Leading Off (essentials for leaders and those they lead)

Source: https://tinyurl.com/yw5ey52s

Edited by Rama Ramaswami, a senior editor in McKinsey’s Stamford, Connecticut, office

As the US celebrates its independence on July 4, references to freedom are everywhere. It might be worthwhile to reflect that while freedom is a privilege to be grateful for, it also comes with checks and balances. This tension is apparent in the postpandemic workplace, where many leaders support employees’ growing demands for autonomy—the ability to control how, when, where, and, increasingly, if they work—but struggle to set parameters around it. Finding the right balance between employee autonomy and management oversight is an enduring challenge: as McKinsey’s Bryan Hancock puts it, “What drives me crazy is when I hear an executive say, ‘This is just a near-term employee power thing.’ No, it’s not.” This week, let’s explore the issue of employee autonomy—and how best to approach it.

AN IDEA

Flexible work is for (almost) everyone

Not all work is remote, but more of it is than you might think. That’s one of the notable findings of McKinsey’s latest American Opportunity Survey. At first viewed as a temporary pandemic response, hybrid or remote work has become an enduring feature of the modern world across most industries, occupations, and regions—58 percent of Americans can work from home at least one day a week, 87 percent would work flexibly if offered the chance to do so, and flexible work is one of the top three motivators to find a new job. Flexible work options are available even in traditionally labeled “blue collar” jobs that might be expected to require on-site labor. As new working models evolve, leaders will need to explore which roles can and cannot be performed remotely, how much day-to-day flexibility their teams expect, strategies to integrate on- and off-site workers, and—perhaps most important—ways to measure how well their chosen models are working.

A BIG NUMBER

$200 billion

That’s how much employers pay every year in healthcare costs for workplace stress, much of which results from limited job control—the amount of discretion that employees have to determine what they do and how they do it. Research shows that people in roles with more autonomy experience less physical or mental stress in the workplace even if they face greater job demands. Leaders who are challenged to define flexible work options may want to consider the negative impact of restricted job control and the positive impact of employee autonomy: workers who have more control over their jobs are healthier, more engaged, and better motivated, thereby boosting organizational effectiveness.

A QUOTE

“For leaders to facilitate flexibility and succeed in hybrid work, enabling employee autonomy will be paramount.”

That’s one of the conclusions of a study of hybrid work published in the Harvard Business Review. According to the researchers, what employees really mean by wanting “flexibility” is wanting autonomy, or the ability to be the primary decision makers of where and when they do their work. By directly blocking this ability, mandates such as requiring a certain number of days in the office are likely doomed to fail. Instead, establish principles, not policies: for example, rather than dictating three days a week in the office, you may want to encourage employees to decide which locations best enable them to carry out certain tasks. Also, consider investing in tools and training to build the skills that employees need to work autonomously.

A SPOTLIGHT INTERVIEW

Giving his teams a high degree of autonomy has paid off for Prashant Gandhi, managing director and head of digital payments at JPMorgan Chase. But it didn’t happen at the expense of structure. “While autonomy is celebrated and talked about frequently, I find that what’s often missing is a careful discussion on the management systems needed to support it,” he says in this interview with McKinsey. “Otherwise you get chaos.” Gandhi’s organization uses a shared culture and guiding principles—in this case, centered on customer satisfaction—to set up a management system that rewards independence and initiative. “If you lay out principles, give people autonomy to deliver on those principles, and provide a system of reviews that’s fair and rigorous, people get it and rally around it,” he says.

CATCH ME IF YOU CAN

Flexibility has its downsides. Employees who work remotely report burnout, alienation from colleagues, feeling invisible to management, and a host of other ill effects. For employers, the implications are different but no less dire. There is often a lingering fear that remote workers may slack off during business hours, moonlight, leak confidential information, or otherwise abuse their flexibility. Using remote monitoring tools without disclosure may raise legal risks. Ultimately, creating a culture of trust and transparency may be the best way for leaders to ensure autonomy—within necessary limits.

Lead flexibly.

