I started literally in the middle of April last year, so I'm just coming on my one-year anniversary at Alight. My introduction to my executive team was just a bunch of boxes on Zoom. It's just a surreal moment rather than being physically together and face-to-face. Just the effort required to meet people, to do it virtually and be in this environment, has humbled all of us.

We're 15,000 people around the world, and I was able to, through Zoom and through technology, see a lot of my employees — not only people who work for me, but really get at the heartbeat of what's working and what's not. That's the balance we're going to get to. Before we were much too much in the office. Now we're too much outside. I think we'll come right back in the middle somewhere.

We've all woken up as corporate America and realized how fragile that relationship between employer and employee is. The gig economy is not going away. It's here. How do we surface that better? The last 20 years were all about the client. The next decade is all about the employee. If you take care of your employees, your clients will be taken care of automatically.

How many CEOs really know how many of their employees can stitch together $500 in a moment of crisis? And that's what, as a company, we're doing for our customers. Looking internally, that was so important to me. When we hit the air pocket in these extraordinary circumstances last year, we decided to overcommunicate to our employee population. Executives took pay cuts, so we did furloughs instead of firings. We put millions of dollars into an employee-assistance fund. Let's all band together and let's ride this out together.

Half of Americans have made a wrong decision in their benefits programs, and 61% can't retire when they want to. I can't believe we as corporate America didn't see this coming, which is that the health world and the financial-wellness world aren't two separate worlds. They're interconnected.

Every CEO I've talked to says, “I'm spending billions on double-digit cost increases. What am I missing? Why am I not getting this?” And it's because it's about the data and the analytics and really bringing together a dataset that's actionable around the personal circumstances of the individual. That's what's been missing.

We have used this time to really reimagine our workforce and our workplace. We will remain an office-based company, but we are looking at all of the roles and really trying to define where a role needs to be. One of the things we learned is, we could work very effectively [remotely].

But what we do miss is collaboration for complex problem-solving. As we're going forward, we're looking to reconfigure our spaces to be much more collaboration-oriented.

How we led changed, and then the kinds of programs and services that we rapidly put into the marketplace and with our own employees changed, because we saw the need. Our decision-making was quicker.

We doubled down on culture and communication. About 80% of our employees are a combination of females and people of color. We knew that when they went home, there would be other challenges.

We provided 80 hours of paid time off for them to care for parents or family. We launched a 24/7 concierge service and a confidential way for our employees to call, and it isn't just about work issues — they're calling about food insecurity, childcare, support for other health needs. We rolled out a brand-new benefit called Papa On-Demand. It gives our associates 10 hours to use as they choose for rides or help with housework or scheduling medical appointments.

We have been looking at health disparities for some time, so that wasn't new, but it was brought to the forefront with COVID, and then certainly racial injustice. We made two $50 million pledges. We made one first to support COVID [response efforts]. But we also made a $50 million pledge last summer to create more sustainable change around health and equity and social injustice.

We've worked extensively with Feeding America because food insecurity is one of the top issues. This year we launched a health plan for our own employees, which is a life-essentials kit. They have a choice of additional benefits around access to healthy food, transportation, and childcare.

We want to participate positively in ensuring that underserved communities have access to the vaccines. We just launched a national partnership with Lyft to provide 60 million free rides to and from vaccine sites.

It's not a short-term commitment. We recently hired a chief health officer. His whole goal is around community health.

As a company, we've always been very global. So the post-pandemic era will be one we can easily adapt to because we were not in one location. We're in 10 different locations all over the world — including Australia, India, Ireland, Canada, and three or four locations in the US — so we span many continents. One of the beauties of that is, you learn to collaborate and work with each other in different time zones across the internet anyway, right? So we expect, in the post-pandemic world, that we will move on to these distributed workspaces. And we're not going to rely on just brick and mortar as a way for people to engage and collaborate, especially in software development.

Now, there are obviously places where looking at people in the eyeballs or solving a hardware problem requires you to come to the lab. So I would say it's a tale of two halves, where software developers can collaborate all over the world and don't always have to come to the office. But eyeball contact with customers, hardware design, and things that you have to touch and package and feel are also required.

