The best of Protocol

The weaponization of employee resource groups, by Megan Rose Dickey

• ERGs have been talked about a lot over the last year or so, and have been identified as a way to help companies become more diverse and inclusive from within. But as Megan found, too many ERG members are finding it hard to effect real change in the workplace.

Performance reviews suck. These tech companies are trying to make them better, by Michelle Ma

• Improving your performance-review strategy takes a little bit of tech, a little bit of process and a lot of diligence and planning. But as the shifting future of work leads to spiking investment in HR tech, and executives are forced into new ways of doing things, now's the chance to do better.

With Andrew Bosworth, Facebook just appointed a metaverse CTO, by Janko Roettgers

• You really can't overstate how big a deal it is that Mike Schroepfer — or Schrep, as he's known to practically everyone — is stepping down as Facebook's CTO. But Andrew Bosworth moving into the role is a big deal, too, and a signal of Facebook's future as it turns to hardware, software and the metaverse.

Here's everything going wrong at Binance, the world's biggest crypto exchange, by Tomio Geron

• Binance is the biggest crypto exchange in the world, and it's not even close. It's also under regulatory fire practically everywhere, which has turned the tech giant into a sort of shape-shifting, amorphous corporate entity that nobody seems to be able to fully grasp.

Beijing meets an unstoppable force: Chinese parents and their children, by Shen Lu

• The Chinese government is setting rules about how kids learn, how they play video games and even what they see online. But you know what they say about rules: Kids and parents continue to find ways to win this cat-and-mouse game.

The hottest new perk in tech: A week off for burnout recovery, by Aisha Counts

• People are tired. And stressed. And burned out. Lots of companies are investing in mental-health tools and ways to measure and improve employee well-being. But more and more are leaning into a fancy, high-tech new strategy: Just close the office and give everyone a week off.

Protocol event

Making sense of vaccine mandates

Vaccine mandates were already gaining popularity among tech companies looking to bring their workers back to campus safely. Now, the Labor Department's Occupational Safety and Health Administration is expected to issue a new rule requiring companies with 100 or more employees to mandate vaccines or weekly testing.

What does this mean for tech employers, and how should they be preparing for this new mandate? Join Protocol's Allison Levitsky for a conversation on what the vaccine mandates means for you, your company and your employees with Engage Peo HR consultant Sadiqa Banks-Holsey, Nixon Peabody OSHA partner Rachel Conn and Gartner head of HR research Brian Kropp at 9 a.m PT / 12 p.m. ET on Thursday.

A MESSAGE FROM PHILIP MORRIS INTERNATIONAL

By scrutinizing facts and including all voices, we can achieve public consensus faster and take well-informed collective action against the many challenges our world is facing. Embracing facts, new technologies, and science is our shared responsibility and the least we can do to drive positive change for the world.

Learn more

The best of everything else

Peter Thiel's Origin Story — New York Magazine

• Max Chafkin, the author of the new book "The Contrarian: Peter Thiel and Silicon Valley's Pursuit of Power," was everywhere this week talking about the history of Thiel. (He talked with Protocol's Biz Carson last week, too.) This part of the story, on how Thiel became Thiel and turned into the tech power-player he is now, is a particularly illuminating one.

He pushed Uber out of China. Then he got too big for Beijing — CNN

• Cheng Wei built DiDi into a ride-sharing powerhouse, and became a star in China's tech scene. But as regulators have swarmed the tech industry in China, his life has gotten … complicated. And so has the future for DiDi.

Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story — The Counter

• Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, Eat Just and so many other companies promise a meat-free meat future that's just around the corner. But as this story argues, it's not, and it's certainly not anywhere close to making a meaningful difference in the world. So what would it take? And is it possible to get there?

Why my NFT toad brought me joy — The New York Times

• You know all the reasons NFTs are problematic for the environment, bad investments, whatever. (Plus, the scammers are everywhere.) But you know what else? NFTs make people happy. And this story does a great job of explaining what it means to be a collector, and why digital collections maybe aren't that different. Plus, what happens when Big Business shows up?

How Google spies on its employees — The Information

• We live in the leaker era, in which employees all over the industry feel both empowered and required to take action when they see wrongdoing. (Even the anti-leaking memos always get leaked.) This is a fascinating dive into the lengths Google and others are willing to go to find out who's talking, and stop them.

File not found — The Verge

• Your mind-bending fact/reason to feel old of the week: An entire generation of people is coming online with no idea how digital files and folders work. (This is like when you realized that young people have no idea why a floppy-disk icon means "Save," only worse.) And that generation is already reshaping everything about how software works.

A MESSAGE FROM PHILIP MORRIS INTERNATIONAL

By scrutinizing facts and including all voices, we can achieve public consensus faster and take well-informed collective action against the many challenges our world is facing. Embracing facts, new technologies, and science is our shared responsibility and the least we can do to drive positive change for the world.

Learn more