— Edited by Rama Ramaswami, a senior editor in McKinsey’s Stamford, Connecticut, office

Married mothers take on more housework even when they out-earn their husbands

Source: https://tinyurl.com/2e5z89fh

Written by: EMMA HINCHLIFFE AND

PAIGE MCGLAUFLIN

Good morning, Broadsheet readers! President Biden chooses a nominee to serve as ambassador to Ukraine, Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter could affect the future of content moderation on the platform, and becoming a breadwinner comes with a caveat. Have a great Tuesday.

– Double duty. Changing gender norms around parenthood and work have allowed women to become breadwinners for their families. But some gender norms are particularly stubborn, as Joanna Syrda, a professor at the U.K.-based University of Bath School of Management recently discovered.

In her research, analyzing the relationship between spousal income and the division of housework between partners, Syrda examined more than 6,000 North American dual-earner, mixed-gender couples between 1999 and 2017. She found that as the gender pay gap closes between a husband and wife, the gender housework gap rises—with the woman taking on even more housework as she begins to outearn her husband. The surprising inverse correlation reflects deeply held beliefs about who should be a breadwinner and who should take care of the home, Syrda argues.

See the statistical analysis below from her study “Gendered Housework: Spousal Relative Income, Parenthood and Traditional Gender Identity Norms” published in the journal Work, Employment, and Society. The chart shows a mother’s housework decreasing from 18 to 14 hours a week as she goes from earning no income to about half the household income—and then ticking back up again to almost 16 hours as she exceeds her partner’s salary. The husband’s housework starts around six hours a week when he’s a father and the sole breadwinner, reaching a maximum of just under eight hours before declining as his wife takes on additional housework with her rising income.

It might sound counterintuitive that women breadwinners spend more time on household chores when they earn significantly more than their husbands—and worse still, the data doesn’t even account for gender gaps between time spent by mothers and fathers on childcare. Syrda speculates that heterosexual couples are, perhaps subconsciously, compensating for deviating from the male breadwinner norm. (Past research has shown that men are more likely to exhibit signs of “psychological distress” when their wife earns more money.)
“This is a non-traditional outcome in that she is earning more money than him,” Syrda says. “So to compensate for that, they [follow the norm] traditionally for housework.”

Syrda’s analysis brings to mind a 2019 study I covered for Fortune. Researchers found that married women did more housework than single moms—despite theoretically having a partner at home to share the load. They also found that “marriage remains a gendered institution that ratchets up the demand for housework and childcare through essentialist beliefs that women are naturally focused on home and hearth.”

The question, as Syrda frames it today, is what housework means to us. “Is housework just a sequence of tasks we perform?” she asks. “Or is it a way of constituting and enacting a gender?”

The combination of parenthood and marriage seems to be the defining element here: Syrda didn’t measure the same uptick in household chores for high-earning women who are not mothers. Similarly, the 2019 study focused on motherhood, measuring the difference in household chores for married and single mothers. Parenthood can have a “traditionalizing effect,” Syrda argues, causing even the most progressive of women to adjust their adherence to gender norms as they feel internal and external pressure to excel at motherhood.

By one measure, Syrda’s study could denote progress; there are enough women breadwinners in the dataset to come to these statistically significant conclusions. But it’s hard to celebrate women as their household’s primary financial provider when doing so comes with a performative obligation to do the dishes.

Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe

Good morning. Is the U.S. suffering from a labor shortage? If so, capitalism has an answer

Source: https://tinyurl.com/mxh92zh8

Written by David Leonhardt

A McDonald’s in Pennsylvania offering a hiring bonus.Keith Srakocic/Associated Press

The baguette solution

The chief executive of Domino’s Pizza has complained that the company can’t hire enough drivers. Lyft and Uber claim to have a similar problem. A McDonald’s franchise in Florida offered $50 to anybody willing to show up for an interview. And some fast-food outlets have hung signs in their windows saying, “No one wants to work anymore.”


The idea that the United States suffers from a labor shortage is fast becoming conventional wisdom. But before you accept the idea, it’s worth taking a few minutes to think it through.


Once you do, you may realize that the labor shortage is more myth than reality.

