This interview was created in collaboration with the Financial Health Network.
Over the last few years, expectations of how employers treat their workers has undergone noticeable shifts. Employees from across sectors increasingly expect more holistic support from their employer. High-performing employers are taking note, recognizing that a holistic benefits strategy – one that focuses on the whole employee – results in a more stable, financially healthy workforce.
Part of a holistic benefits strategy includes recognizing individual workers as members of families and communities. Access to paid leave is estimated to increase mothers’ labor force participation by approximately 20 percent during the first year following their child’s birth. Furthermore, having access to paid medical leave has led workers to experience less stress from financial insecurity during a health shock. Recently, Levi Strauss & Co. (LS&Co) expanded its paid family leave plan to be more inclusive of its global workforce. Using data and feedback from employees, HR leaders designed a paid leave benefit that provided support to a wide range of employees.
In this interview produced by JUST Capital and Financial Health Network (two of the partners in the Worker Financial Wellness Initiative) we talk with Tracy Layney, Levi Strauss & Co.’s Chief Human Resources Officer, discussing the company’s decision to continue expanding their paid family leave plan.
One of the most important ways that LS&Co. stands up for our values is by standing up for our most important audience: our employees. We see it as our responsibility to create an environment that enables employees to be healthy, happy, and successful at work and at home.
We’ve seen the positive impact of paid leave in our employees’ lives since we introduced paid parental leave in 2016. Access to paid family and medical leave is not only the right thing to do for employees, but it’s the smart thing to do for business. So, in 2020 we expanded the benefit to include paid family leave. Then, at the beginning of this year, we enhanced the standard of our paid leave benefit around the globe to ensure our eligible employees have equitable access to time off work for maternity leave, parental bonding leave, and family care leave.
We had heard strong feedback on the need for paid family leave from our workforce. From a U.S. home office perspective, more than 50% of our population is made up of individuals between the ages of 36 and 55 – part of the so-called “sandwich generation” that is more likely to be caring for both a child and an elder at the same time. We realized that to truly support employee well-being, we must support employees’ ability to care for their closest family members, whether that person is a child, spouse, parent, or domestic partner, without worrying about their job or their paycheck.
Over the past few years, we’ve implemented and advocated for paid family leave and paid sick leave for our employees in certain locations and have seen firsthand the impact this has had on our employees’ lives. Our people make us who we are, and it’s our responsibility to create an environment that enables them to be healthy, happy, and successful, both at work and at home.
We wanted to ensure eligible employees receive the same paid leave benefit regardless of their geographic location, so we created a global core minimum standard. This allows us to provide eligible employees with up to:
Our goal with the enhancement was to create an equitable global core minimum standard, thus providing a stronger safety net for our employees wherever they are located. Our previous policy minimums were contingent on local laws and standards around the world — employees were in theory eligible for a variety of paid leave benefits depending on their region, but it didn’t always work out that way in practice. By raising the minimum standard across the board, many LS&Co. eligible employees will and are currently experiencing an enhancement in this benefit.
Our driving force and our motivation is our employees. At LS&Co., our people make us who we are and it’s our responsibility to create an environment that enables them to be healthy, happy, and successful at work and at home. Companies play a role in being the employer their employee needs in today’s landscape. This includes ensuring their people don’t have to choose between their careers and their health.
Companies should expand access to paid leave because this issue directly affects them, their workforces, and their ability to stay competitive in our modern U.S. economy. I would encourage everyone to foster conversations with their companies and dig deeper into the business rationale behind it.
Paid family leave is a relatively small investment with a very meaningful return, our actual expense is tracking under initial projected expense. Our paid family care policy globally costs us only 36% of what we’d projected, and since our global enhancement in January, we’ve had over 260 leaves across 20 countries.
During COVID, our company saw much lower attrition and impact on women than the average numbers across the U.S. and we believe it is because of our benefits and company culture (It is an expense to rehire and train people – paid leave boosts retention.) We realized that to truly support employee well-being, we must support employees’ ability to care for their closest family members, whether that person is a child, spouse, parent, or domestic partner, without worrying about their job or their paycheck.
