Indeed, many companies are framing recent changes as efforts to give their employees more flexibility. (Salesforce’s CEO is Marc Benioff, who owns TIME alongside his wife, Lynne.) Slack said, in a statement, that the company has learned “a lot in the last two years about how to work in a more flexible world” and that the company has created new benefits and tools to support its employees-including encouraging them to take time off and recharge (although apparently not all at once.). Slack, which was formally acquired by Salesforce in July 2021, stopped its Fri-yays in December of 2022. C-level executives and human resource leaders polled in the same survey said that they had concerns that the mental health benefits could cause employees to take more time off, hurting the companies’ bottom line.ĭuring the pandemic, Slack, for instance, launched “Fri-yays” in which the whole company shut down one Friday a month to give everyone a chance to relax and recharge. employees polled in 2022 said that they felt they had workday flexibility to care for their mental health needs, down from 64% in 2021, according to a survey conducted by Forrester Consulting and commissioned by Modern Health. These shifts are materializing in many different ways at companies across the country. ![]() Read more: As People Return to Offices, It’s Back to Misery for America’s Working Moms “It kind of felt like, ‘ok, now we can go back to something that was easier for the people in charge, and for managers,’” she says. She likens it to the end of World War II, when all the women who had been welcomed into the factory were sent home to be in the kitchen again. Still, she feels like her old company missed an opportunity to be a better place to work. “It felt very egalitarian-like we’re all in this together,” she says. Though Kislinska, who worked in tech, had a young child, she didn’t feel like she was falling behind her colleagues without children, or those with a stay-at-home-spouse, because everyone at her company was encouraged to stay home, spend time with their families, and balance work and their own mental health. Goodbye to the kindler, gentler employerįor Olga Kislinska, the pandemic felt like a great equalizer. That will also mean a workplace with fewer women and underrepresented minorities, since the pandemic-era changes that made their work lives better are now disappearing. Rather than a more diverse, inclusive, and happy office, the “new” workplace ushered in by the pandemic may be exactly the same one that existed before it. But even employers who had committed to change are backsliding, and the window of opportunity for the pandemic to dramatically change work in America is closing fast. ![]() Talk of the “Great Resignation” had employers scrambling to keep workers happy, and experts predicted a new era of work, in which people pursued careers they actually liked, companies took a stance on social issues, and the 9–5 workday was a thing of the past. who had been gaining leverage over their employers for the first time in decades. These changes are a serious setback for the 88 million professional workers in the U.S. “We are managing out our less productive agents more aggressively,” Mark Jones, the chief financial officer of Goosehead Insurance, a publicly-traded insurance company, said to analysts in October, explaining that the company was now in a “post-pandemic environment.” Goosehead also cut its corporate staff by 18% over the quarter “to focus on increasing productivity.” Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Facebook employees that their performances would be graded more intensely than before Alphabet’s CEO Sundar Pichai reportedly urged employees to work with “greater urgency, sharper focus, and more hunger” Twitter owner Elon Musk advised employees who didn’t want to work long hours at high intensity to quit. Even people who still have jobs may notice that their employer is no longer the same empathetic, understanding boss that they bonded with in the first two years of the pandemic. ![]() It’s not just the spate of layoffs- including more than 100,000 in the tech industry alone in 2023-that have left professional workers reeling.
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