Econ 101


Let’s start with some basic economics. The U.S. is a capitalist country, and one of the beauties of capitalism is its mechanism for dealing with shortages. In a communist system, people must wait in long lines when there is more demand than supply for an item. That’s an actual shortage. In a capitalist economy, however, there is a ready solution.

The company or person providing the item raises its price. Doing so causes other providers to see an opportunity for profit and enter the market, increasing supply. To take a hypothetical example, a shortage of baguettes in a town will lead to higher prices, which will in turn cause more local bakeries to begin making their own baguettes (and also cause some families to choose other forms of starch). Suddenly, the baguette shortage is no more.

Human labor is not the same thing as a baguette, but the fundamental idea is similar: In a market economy, both labor and baguettes are products with fluctuating prices.

When a company is struggling to find enough labor, it can solve the problem by offering to pay a higher price for that labor — also known as higher wages. More workers will then enter the labor market. Suddenly, the labor shortage will be no more.

A job fair in Orlando, Fla., this month.Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket, via Getty Images


One of the few ways to have a true labor shortage in a capitalist economy is for workers to be demanding wages so high that businesses cannot stay afloat while paying those wages. But there is a lot of evidence to suggest that the U.S. economy does not suffer from that problem.

If anything, wages today are historically low. They have been growing slowly for decades for every income group other than the affluent. As a share of gross domestic product, worker compensation is lower than at any point in the second half of the 20th century. Two main causes are corporate consolidation and shrinking labor unions, which together have given employers more workplace power and employees less of it.

Just as telling as the wage data, the share of working-age Americans who are in fact working has declined in recent decades. The country now has the equivalent of a large group of bakeries that are not making baguettes but would do so if it were more lucrative — a pool of would-be workers, sitting on the sidelines of the labor market.

Corporate profits, on the other hand, have been rising rapidly and now make up a larger share of G.D.P. than in previous decades. As a result, most companies can afford to respond to a growing economy by raising wages and continuing to make profits, albeit perhaps not the unusually generous profits they have been enjoying.

By The New York Times | Source: Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis


Sure enough, some companies have responded to the alleged labor shortage by doing exactly this. Bank of America announced Tuesday that it would raise its minimum hourly wage to $25 and insist that contractors pay at least $15 an hour. Other companies that have recently announced pay increases include Amazon, Chipotle, Costco, McDonald’s, Walmart, J.P. Morgan Chase and Sheetz convenience stores.

Low wages seem normal

Why the continuing complaints about a labor shortage, then?

They are not totally misguided. For one thing, some Americans appear to have temporarily dropped out of the labor force because of Covid-19. Some high-skill industries may also be suffering from a true lack of qualified workers, and some small businesses may not be able to absorb higher wages. Finally, there is a rollicking partisan debate about whether expanded jobless benefits during the pandemic have caused workers to opt out.

For now, some combination of these forces — together with a rebounding economy — has created the impression of labor shortages. But companies have an easy way to solve the problem: Pay more.

That so many are complaining about the situation is not a sign that something is wrong with the American economy. It is a sign that corporate executives have grown so accustomed to a low-wage economy that many believe anything else is unnatural.

Research: Adding Women to the C-Suite Changes How Companies Think

Source: https://tinyurl.com/snrs25cu

Writte by: Corinne Post, Boris Lokshin, and Christophe Boone

Research has shown that firms with more women in senior positions are more profitable, more socially responsible, and provide safer, higher-quality customer experiences — among many other benefits. And of course, there is a clear moral argument for increasing diversity among top management teams (TMTs). But when it comes to explaining why having more female executives is associated with better business outcomes, and what specific mechanisms cause those positive changes, existing research is much more limited.

We set out to explore these questions by examining exactly how firms changed their strategic approach to innovation after appointing female executives. We tracked appointments of male and female executives and analyzed R&D expenses, merger and acquisition (M&A) rates, and the content of letters to shareholders for 163 multinational companies over 13 years to determine how these firms’ long-term strategies shifted after women joined their TMTs.