Also, showing employees we have their backs cultivates loyalty, supports productivity, and fosters a culture where people do their best work. Comprehensive family and medical leave policies also help further equality and diversity goals, allowing more people to take advantage of professional opportunities that present themselves.
At Levi Strauss & Co., we are committed to offering a wide array of benefits and support for our employees in ways that are both tailored to their unique needs and can help them look after themselves and their loved ones, and one of those ways is through our ongoing mental health and well-being offerings. Most recently, we expanded access to Lyra Health’s emotional well-being support, available to all our employees around the world and their household family members.
Ongoing mental health resources are ingrained in the day-to-day culture and benefits of LS&Co. These include providing accessible, always-on resources that help our people prioritize mental and physical health and manage symptoms of stress, anxiety, and depression, should they arise. We train our managers to lead from the heart and with understanding. There is no one-size-fits-all leadership style, but by making small changes in the way we communicate with our people, we can foster a culture rooted in authenticity and empathy.
Hi – it’s Alison Omens, President of JUST Capital, filling in for Martin with a dispatch this week from Washington D.C., where JUST Capital’s media partner, CNBC, hosted their second annual CEO Council Summit. Given our location and the upcoming election, much of the conversation centered on how CEOs can navigate the political environment to lead in transitional and turbulent times.
The Managing Director of the IMF, Kristalina Georgieva, kicked off the morning with a challenge to leaders that I appreciated. She noted that this decade is still being defined and that the Twenties may come to be known by one of three ‘T’ words: turbulent, tepid, or transformational. She urged business leaders to steer toward the latter path.
But other leaders had a different message.
In their own ways, Speaker Mike Johnson, FTC Chair Lina Khan, and Assistant Attorney General Jonathan Kanter, who leads the Justice Department’s Antitrust Division, all signaled the importance of business staying in its lane without running into enforcement challenges or overstepping on social or political matters.
This message left an interesting challenge in my mind, something that JUST Capital spends our time on – understanding what business leadership means today.
There were two additional ‘T’ words that Georgieva didn’t use, but I think are highly relevant here. One is transition. This moment is transitional for businesses, whether transitioning to an AI future, changing demographics, climate, or shifting political winds. To navigate these transitions, I recommend looking at JUST Capital’s extensive polling of the American people for guidance. The public is clear, regardless of ideology: focus on your own workforce. Create jobs with good wages and benefits in communities that need them.
The second ‘T’ word, also derived from the polling, is transparency. Transparency signals priority and direction, and Americans clearly believe it to be a necessary part of effective business leadership today (check out this Agenda Week article about the importance of transparency on workforce and human capital issues with JUST Capital’s data).
Each business leader needs to forge their own path on how to guide their organization through challenging times. Through the turbulence, focusing on workers and transparency will be key.
“If all the women are secretaries, and all the men are executives and you don’t tell us that, you have not given us the information that we need to assess whether or not you’re really an employer that values all types of people.”
Two weeks ago, we released the CRE Alliance Standards, which is a roadmap for businesses to advance equity and inclusion, combat discrimination, and embody the best of socially responsible business.
But, to bring these standards to life, we must work together.
Contribute to the development of the standards by taking part in our public comment period. If you want to lend your perspective on the topics of corporate governance and leadership, internal infrastructure, workplace culture, workforce diversity, job quality, products and services and/or a socially responsible value chain, take our online survey or sign up for a virtual roundtable discussion before September 13.
Read the standards and take the survey inside.
Business Insider highlights a McKinsey study that says AI has the power to disrupt the job market by 2030 as severely as COVID did in 2020.
The Washington Post reports that a dozen of current and former employees at OpenAI and other prominent AI companies warned that the technology poses grave risks to humanity in a Tuesday letter, calling on these businesses to implement sweeping transparency changes. Learn more here.
