse engineer what we can give up in order in order to sustain that. That's really interesting. Okay, so when you think about what this is going to do to workplaces and this idea of your culture of work, how can you create a culture when we when we are operating this way? Yeah, so I think we need We need to build resilience into our cultures like never before. I think, you know, cultures were like good cultures or bad cultures. But resilience hasn't always been the thing. But I think now we have to build in resilient cultures because if it's not a pandemic, it's going to be something we want to be prepared for it. So if you think about like, what do you need in a resilient culture, it means that some things are going to go wrong, so you have to be able to bounce back to us. That means you have to build a culture that's built on trust, because if we have a reservoir of trust, you're going to get the benefit of that doubt if we have to bounce back. If somebody has a bad day, if something goes wrong, we're like locked arms and we can come back for it. So I would think about culture with resilience and trust. And I think you can design both of those pretty purposely. I know you talk a lot about trust. How is that harder to do right now? And what are the lessons and six that recommend? Well, so, you know, building trust over zoom versus in person. So a big part of trust is empathy. And so, um, if I'm in a room with you like a making eye contact, I could chair I sit in, could be right next to you. I could get up and get you a cup of coffee. So I have all these micro actions I can do to reveal empathy. And on June, it's only my words. So on Zoom, I might ask, how are you doing? And you're going to say fine or if you say fine, I can't stop there. Because if I were, we were in the same room. We could pick up on all of the other cues, so I have to find some way to engage you. So how are you doing? And you say I'm doing fine. And I'm like, You know, it sounds like the schools in Cambridge are never opening again. How's that working out for your family? Like I just have to do something to get you to engage so I can see all the micro signals so I can know where the empathy. So we have to do some prodding, I guess. Some sanding so we can see the stuff that we would normally see in a physical environment.

Alastair Simpson, VP of design, explains what the company has in store.

What a return to the office looks like for Dropbox

Dropbox's VP of design on what the company has in store.

How do you think? Going forward? I mean, is this going to when you do return to the office? What is that going to look like for you, Alistair? I think Certainly a Dropbox. We've shifted to a virtual first approach, so our primary way of working will be remote. But we've created we will still be having our offices. And we're recreating them as studios where we're having intentional, meaningful moments of collaboration because we recognize the importance of bringing people together for key critical impulse of moments, which I know has been spoken about a lot during the morning. And that is that intentionality and being deliberate and principal about when you come together, I think, is the most important thing that you can do when working in a distributed fashion and so with to help our employees through this transition, we've done a number of things to try and be deliberate and intentional. So, for example, when we're working remotely, we've created core collaboration hours. That is a time where we expect employees a four hour block to be online at the same time so that they can synchronously collaborate together the other the other period during the day. We want them to create their own non linear work case so that it works for their own personal situation. Do they need to go and pick up their kids so they have to look after a relative? But during that time, we recognize the importance of asynchronous collaboration. So working through Dropbox paper documents or email or slack to a synchronously move work forward in a way that helps our customers and all of our other employees. And then the third mode is, as I mentioned these studios, so actually making sure that when teams come together for specific activities, when they need to come together to either build culture or to collaborate on a specific problem, that they understand when to use our Dropbox studios in the office space that we have. And so I think that it's going to be court to how we went, eventually returned to work once safe and we returned to the office. The last thing that I'd say on on that deliberate and intentional way of working is we've created a set of really flexible rifle practices, so it's not policy, okay, so we have this really flexible set of practices that we've written up and shared in our virtual first toolkit. Externally, it's open source. These practices are frameworks and guardrails for how to communicate with your employer with your teammates, for how to look after yourself in a virtual first world when you're working from home, and how to make sure that you are being deliberate with your communications. Because giving people and our employees, uh, toolkit frameworks practices, I think, really helped create an inclusive environment for everyone to drop off.

Mark Hoplamazian discusses what he thinks will be the future of work.


Hyatt CEO: The 5-day, 9-5 office work-week is over

Mark Hoplamazian discusses the future of work.


Hyatt CEO: The 5-day, 9-5 office work-week is over


Heather MacDougall, VP of Workplace Health & Safety, explains.

How Amazon kept its employees safe during the pandemic

Amazon's VP of Workplace Health & Safety, explains.

Amazon went through one of the most remarkable pandemic transitions. You had to had to add more than 427,000 employees in the 1st 10 months of 2020 as we were all desperately buying toilet paper and bleach and everything else. And you brought your global workforce to more than 1.2 million, which was up more than 50% from a year earlier. Very few companies have to deal with that kind of transition and to think about keeping your workers safe and well during that. How how much of a challenge was that? Um, you know, just to put it lightly. And And what? What are you still seeing as the lessons learned from that? Thank you, Cliff. The pleasure to be here today. I think we had the benefit of, uh, thinking about this from the beginning as we were tracking the coronavirus. Uh, since it first appeared in China, and then as it spread through, uh, Europe. So we began thinking about this many months ago, and I think because of that early warning, we started to put a team in place that began to respond and think about the changes that needed to occur very early on. And so we have invested more than 11.5 billion in 2020 on our covid response. Um, and there were many changes that were a part of that. If you walked into one of our fulfillment centers today, it would look very different than it did pre pandemic. We've made over 150 significant process changes to make sure that we're keeping our team safe. And that's everything from staggering, um, ships to breaks to reconfiguring break rooms to adding additional break rooms to mask to screening process is to, you know, the thermal cameras that we have when you come into our buildings. Um, to how you clocking in and out for your shift? Um, to how we conducted training, how we conduct meetings. So all of these things have been part of our processes. We've made our way through the past year. Um, you know, for my team, for the workplace health and safety team at Amazon, Uh, safety has always been our top priority, and it has that Amazon as well. But it's been, um, just super, um, great. You know, I'm super proud of our response and how we've all come together to think every day about are we doing enough and how do we use technology and how do we use innovation, which is so important for the size that we are in the ability to scale globally, to think about how we use those tools throughout our operations, and we've had lots of folks who have really stepped up to help us there.

Reimagine Work Summit 2021

Arianna Huffington: ‘Not since the Industrial Revolution have we rethought work’

Latest video

She explains how we can truly be our best.

Videos (10 videos)

Arianna Huffington: ‘Not since the Industrial Revolution have we rethought work’

How Twitter and Major League Baseball are making a push for diversity and inclusion

So long Silicon Valley. Here are the new tech hubs.

Levi Strauss CEO: Why we're so outspoken on social issues

Here’s what people really think about working from home

How to decide where to be great, and where to fail, at work

What a return to the office looks like for Dropbox

Hyatt CEO: The 5-day, 9-5 office work-week is over

How Amazon kept its employees safe during the pandemic