As leaders in the European market, the firms we analyzed were all actively involved in activities associated with strategic innovation (e.g., technology-based M&A and internal R&D) during the observation period — but we found that their approaches to those initiatives varied significantly. Specifically, we were able to identify three distinct trends around shifts in firms’ strategic thinking following the appointment of female executives:

1. Firms became more open to change and less open to risk

First, we found that after women joined the C-suite, firms became both more open to change and less risk-seeking. In other words, these organizations increasingly embraced transformation while seeking to reduce the risks associated with it.

To quantify these subtle cognitive shifts, we first conducted a linguistic analysis of changes in company documents issued by the TMT. We used a standard word categorization methodology that grouped terms like “bold,” “venture,” and “chance” as likely reflecting a greater propensity for risk-taking, while terms such as “create,” “transform,” and “launch” indicated more openness to change. We found that after appointing women to the C-suite, the frequency of terms in company communications that indicated a propensity for risk-taking decreased by 14%, while the frequency of terms suggesting openness to change increased by 10%.

This suggests that adding women to the C-suite does not simply bring new perspectives to the top management team — it shifts how the TMT thinks. Our research indicates that female executives don’t just offer specific new ideas to the team; their presence actually makes the TMT collectively more open to change and less comfortable with risk-taking. And as we discuss below, this mindset shift was reflected in tangible changes to how these firms made key strategic decisions.

2. Firms shifted focus from M&A to R&D

Specifically, we observed that when TMTs added female executives, they gradually shifted from a knowledge-buying strategy focused on M&As — which could be described as a more traditionally masculine, proactive approach — towards a knowledge-building strategy focused on internal R&D, which could be described as a more traditionally feminine, collaborative approach.

Our analysis suggests that this shift was a direct result of firms’ increasing aversion to risk, as we found that when a TMT experienced a one standard deviation increase in propensity for risk-taking, the likelihood of doing an additional M&A the following year increased, on average, by 10%, while TMTs that became less open to taking risks were significantly less likely to engage in M&A activity. Conversely, we found that after women were appointed to senior positions and firms began to exhibit higher levels of both openness to change and aversion to risk, firms reported an average 1.1% increase in R&D investments — and the average total R&D investment of the companies in our sample was $6,538 million, so a 1.1% increase is substantial.

3. The impact of female appointments was greater when women were well-integrated into the TMT.

Finally, we found that the more effectively female executives were able to integrate into the TMT, the greater the impact they were likely to have on its decision-making. There are two key factors that can influence this:

• Whether she’s the only woman: We found that adding female executives to the TMT only actually changed C-suite thinking in cases where the executive team already had at least one woman. This may be because teams that already had a woman in the C-suite were more comfortable working with and including female executives, reducing the obstacles facing new female appointees.
• Whether she’s one of many new appointees: We also found that larger shifts in thinking occurred when the new female executives were part of a smaller cohort of new appointees. In other words, if a firm promoted 10 men and 2 women to senior roles, we would see less of an impact than if a firm promoted 5 men and 1 woman. This could be because incumbent senior managers may feel more threatened when a larger group is promoted into their midst, leading them to be less trustful and less welcoming of the newcomers, and thus limiting new executives’ ability to contribute effectively.

Importantly, we measured all of these metrics both before and a full year after female executives were appointed to the TMT. This ensured that we were actually observing the effect of adding women to the C-suite, as opposed to simply documenting trends that were already in play before the addition of the female executives. We also controlled for other factors that may have correlated with changes in C-suite makeup, such as product strategy, R&D investment levels, and female board representation, to isolate just the effects of adding women to the TMT.

Why Is Having Women in the C-Suite So Impactful?

While our study focused simply on demonstrating these causal relationships, there are a few potential hypotheses we can offer based on prior research that could start to explain the root causes behind our findings.

First, a look at many women’s paths to executive positions sheds some light on why these leaders might simultaneously court change and avoid risk. To advance to the highest corporate levels, many women need to walk a difficult tightrope: They often learn to stand out by promoting novel strategies in an effort to overcome stereotypes of timidness, but at the same time, the hyper-visibility that comes with being the only one of an underrepresented group drastically increases the professional costs of making mistakes, and so they learn to carefully weigh the benefits of their innovative proposals with the risks of potential failure. Based on this common experience, one could expect TMTs to become more focused on balancing innovation with risk mitigation as more women join their ranks.