Bloomberg is reporting that key engines of US spending are declining all at once, alongside increases in credit usage as disposable income declines.
Meanwhile, Walgreens joins Target and several other retailers in slashing prices on over 1300 common items within its stores to help out their customers. CBS News has the story.
In possibly the strangest business story of the week, the CEO of Chipotle had to answer questions about “shrinkflation” in Fortune this week after several Tik-Tok videos went viral claiming that the chain was skimping on meat in their orders.
This chart comes from a deep dive into the data within our JUST Jobs Scorecard via Gretchen Lenth at Agenda Week, highlighting which data points different companies are disclosing across industries. Explore this interactive chart and others in the full article.
According to the annual Axios Harris Poll 100 Corporate Reputation Survey, there has been “a systemic loss in corporate reputation” over the past year. Consumer dissatisfaction with higher prices is part of the story, but 72% of those surveyed believe companies are taking advantage of inflation to increase their profit margins.
The study also suggests that in addition to wanting companies to prioritize fair prices (53%), Americans would prefer they focus on improving product quality, safety, and consumer satisfaction (48%) and paying good wages/promoting economic growth through job creation (48%) as opposed to ESG (23%), AI investment (13%), and taking proactive stances on societal or cultural issues (11%).
Certainly, companies are treading carefully on the latter issues in terms of public-facing statements. As Business Insider notes, “mentions of ESG on fourth-quarter earnings calls in 2023 compared to 2020’s Q4 dropped more than 78%. DEI’s decline was even larger during that time frame, falling 88%.” But the fact that kitchen table financial matters – wages, jobs, prices – are so important comes as no surprise to us. Worker-related issues, as regular JUST followers know, have been the priority of the public in our own polling for years.
Our new guide – The Corporate Guide to Human Capital Disclosure & Leading Practice – will make it easier to make progress in this critical area. We track the state of current disclosure, standard practice benchmarks, and leading practice examples across 6 areas: Wages & Compensation; Benefits; Training & Development; Workforce Composition; Employee Wellness; and Hiring & Stability.
Some of the best performers – including Waste Management (Tuition Reimbursement), Carmax (Veteran Hiring), ONEOK (Internal Hiring) and Mondelez International (living wage) – may surprise you.
Be well,
Martin
(Wikipedia)
“I believe we as a society have gotten better at instituting governance structures to help mitigate the problematic and harness the positive outputs and potential of technologies. While AI has the potential to both make our lives easier and more challenging…I believe the most prolific and efficient use cases for AI will also be the ethical ones, many of which we already see happening across the medical and education fields.”
This week, the Corporate Racial Equity Alliance (CREA) – a joint initiative led by PolicyLink, FSG, and JUST Capital – released a draft of the Business Standards for 21st Century Leadership to help companies maximize the impact of their social responsibility efforts. Forbes explores the standards in more detail.
Actress Scarlet Johansson is threatening legal action against OpenAI, alleging the company copied her voice for its latest update despite declining an offer from CEO Sam Friedman to lend her voice to the project. The Washington Post has the details. At the same time, The New York Times is reporting that former ChatGPT employees have raised concerns that the company is not doing enough to ensure its products don’t pose a threat to humanity.
According to Quartz, JPMorgan Chase is training all of its new hires on AI as the company pushes harder to be the industry leader in the technology.
More big news from JPMorgan Chase: The Wall Street Journal reports that its CEO, Jamie Dimon, plans to retire within the next few years.
Target is lowering prices on 5,000 of its most frequently bought items–including staples like milk, meat, bread, fruit and vegetables, as well as paper towels and diapers. NBC News has the full story.
This week’s chart comes from the Wall Street Journal’s massive analysis of CEO pay across the business landscape. Above, you can see how the median pay for CEOs has more than doubled over the last 10 years. Explore the data here.
AI’s impact on the future of work continues to dominate the headlines in 2024, particularly when it comes to rapid adoption of generative and predictive AI algorithms.