I think as a leadership team, you have to rely on nimble, agile decision-making. And as we worked with our customers, we noticed that they have to think and plan a lot differently because it's a lot easier when you meet face-to-face and you can draw on the board, and now things like that can take longer. So as a team, you don't want it to take longer if you want to continue to be nimble and agile. And in order to do that, you have to create a set of planning processes. Step one was for the customers to understand that some of the things they would have done in their labs, you can do as a virtual proof of concept, and then because you don't have the chalkboard and the eye-to-eye contact, you have to more than make up for it with virtual collaboration.

That's why we all have so much collaboration fatigue over the day. So our leadership team has had to adapt. And I think our leadership team has also recognized that this is not fixed hours. You could be doing this at odd hours of the day, depending on when you're dealing with your family and when you're dealing with work. So the good news with our leadership team is, we worked together for several years, and sometimes even decades at prior companies. So there is no getting to know each other, but there is an adaptation to work-family balance, collaborating all over the world in different time zones, and also making more agile and nimble decisions.

Even before COVID, we were really pushing the boundaries on flexible work. What we won't do is say to people that they have to work from home. We want to give people choices of where and how they work. We were a little bit ahead of the curve in terms of investment in flexible work infrastructure.

I suspect that what we'll see is that even once offices are enabled to come back to 100%, we won't see that happen.

We'll probably see occupancy moving back to somewhere between 40% and 60%. If that hypothesis is correct, then we'll look at consolidating some office space and probably change some of the internal infrastructure. If employees are spending less time in the office, you want them to have a richer experience when they're there and have more face-to-face time with colleagues.

We live in a very uncertain world. Against that backdrop, I believe a CEO or other executives in the company need to be quite sensitive to what's going on in the world around us and well connected to the wide range of stakeholders we have. We have to be good at incorporating what we hear externally into how we run the company.

I need to ensure that people throughout the company are both capable and empowered to act in the face of what they're experiencing day in and day out. If we have an organization that's very stifled and where control is held at the center, I think that will mean that we will end up being slower-moving and less attuned to what's happening around us.

In 2016, we set out the ambition of being gender-balanced by 2025. We were sitting at 16%, 17% women in the workforce then, and now we're at 27%. We're on track, but we have to pick up the pace. I also see that effort as having been a lever to address inclusivity more broadly. There was a strong focus on gender balance, but of course, having a truly inclusive culture doesn't stop with gender.

It’s important to note the nature of the Blue Apron workforce, which includes both essential workers in our fulfillment centers, who get our boxes to customers each week, as well as our corporate employees. Throughout the pandemic, our fulfillment-center employees, who make up a significant portion of our workforce, have had to physically be in our facilities.

Our main priority has always been to provide a work environment to help keep them and our customers safe and healthy. During the early days of the pandemic, we implemented robust measures on top of existing safety and sanitation protocols. We are evaluating which of these enhanced measures will stay post-pandemic and as individuals continue to get vaccinated.

Our employees in our corporate offices in the New York area and Austin, Texas, have been working remotely for over a year. While a physical office will play a big part in the future of how our employees interact and cultivate a good workplace culture, we believe that flexibility will be key to creating a work environment that is beneficial for everyone.

We do not plan to make any final decisions on our return to office policies without making sure we have taken into account the right safety and sanitation measures, our employees’ feedback, and the non-workplace elements, like school schedules, that impact their daily lives.

The pandemic has completely changed how we communicate with our stakeholders. We’ve learned how to do it more efficiently with the right tools, which also means we can do it more frequently. We conduct a variety of internal events for our employees, including quarterly question and answer sessions with our Executive Leadership Team, monthly employee all-hands meetings, and special events like our Chef and Supplier speaker series. We plan to continue to conduct these virtually post-pandemic.

It is also important to recognize the personal toll the pandemic has taken on team members through this time. The extra burdens of childcare, managing through a changed environment, the toll of isolation or restricted movement, and economic fluctuations build no matter if someone has been directly exposed to COVID-19 or not, or whether they have had to work at a physical location or from home.