In addition, prior research suggests that female executives are likely to care less about tradition and are more open to challenging the status quo than their male counterparts. Behavioral psychology has found that these sorts of attitudes fundamentally increase others’ receptiveness to change, and so it would make sense that as more women are appointed to executive teams, it could trigger more open-mindedness in existing TMT members.

Similarly, if the individual women entering the TMT are on average more risk-averse (as studies suggest is often the case), their presence could cause the entire team to become more cautious. When an individual who seems more risk-averse enters a group, research has found that it can cause other group members to believe that the group as a whole is more risk-averse than it actually is, which can in turn lead everyone to become less open to risk.

Finally, it’s also possible that these changes are simply the direct result of increasing diversity in the TMT. Research suggests that having more diverse perspectives to weigh in on key decisions can make a group more open to change, and more likely to see change as feasible. At the same time, having a wider range of opinions to consider often slows down decision-making, decreasing the chances that the group will make rash or risky decisions.

The Power of Patterns

Of course, the trends we’ve identified are by no means a hard-and-fast rule. There are a number of famous examples of women-led companies that prioritized M&A over R&D, and certainly promoting women to the C-suite is no guarantee that a firm will invest more in R&D or avoid M&A opportunities.

But because our analysis is based on a comprehensive look at all TMT appointments (not just CEOs) across more than 150 multinational firms, we’ve been able to identify patterns that may not be obvious when thinking about singular, highly-visible female CEO appointments. While there are plenty of well-known female leaders who exemplify the patterns we found — Marillyn Hewson of Lockheed Martin, Lisa Su of AMD, and Susan Wojcicki of Google and YouTube, for example, are all known for being catalysts for internal change and innovation — many of the executives in our study are not household names. The scope of our analysis allows us to refocus the conversation from the impressive achievements (or notable failures) of individual female leaders to the broader impact of gender equity in the C-suite.

Furthermore, while our study focused solely on how firms change when women join the TMT and did not include information about the impact of other forms of diversity, we would expect to see similar findings for members of other underrepresented groups, such as racial and ethnic minorities. Research suggests that the career trajectories of these executives have much in common with those of women who make it to the top, and so while it is outside the scope of our current work, we wouldn’t be surprised to see similar patterns for TMTs that add members from any underrepresented group.

***

Despite numerous studies linking greater representation of women in the C-suite to positive firm outcomes, the mechanisms driving those changes have largely remained unclear. Our study begins to explore those mechanisms, finding that when women are appointed to the C-suite, they catalyze fundamental shifts in the top management team’s risk tolerance, openness to change, and focus on M&As versus R&D. To be clear, we make no claim as to whether these shifts are intrinsically “better” — rather, our research aims simply to shed light on exactly how the integration of female leaders at the highest levels of an organization impacts its approach to innovation, and ultimately suggests that including more women in executive decision-making may lead firms to consider a wider variety of value creation strategies.


Corinne Post is a professor of management in Lehigh University’s College of Business (USA). Her research examines the role of diversity as enabler or impediment to group and organizational performance and the mechanisms underlying gender and racial/ethnic differences in career trajectories and outcomes.


Boris Lokshin is associate professor at the department of Organization, Strategy and Entrepreneurship, Maastricht University. His research deals with topics at the intersection of fields of strategic management, innovation and entrepreneurship and has appeared in the leading academic journals.


Christophe Boone is a professor of organization theory and behavior at the Faculty of Business and Economics, University of Antwerp (Belgium). His research focuses on the dynamics of organizational populations in local communities, the antecedents and consequences of team and organizational diversity, CEO values and cognition, and the neuroeconomics of decision making.

Readers share their most pressing questions and concerns about the future of work in post-Covid societies.