Igor Tulchinsky is the Founder, Chairman, and CEO of WorldQuant, a global quantitative asset management firm with over $7 billion in assets under management. His 2023 book, The Age of Prediction: Algorithms, AI, and the Shifting Shadows of Risk, looks at how predictive AI technology is quietly reshaping our world in fundamental ways.
JUST Capital’s CEO Martin Whittaker sat down with him to discuss the benefits and dangers of this technology for America’s business leaders and workers.
Full interview below:
Martin:
You’ve discussed at length some examples of predictive technology being adopted right now – for example, the medical field tapping into the power of analyzing patterns in emerging infectious diseases. What are other ways AI’s predictive power can be used to help communities? What are some potential future uses that you envision?
Igor:
Over the next decade, I believe we can expect further disruption to economies and organizations, driven by increasingly sophisticated language models and the anticipated rise of artificial intelligence. This growth in intelligence is expected to enable the rapid analysis of vast amounts of information, enhancing productivity and innovation across various sectors.
Healthcare and medicine already seem to be benefitting from these tools, enabling advanced techniques that can provide better outcomes for people. The medical community appears to increasingly leverage predictive AI to understand patterns of emerging infectious diseases and to improve DNA and RNA sequencing from human patients.
Technology also holds the promise to revolutionize education by breaking down barriers to access and enabling rapid adaptation to evolving skills landscapes. From my perspective, we’ve only scratched the surface of predictive technology’s possibilities, yet these initial advancements present significant opportunities to utilize predictive AI in impactful ways in the future.
Martin:
There are technologies that radically transformed society – the wheel, gun powder, the printing press, the electrical conductor, the internet. Looking back at the adoption, spread, application, and regulation of these technologies – what’s one lesson from history that we can take to guide how we encourage just AI?
Igor:
As long as humans have been inventors, there have been positive and negative use cases of new technology. While the first axe could harm, it could also cut wood for the first fire. Over time, I believe we as a society have gotten better at instituting governance structures to help mitigate the problematic and harness the positive outputs and potential of technologies. While AI has the potential to both make our lives easier and more challenging, I view it as just a tool, driven by human-decision making that will determine the course of its use. Overall, I believe the most prolific and efficient use cases for AI will also be the ethical ones, many of which we already see happening across the medical and education fields.
Martin:
In your book, you discuss the challenges as much as you do the opportunities associated with predictive technologies. What are some examples of risks around AI and its predictive power that organizations and leaders should be aware of? What can be done to mitigate these risks and challenges? Is there a possibility that AI’s potential for harm outweighs its potential for good?
Igor:
Technological advancements, while improving daily life, can also present existential challenges. There are examples throughout history of new technologies that have had positive and negative impacts, and in many of these cases, humans have improved in implementing controls to focus on positive innovation. Take cars, for example – they revolutionized travel and productivity, but safety measures like maintenance, seatbelts, and airbags evolved to mitigate risks.
The adoption of predictive technologies also brings with it increased complexity that leaders will need to learn to manage. Importantly, what is underlying all this change and progress is how humans and machines will continue to have a symbiotic relationship. AI does not have the same intent or purpose that humans possess. Because of this, I believe that humans remain imperative in guiding and directing the technology in a way that ensures it is justly deployed. With AI, I think that it is critical that ethical considerations, guidelines, and potential regulatory frameworks are developed in tandem with technological progress as unforeseen outcomes make themselves known.
Martin:
How will AI impact our relationship with the future in terms of its effect on how we approach risk? With increased predictability, can we guarantee more certain outcomes?
Igor:
The proliferation of data is providing us with some clarity about what the future may look like, and AI is already helping us process data and use it to predict outcomes across a number of areas. With this transformation in the future – and partly because of it – may come a countervailing impulse: the desire to increasingly model a world that is confoundingly complex.
