Photo: Luis Alvarez / Getty Images
Video meetings are draining. Try something more casual.

Hello, and welcome to the second issue of Protocol | Workplace. For those of you only just joining us, this weekly newsletter is dedicated to every aspect of the future of work — from diversity issues to Slack hacks, management theories to unionization plans and ERGs to KPIs. We hope you find it useful, and want all your feedback: workplace@protocol.com.
This week: why you shouldn't hold on to your ideas about the future of work too tightly, another DEI lead bites the dust, and try quitting video meetings for something more casual.
It might sound like a fantasy — and maybe ultimately it is! — but momentum for the four-day workweek is starting to gain just a teensy bit of steam. The national campaign for a #4DayWeek is asking companies to sign up to launch a pilot program in 2022, and Kickstarter has just announced it is the first company on board. (Kickstarter is a pretty progressive workplace, by the way, and was one of the first tech companies to unionize).
Companies can be just as productive (and afford to keep salaries the same) while reducing the working week to 32 hours, the campaign argues. Because workers experience less stress and burnout, better mental health and more family time on a four-day week, it says, they become more productive and engaged.
The Teamsters Union is the latest to take on Amazon in the growing union war. Organizing the company has proven to be the Everest of tech unionization: Every major effort there in the last decade has failed spectacularly, and the latest union election in Bessemer, Alabama went in favor of Amazon by more than a 2:1 ratio.
In other tech union news in the last week, the workers at tech-darling health care provider One Medical are unionizing, too.
—AK
You're having too many meetings. That's the best, most consistent piece of advice remote-first companies will give you. They're too formal, too draining, just too much in general.
There's a better way to meet, and it's called the huddle. That's what Slack calls it, anyway. It's launching a new feature that lets you create a live audio space in any channel, as if you've just hopped into a conference room, and folks can come and go as they please.
The huddle can work in lots of ways: Rally turns calls into sort of a virtual cafeteria, where you can sit down at any table and chat with whoever's there; Rume adds games to make the whole thing feel a little more casual. This is about making video chat less like a meeting and more like, well, a chat. That goes a long way toward mitigating — though not solving — the fatigue that comes from a day of back-to-back Zooms. And seriously: Turn off the camera more often.
A survey of 12,000 employees by Boston Consulting Group found 60% of respondents want flexibility as far as where and when they work. As the world plans to safely reopen businesses, educational institutions, health care facilities and government entities, we are focused on innovating across our platform to support their needs.
That phrase has become a mantra at Gusto as the company endeavors to figure out what the future of work looks like for its own staff and customers. "It's very clear that one-size-fits-all isn't going to cut it," Danielle Brown, Gusto's chief people officer, said on this week's Protocol | Workplace virtual event, Redesigning the 9-5. But building a system that works for everyone is tough, and her role requires patience and flexibility, said Brown.
It's important not to hold on to ideas too tightly, Brown said. Gusto's leadership has lots of thoughts about how things are supposed to work in the future, but it's planning to be flexible.
Long-term plans are hard to make right now. Brown said she's trying to figure out what remote and hybrid work look like, both for her team and for Gusto's customers, especially once the pandemic is over.
Her sweet spot for hybrid work, by the way? Two days a week at the office, three at home. Everyone in our event agreed that felt like the right number. But who knows? Maybe it's wrong! "I'm going to follow my own mantra," Brown said. "Give grace and give space."
— DP
Offices are reopening, but employees aren't exactly flooding back so far. Only a couple hundred VMware employees have been showing up to the company's newly reopened Palo Alto HQ — which had a capacity of around 6,500 before the pandemic.
Many companies are reimagining office space, and VMware is no exception: It's revamping its HQ to be 50% to 70% collaboration space by getting rid of most individual desks.
But are companies just clinging on to the past? GitLab's head of remote, Darren Murph, told me this week that he sees remaining in offices — even when they're repurposed as collaboration hubs — as "a nostalgic thing where you're trying to hang on to the past."
There's a narrative that the head of diversity role sees a lot of turnover. We haven't crunched the numbers (yet), but the impending departure of Pinterest's Tyi McCray supports that characterization. Earlier this week, Protocol's Issie Lapowsky reported McCray will be leaving the company this month after less than one year on the job.
A survey of 12,000 employees by Boston Consulting Group found 60% of respondents want flexibility as far as where and when they work. As the world plans to safely reopen businesses, educational institutions, health care facilities and government entities, we are focused on innovating across our platform to support their needs.
Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to workplace@protocol.com. Have a great week, see you next Wednesday.
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