Source: https://tinyurl.com/yynb5c2z 

Written by: By Bryan Lufkin and Rachel Mishael

It’s been nearly a year since the novel coronavirus began spreading around the world. While we’ve learned a lot about Covid-19 since January – and how to live and work in lockdown – there’s still much we don’t know about how the pandemic will change our societies.

That’s why we’ve rolled out Unknown Questions, our series grappling with these seismic changes by asking leaders and experts across the globe for their input. But today, we’ve turned to you, our LinkedIn readers, for your views on the biggest unknowns about the post-pandemic future.

The future of work

“My biggest question: Why can’t we work from home forever?” asks Kathy L from Virginia. With many workers asking the same thing, several big companies have already answered: “Why not?” Just this month, tech giant Microsoft announced that it would offer staff the option to work from home permanently, just as other Silicon Valley mainstays Facebook and Twitter, as well as Japan’s Fujitsu, did earlier this year.

Shun-ping Chiu in California points out that while remote work was technically possible before the pandemic, what Covid-19 has brought “is a mindset difference that allows people to view remote work as a new normal rather than an occasional opportunity”. And data backs this up: In April, the Office of National Statistics reported that 46% of employed Brits were working from home; in May, 42% of the US workforce were doing the same.

The pandemic has had profound impacts on how we work, and many of us feel that some of the changes are irreversible

“Most of the client meetings, kick-offs, project meetings could easily and effectively be conducted via tools like Teams, WebEx, Zoom and other virtual meeting solutions,” says Gagan Lamba in San Francisco. “Soon enough corporations will recognise the benefit of people working from home, which would result in savings on lease cost, electric bills, shipment cost, administrative cost.”

But some fear losing vital communication skills, or wonder whether they will be as effective or successful professionally as they would be at an office. “I fear we will forget how to communicate, which in my field as a salesperson makes me very nervous,” says Ben Brown from England. “Face-to-face interaction is vital in order to win new business and build a relationship with the customer where they can trust you.”

On the flip side, telework could potentially open up more opportunities. “Everyone who has talent and skills will learn that they can market their talent to the whole world,” says Juliana Carroll in New York. “Everyone who takes their everyday skills for granted will realise that someone will pay for that skill and/or for their time. Every responsible college student will realise that someone will pay for their time to help with children's homework. Every bilingual person will realise that someone will pay for their time to practice another language… It's just a matter of finding the right virtual marketplace.”

But others worry about possible drawbacks to long-term remote working. “On the flip side, it opens up unanswered questions: What is my career growth path? How do I collaborate on new ideas? How do I build a trusted relationship with a customer? How do I engage my team? Is this fair to people with small kids? What are the implications on taxes?” asks Pankaj Goyal, also in San Francisco.

And where does all this leave office buildings? In May, office and retail landlord Land Securities reported that a mere 10% of its office space in the UK was in use. Meanwhile, real estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield forecasts that Covid’s hit on the office real estate market will be worse than the global financial crisis, with a net loss of 95 million square feet of real estate in the next year – and that the market might not get back to pre-Covid levels until 2025.

“How is commercial real estate adapting to the post-Covid world?” asks Lisa Hoffman from Virginia. “Is there a shift away from typical tenants to a different tenant or a new space use? How will these changes impact the urban environment, especially downtown hubs that rely on dense office real estate?”

Plus, with the meteoric rise of telework, some are wondering if people will soon be paid based on where they live. One survey this summer of high earners in New York City revealed that 44% of them had thought of moving in the last four months to telework somewhere cheaper to live.

Eric Luna in New York says: “People would do the exact same job but be paid differently because of their home or residential location. Some say this will happen. I personally believe something like it will. Is this avoidable or inevitable?”

Of course, some offices will stay put in their current spot – after all, research in July from Gensler, an architecture firm in San Francisco, found that only 12% of workers want to work from home permanently. “I do not believe that we will find a one-size-fits-all solution,” says Thibault Pelloux-Gervais in California. “I am still convinced that in-person activity is essential to build team spirit, which drives collaboration and innovation. A hybrid model where you would spend some time working from home and some time from an office could become a very common model.”