The range of potential outcomes is growing, particularly as we discover new use cases. Over time, it will become clear whether AI will make all risks quantifiable and comprehensible, or if our cognitive machines will merely generate new risks and anxieties. For now, the only certainty is that as this process plays out, we should adjust our conception of risk. Continuous testing and monitoring of evolving risks are crucial. The significant growth of data could allow us to create more predictive tools and increasingly strengthen our predictions, but I view it as critical that we refine our ability to process and utilize this information to both capitalize on untapped opportunities and mitigate potential risks.
Martin:
You’ve previously said that the nature of AI technology means a “variety of people have the potential to make an impact.” Talk to me about how we can drive diversity of thought and diversity of actors with AI. How can we ensure the technology is leveraged as a source of greater inclusion? What are you doing to help bring AI to a greater number of people?
Igor:
The commoditization of AI ultimately may mean the commoditization of intelligence. This could present an opportunity to enhance accessibility to education and in turn to the jobs that that education unlocks, therefore fostering a more inclusive workforce. I believe that by increasing accessibility to education through varied learning pathways and simplified interfaces, diverse groups of people can have access to quality educational opportunities that were previously unavailable. As an example, I founded WorldQuant University with the goal of expanding access to higher education. The organization utilizes technological capabilities to offer a comprehensive and accredited advanced education for free in fields like Financial Engineering and Data Science to diverse student groups worldwide. I have always held the belief that talent is globally distributed, opportunity is not. Through WorldQuant University’s online learning platform, we are able to bring these upskilling opportunities to talented individuals who might not have otherwise had access.
Martin:Who do you think will be the biggest winners and losers in the age of AI? As more and more actors enter the conversation around AI, what will be a key determinant for success?
Igor:
In the age of AI, I think the greatest beneficiaries will be those who actively embrace and collaborate with these emerging technologies. I believe intelligence will become commoditized and lead to increased mechanization across industries that rely on this kind of standardized intelligence. This evolution alone has the potential to revolutionize most sectors. Wherever people can find opportunities to scale, I believe that technology can be an effective propagator and provide tremendous power. To the extent that humans contribute beyond the components that can be commoditized, that will be our value.
At a private JUST webinar this week, Brookings Institution’s Xavier de Souza Briggs (also a JUST Board member) and Molly Kinder (read her latest article on how Hollywood writers went to war on Gen AI here) joined MIT’s Tom Kochan and Stephanie Bell from Partnership on AI to expound on the impacts of Gen AI on America’s workers.
The central question? How companies can think about their human capital as a value creator in the implementation and deployment of generative AI technologies. The discussion highlighted the importance of deliberate implementation strategies and highlighted the potential for empowering workers by incentivizing their engagement with AI in their respective roles.
We often dwell on the possible negative societal impacts of AI when we contemplate its future – instinctive fear of the unknown perhaps – but there are also some clear and very immediate positive applications.
The mission of Karya, for example, is bold and simple: they are tackling poverty in India by working with big tech companies (who spend billions of dollars to collect training data for their LL models) to bring that digital work to local communities. Their partnerships with Google, Microsoft, The Gates Foundation, and the Government of India will help bring digital employment to 100,000 low-income Indians this year.
Humanitas.ai, led by Bay Area tech leader Phil Chow, is exploring the application of Gen AI in America to create personalized support for frontline workers and their families in accessing benefits, emergency needs (such as food), and other forms of urgent care. Turnover and unused benefits cost employers hundreds of billions of dollars every year; Humanitas.ai’s concept could help corporations improve efficiency and directly benefit the lives of millions of their workers.
These are just two examples of how companies could find alignment between driving business value and deploying worker-centric AI. JUST’s work will help make sure the issue remains a priority.
Be well,
Martin
“Technology fosters jobs. It fosters opportunity. I think gen AI is the biggest opportunity. It is the iPhone moment for enterprise for sure. In terms of reskilling and retooling people, that will have to happen. Six out of 10 people will need to be retrained for this new economy, but it is a great opportunity. Most of the jobs they’re doing right now are soul crushing.”
CNBC covers the leaders in our Top 5 Companies for Parents list and explores some of the policies each company has on top of parental benefits, including specific pay equity initiatives.