Businesses have to manage and drive growth while also allowing the space to manage personal challenges as we move through the pandemic. That is a hard balance, but staying focused on the mission and purpose of an organization and its people is the most critical aspect.

Finally, it is important for companies to stay focused on the long term. You need to adapt to what is happening, but staying focused on long-term customer, employee, and business needs will set you up more fully for when we emerge.

We believe that change starts from within Blue Apron. We’ve committed to building diversity and inclusion programming for our employees specifically designed to address unconscious bias, promote anti-racism, and advance equity. We are looking to address these issues in a number of ways, including implementing a DEI learning and development plan to build awareness and drive inclusive behaviors and attitudes, and developing our diversity pipeline through hiring, mentoring, and coaching.

Being able to turn on the remote workforce [virtually] overnight has proven it is something that works. In fact, 2020 was possibly our most productive year yet. The amount of work done by our team was honestly fascinating to me, and a big surprise.

As a leader, my personal view of working from home has changed. Previously, we would say we wanted to provide flexibility, but given how well we’ve been able to maintain productivity — going forward it will be more of a choice. There will be a hybrid solution.

Before the pandemic we also had a New York office, and traveling between three offices was something I tried to do a lot. Now we are able to feel connected despite not being together physically.

We’ve really upped the communications. We continue to do quarterly town halls. Before the pandemic we had to split up between three locations. Now we have the whole community together rather than broken up between offices. We provide all the materials beforehand, and people have more time to prepare and make the meetings even more productive.

Two-thirds of our customers are women, and two-thirds of those are minority women, so in our customer base today, we already reflect and attract people who are underrepresented by traditional financial services.

We have done a great job of providing financial access to those who need it most. And now with our new head of marketing, who is also a woman of color, we will be able to work on enhancing our marketing strategy, identify even more pain points for this demographic, and provide even better solutions through education and our full suite of financial-services products.

Not only am I happy and proud of the customer base that we serve but I am also proud of the representation at our company. Today, about 48% of our employees are women, and we have great representation of women at the C level and at the board level. Additionally, at the time we went public [in January], I was the youngest woman founder and CEO to take a company public, and also the youngest minority woman to do so. I am grateful I can hopefully serve as inspiration to other young women and women of color to also break through and fulfill their dreams, especially in business and fintech.

I was happy I could do my [pre-IPO] roadshow with investors virtually rather than in a new city every day. I got more investor meetings in because they were literally back-to-back — and I wasn’t recovering from a plane ride or a hotel room.

We create experiences for women to connect through the lens of brands, specifically those brands looking to connect with African American women. We specifically focused on Black millennial entrepreneurs and their advancement to funding and resources. Post the unfortunate tragedy of George Floyd, we are focused on working with brands that have put funds together that help build Black communities, so our community of women can gain access. We are the hub for the brands to say Boss Women Media has this amount of resources and grants to help propel women forward.

I used to have an office in a coworking space that has closed down its spaces permanently. We are now opening our own office and just signed a lease. Our team is a total of five employees: four women and one man. All of our employees are what we like to call side hustlers in our community — people looking to earn extra money or be part of a passion project.

We really had to shift and strategize functions. We were an in-person event company, so we’ve had to pivot from that stance to virtual events, all free. The biggest change has been creating robust online digital experiences, and that is one of the things that has really made us stand out.

We’ve done that by not just hosting the events on Zoom. We made the studio more of an experience with live DJ moments and live cooking sessions with Tia Mowry and Meagan Good. We’re working through the digital experience, knowing we have only got a few minutes to really capture [our audience]. At our last event, we had 17,000 women attending live.

Our office space is going to be different, so you have to be flexible. The nine-to-five has really thrown itself out the window, and the world is changing. This is the normal now. We’re not going back. We never structured ourselves as a traditional company anyway — we’re a startup. The space we’re opening is for creators to be able to utilize it, and because we realize the nine-to-five isn’t going to be traditional anymore.

It will serve as a place where women can come and take their side hustle to the next level. We’re capitalizing on the digital experience because while we all hope in the fall things are normal, it still won’t be at full capacity, and we aren’t hosting in-person events until the end of 2021.