As the way we work has shifted, so too have the ways we navigate family life and how our children learn

Childcare, coping and inequality

Yet if hybrid does become more common and employers give workers more flexibility, what does it mean for parents whose children are at home doing distance learning? After all, in the US, a whopping 93% of households with school-age children reported having to accommodate distance learning at home during the pandemic. Globally, 1.2 billion children are out of the classroom. Tracey Stewart from Seattle asks: “Will working from home remain a viable solution? Will employers note increases in productivity and cost savings, and offer real flexibility for working parents? Will governments and corporations, post-Covid, offer childcare solutions like generous subsidies or onsite solutions in order to maximise workforce engagement? Many parents are simultaneously loving the flexibility of working from home, but also buckling under the burden of full-time teaching or parenting.”

In this sphere, like many others in the pandemic, inequalities have been laid bare; while 95% of students in countries like Switzerland and Austria have a computer to do schoolwork, only 34% in Indonesia do. “From their academic success to their social skills and mental health, the pandemic is a crisis for today’s children – and the fallout may follow them for the rest of their lives,” says Isabel Santos in Portugal. “When today’s children and adolescents grow up, will they see themselves as a ‘lost generation’, whose lives will forever fall in the shadow of a global pandemic?”

When it comes to Covid-19’s emotional impact, readers aren’t just worried about Zoom fatigue or WiFi blips during video calls. Furloughs, redundancies and slashed pay all threaten livelihoods, with a major impact on mental health. Julie Derrick in Cardiff, Wales, says: “My biggest question (and concern) is how on Earth are we going to cope with the surge in mental health cases, in particular OCD, post-Covid – when mental health resources were already way over-stretched (and underfunded) even pre-Covid.” In the UK, nearly 20% of adults have been experiencing some form of depression during the pandemic – a figure that had doubled since before the outbreak, according to the Office for National Statistics. “I am curious about the post-traumatic effects, how it affects personal relationships,” agrees Marcell Déri in Hungary.

And finally, with inequalities – whether socio-economic or racial - more visible than ever, one question on readers’ minds is whether our societies can change for the better as a result. “Under duress, we tend to regress,” says Dennis Linehan from Flagstaff, Arizona. “So, when we emerge from the pandemic, is humankind motivated by a common goodwill and generosity toward one another or are we generally more pessimistic and revert to a pronounced tribalism?”

Perhaps the most concrete certainty for the future is uncertainty. “I’m objectively curious to see where the waves settle and what becomes a new normal,” says Marek Matthew Getter in New York City “What interests me is what normal will look like. There’s no going back; we cannot unlearn the lessons of Covid.”

What Does the Families First Coronavirus Response Act Mean for Employers?

Source: https://tinyurl.com/r6feolj

Written by: Jordy Dean

HR Alert

What Does the Families First Coronavirus Response Act Mean for Employers?

Applies to: All Employers with fewer than 500 Employees

Effective: April 2, 2020

Beginning April 2, 2020, the Families First Coronavirus Response Act (FFCRA) will require employers to provide protected paid leave and paid sick leave to employees through December 31, 2020.

First, the FFCRA’s Emergency Family and Medical Leave Expansion Act extends employee leave protections under the federal Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA) as follows:

• Applicability: Private employers with fewer than 500 employees.
• Eligibility: Employees employed for 30 calendar days or more may request FMLA benefits for leave where the employee is unable to work (or telework) due to a need for leave to care for the son or daughter under 18 years of age of such employee if the school or place of care has been closed, or the child care provider of such son or daughter is unavailable, due to a public health emergency.
• Paid Leave: The first 10 days of leave are unpaid after which the employer pays the following:

• at least 2/3 of an employee’s regular pay rate;
• for the number of hours an employee is otherwise normally scheduled to work (for those with varying schedules, employers should use an average number of scheduled work hours over the six-month period just prior to the date of leave); and

• up to a maximum of $200 per day and $10,000 in aggregate.