JUST Board Member Dan Hesse interviews Ambassador John Negroponte as he shares life and business lessons from four decades of diplomacy.
Fortune examines how the AI data center revolution is happening in people’s backyards, as major server farms are being installed in the same areas where enormous shipping warehouses were erected over the past two decades.
Fast Company sits down with four CEOs of publicly traded companies to hear their vastly different ideas of how AI will impact their business and their workers.
The New York Times takes a closer look at the growing trend of CEOS staying longer than a decade at their company and the hidden downsides–like becoming more risk-averse–this can have on corporations.
Impact Alpha covers the latest report by WORC (Workforce & Organizational Research Center), “Thinking Beyond the C-Suite Pays Off”, which examines the role of human capital management in value creation at private equity firms with more than $5 billion in assets.
Fortune chronicles the uphill battle facing Nasdaq’s diversity rule, where every company listed must list and meet certain representational quotes in the boardroom, and why its greatest legal challenges are coming up.
Fast Company explains why, on average, most workers want a boring boss.
This chart comes from Axios, and shows the stock market hitting a new record high, something almost unthinkable two years ago, despite general economic pessimism from workers and a divisive election later this year. Learn more inside.
We appreciate that many of you eagerly await the arrival of our newsletter every Friday morning and so are grateful for your patience and flexibility to let us bring you CNBC’s latest coverage of our newly released report – in honor of Mother’s Day – on how companies are really stepping up to support working moms (and parents overall).
Our Top Companies for Parents report (NBC coverage inside) spotlights some of the leaders, including S&P Global, American Express, Deckers Outdoor Corp., Goldman Sachs, and Splunk Inc. All offer flexible scheduling, as well as benefits such as fully remote or hybrid working arrangements to help parents and working moms in particular navigate work-life balance., They also provide 20 or more weeks of paid parental leave for both primary and secondary caregivers, parental leave parity for all caregivers, backup and subsidized dependent care, and more.
Beyond this, many companies are also doing more to explicitly accelerate progress for women within their workplaces. Deckers, for example, sets quantifiable and time-bound targets to achieve gender parity in leadership positions and its Board of Directors. Goldman Sachs sets hiring goals for women in both entry level positions and senior management. And S&P and AmEx disclose conducting pay equity analyses to ensure fair compensation regardless of gender.
At a time when many forces seek to divide us, this feels like something we can all join together to celebrate. Explore the list here.
Be well,
Martin
(Bright Horizons)
“This is really a wake up call to all employers that they need to move both quickly and substantively to offer these kinds of benefits. The pandemic afforded working parents some flexibility, that in many ways, has started to dissipate or has fully dissipated in this return to a more traditional [work] environment. Employers leaned in during the pandemic, and are now leaning back out, but are not placing supports to compensate for that change.”
The New York Times takes a look at the impact generative A.I. is having on the climate, now that the implications of the technology are becoming clearer.
Nasdaq examines the ways that Artificial Intelligence could be used to improve ESG assessments and keep appetite strong for new funds.
According to Fortune, Millennials need to boost their AI skills to avoid having their jobs swallowed up by Gen-Z.
Harvard Business Review releases a fascinating bit of research that shows that when employees identify with their company, they are far less likely to recognize gender discrimination at their office, or forms of disrespectful conduct that have an underlying bias. Learn more here.
The Washington Post chronicles how corporations are scuttling their DEI language, as many are starting to view it as more of a risk than a benefit, at the same time that McKinsey’s initial research on the benefits of DEI has come under scrutiny for having results that cannot be replicated. Meanwhile, Fortune takes a look at how diversity chiefs at some of America’s largest companies are preparing for an incredibly divisive election season among their staff.
Yahoo reports that Apple’s latest stock buyback plan is the largest made by any U.S. corporation ever, approving $110 billion in repurchases.
This chart comes from a collaboration between The Harris Poll and Bright Horizons examining the state of childcare across the U.S. for working parents. The research was featured in Fortune and includes an interview that you can read here.
