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The reopening is here — but only if you’re vaccinated

Hello! We hope you had an excellent long weekend filled with no work whatsoever, and we're glad to be back with you to talk about all things future-of-work.
In this week's Protocol | Workplace: More than 100 employees said they've experienced racist treatment at Tesla's Fremont factory; Google's latest diversity report leaves a lot to be desired; and how Y Combinator built what you could almost call Tinder for Co-Founders.
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Facebook, Google, Amazon and other big tech companies have said they would allow unvaccinated employees at the office. But in the last few weeks, four software makers — Adobe, Asana, Twilio and VMware — have said they would impose vaccine mandates at their reopened offices.
It's a trend that Fenwick & West partner Sheeva Ghassemi-Vanni started noticing last month, when the California Division of Occupational Safety and Health (Cal/OSHA) said that vaccinated employees could remove their masks at work.
"Before that, I had a lot of clients still calling and asking, 'Can we require vaccines?'" Ghassemi-Vanni said. "With Cal/OSHA's mandate, it has become clearer to employers, like, 'Oh, this is something that we could do, and it's perhaps becoming more socially acceptable to require.'"
Still, most big companies that got back to us are going with the "encourage, but not require" policy when it comes to vaccines. In addition to Facebook, Google and Amazon, this includes Microsoft, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Intel, ServiceNow and Uber.
Tesla has for years faced allegations of allowing a racially-hostile and discriminatory workplace to fester in its Fremont factory. Several 2017 lawsuits alleged at the time that people regularly used the N-word, slurs were graffitied on bathroom walls and Black men and women were forced to do menial tasks and denied job promotions.
Protocol reviewed legal documents and public records from the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing and found that the 2017 allegations are not isolated, and hundreds of other workers have had similar experiences.
"My personal view is that Tesla does not focus on investigating and preventing these claims. They are really focused on making cars and less focused about their employees' conduct in the workplace, based on the discovery that we've done in five different cases," Larry Organ, the attorney in the class-action lawsuit, told me.
Google is no expert in the field of diversity and inclusion, and it shows in the company's latest report. While Google increased the hiring of Black and Latinx employees, the company struggled to retain Black and Native American employees. In fact, Black and Native American employees left Google at higher rates than any other group.
But that's not surprising because Google has struggled with retaining employees of color for years. In 2018, Google's attrition index showed Black and Latinx employees were leaving Google at rates faster than the national average. So it's no wonder why the presence of Black and Latinx employees has barely increased over the years.
Below is a quick snapshot at racial diversity "progress" at Google over the years.
Zoom is for you. From meetings, chat, phone, and webinars to conference rooms and events, Zoom powers all your communication needs. Zoom for Government, our separate, U.S.-based platform, offers the same Zoom experience but with the specialized security controls and certifications required by the U.S. government.
There's a new dating app for startup co-founders. Sort of. Y Combinator has launched a co-founder matching service through the YC Startup School, intended to help founders find people with the right attributes and skills to pair up to launch a company. YC is famous for encouraging startup founders to work with a partner, and only four companies that have gone through YC accelerators have done so with a single leader.
YC built the free service in part because it's hoping some of the new matches will then choose to go through its accelerator programs, Startup School Director Kyle Corbitt told Protocol's Biz Carson. And to keep the program community meaningful, the program directors manually vet every applicant to keep spam and other unrelated pitches out.
This one's for all the Notion devotees out there. The popular note-taking app's API is still in beta but getting better fast, and thanks to a new integration with IFTTT it's now much easier to get information in and out. (Anyone who uses Notion a lot knows the app is super powerful ... but not super fast.)
Here are a couple of IFTTT triggers worth turning on:
Notion also works with Zapier, Tray.io and Integromat, which are more complicated but also much more powerful systems. A big part of Notion's appeal is its Swiss Army knife functionality; it just does more things than most apps. Spending a few minutes setting up an integration or four makes it even more useful for more things.
As VP of design, Alastair Simpson wasn't necessarily the most obvious choice to help Dropbox figure out its own future of work. But he thinks it makes perfect sense. "We're turning human-centered design inwards on ourselves," he said.
Dropbox is designing its workplace like it builds products. Dropbox has offices around the world, and Simpson's been working on redesigning practically all of them. "What we're thinking about," he said, "is having really deliberate purposes for what teams do there."
There's more to it than the buildings. Simpson and his team are designing tools for booking spaces, helping employees plan ahead to make sure everyone can be together, designing safety protocols and more. "We're mapping out user journeys for employees," he said. Dropbox is all about helping people work better through good design, Simpson figured, so why not build Dropbox the company the same way?
— DP
Zoom is for you. From meetings, chat, phone, and webinars to conference rooms and events, Zoom powers all your communication needs. Zoom for Government, our separate, U.S.-based platform, offers the same Zoom experience but with the specialized security controls and certifications required by the U.S. government.
Thanks for reading! Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to workplace@protocol.com. Enjoy your day; see you next week.
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