• Duration of Leave: The total leave allocation, including paid and unpaid portions, is the full 12-week benefit under existing FMLA rules.
• Substitutions: Employers may not require an employee to substitute any leave, but an employee can choose to substitute any accrued vacation, personal, or sick leave during the initial unpaid portion of the leave.
• Restoration to Position: This provision requires an employer to restore the individual to the position they held prior to the leave, except for employers with fewer than 25 employees if:


• the employee’s position is eliminated due to economic conditions or other changes in operating conditions of the employer that affect employment and are caused by a public health emergency during the period of leave; and
• the employer makes reasonable efforts to restore the employee to an equivalent position, and, if unsuccessful, the employer makes reasonable efforts to notify the employee if an equivalent position becomes available within one-year following the leave.

• Special Rule for Healthcare Providers and Emergency Responders: An employer of an employee who is a healthcare provider or an emergency responder may elect to exclude such employee from this leave benefit.

Second, the FFRCA added the Emergency Paid Sick Leave Act for employee relief.

• Applicability: Private employers or individuals employing fewer than 500 employees, and public entities with one or more employees.
• Eligibility: Employers must provide paid sick time to employees who are unable to work, or telework, regardless of how long the employee has been employed by the employer, under the following circumstances:

1. Federal, state, or local quarantine or isolation order related to COVID-19;
2. Advice by a healthcare provider to self-quarantine due to COVID-19-related concerns;
3. Employee experiencing symptoms of COVID-19 and seeking a medical diagnosis;
4. Employee’s need to care for an individual who is subject to an order or who has been advised to quarantine by a healthcare provider;
5. Employee’s need to care for a son or daughter if the school or place of care closes or is unavailable due to COVID-19 precautions; or
6. The employee is experiencing any other substantially similar condition specified by the Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS).

• Compensation: For reasons 1-3 above, employers must pay the greater of the employee’s regular pay, the minimum wage in effect under FLSA, or the state/local minimum wage rate in effect, up to a maximum of $511 per day and $5,110 in aggregate. For reasons 4-6 above, employers must pay 2/3 of the greater of the employee’s regular pay, the minimum wage in effect under FLSA, or the state/local minimum wage rate in effect, up to a maximum of $200 per day and $2,000 in aggregate.

• Duration:
• All employees, regardless of the length of employment, are entitled to:
80 hours, if full-time; or
the average number of hours over a two-week period, if part-time.

• Hours cannot carry over from one year to the next and paid sick time ends on the next scheduled work shift immediately following termination.
• Employers who are healthcare providers or employers of emergency responders may elect to exclude such employees from this benefit.
• Employers may not require an employee to:
• search for a replacement employee to cover their hours as a condition of providing paid sick leave; or
• use other paid leave provided by the employer before the employee uses sick time under this provision.

• Prohibitions and Enforcement
• Violation is a failure to pay minimum wage under the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) and be subject to fines.
• Employers may not discharge, discipline, or discriminate against an employee who takes leave or has filed any complaint or proceedings with regard to this Act – employers willfully violating this will be subject to penalties of up to $10,000, or up to six months imprisonment, or both.

• Notifications and Disclosures:
• To the extent an employee is planning on
exercising leave for this purpose, they should notify their employer as soon as is practicable. Likewise, after the start of the leave period, an employer may require the employee to follow reasonable notice procedures to substantiate continued paid sick time payments.

• Notices shall be posted in conspicuous places on the premises of the employer, where notices to employees (including applicants) are customarily posted; or in employee handbooks. The notice will be available by March 25, 2020.
• Exceptions: The Secretary of Labor has the authority to issue regulations to exclude certain healthcare providers and emergency responders from the definition of eligible employee and to exempt small businesses with fewer than 50 employees if this provision will jeopardize the viability of the business

Employers providing paid leave and paid sick leave are entitled to tax credits against the payments made, subject to certain requirements. As implementation of these rules begins, Congress is already working on providing more assistance to help Americans. Continue to look for updates on this topic.

Action Items

1. Review the Act here.
2. Have paid leave policies updated.
3. Prepare for employee leave requests beginning April 2nd.
4. Display required notice (available by March 25th).
5. Review your financial planning now.
6. Review your ability to comply with the FFCRA and isolation orders.