One of our next initiatives, in May, is “Home Hustlers, Beauty Edition.” Black women are the fastest-growing segment in beauty brands. We’re putting it in place to give them more resources and tools at the end of the program.

I’m also a new mother, so transitioning from full-time hustle mode to motherhood is a whole beast in itself. When you become a mother, you have a little more sympathy for others.

There’s also a fire in me to hold these brands to the messages that they are putting out. There are a ton of companies and entrepreneurs — Black women are the fastest-growing [sector of] entrepreneurs since the pandemic — but are they the fastest at growing revenue? How can we help them grow revenue? How can we help them create businesses that are not at poverty level?

I’m seeing that there are a lot more people sitting at the table to make the decision to bring awareness to the change. It’s not going to happen overnight, but by continuing to make spaces for Black voices, and continuing to recruit Black talent so that when these changes are made at these companies, there is someone there who looks like they are trying to recruit. Being bold and courageous in the conversations — that’s how we’re going to get there.

We've learned a lot about how to work remotely, and how to be really effective remotely, but we all desperately miss being together. We'll go back to a mode where we'll be in the office with regularity, but there'll be a lot more flexibility. We're really trying to emphasize that coming to the office is a privilege, so the office experience will hopefully be much better, even better than what it was before.

When you're going through a crisis, the importance of communicating in times of uncertainty is really significant. During the last year, I've done a call every two weeks with the entire company. It's a way to demonstrate that you care to the employees. But it also sort of raises the question: “Why weren't we doing this before?” You get to keep people up to speed on what's going on across the company, not just related to COVID. Being remote has allowed us to be more informed and tighter knit, at least in a certain way. We lack the face-to-face engagement and intimacy, but that communication has been terrific. There's going to be a lot more of that going forward, even as we return to some level of normal.

When we go back to normal, we'll go back to the normal where you need to be in the office — a big part of success is just showing up. But at the same time, we're going to double down on our ability to share our insights remotely.

On our own diversity and inclusion agenda, I would describe it as kind of like climbing up the mountain, and you look down and say, “Oh, man, we've come so far. We're so proud of ourselves.” And then you look up the mountain and are like, “Oh, man, we've got a long way to go.”

We've been having this conversation at Bridgewater for a number of years, and the last year has just made me — and we've explicitly talked about this at the company level — accelerate those efforts. We had a set of guest speakers come in — Wes Moore, Mitch Landrieu, and a number of other prominent figures in the racial-injustice discussion. And then we had internal conversations where the Bridgewater Black network orchestrated a series of discussions about these issues. I don't pretend we are going to solve society's problems overnight, or that Bridgewater alone can solve them, but it's important for our community to really engage with those topics.

In order to do that well, you have to be vulnerable, people have to be vulnerable. And that's what we've been trying to encourage. These are tough issues, and understanding and humility are the important first steps.

We have above 50 employees now, with headquarters in Los Angeles. When the pandemic hit, we closed up shop and moved online. It happened to be our busiest and most challenging time, but we did it.

We’re still working on details of the [return] plan. Ironically, we had just expanded our headquarters to create more meeting spaces — literally, the paint wasn’t even dry on the walls just as the pandemic hit. We’re now in our fourth full year of operations. I think now we’re trying to figure out what is the best way that will benefit the collaborative nature and creative spirit of the company, but doing so in a safe and effective way.

From a positive perspective, we flexed our resilience muscle. Everyone realized what resilience meant, because it wasn’t just packing up and bringing the business virtually, but during so during our busiest time of getting product on the shelves.

There were a number of challenges associated with that, but the team was incredible in being able to figure out ways to make that happen. Our fill rate, which is the rate by which we fulfill products to retailers, was at some points 99% — truly remarkable when it came to the pandemic, and much higher than a lot of larger companies. That doesn’t mean we didn’t have some issues, but overall our fill rate was a standout in the industry.

What I loved about bringing this business virtual was, we saw innovation from all departments — supply chain, operations, marketing. They had to be uber-innovative in terms of what they were able to do in the marketplace. Innovation was coming from every pore of the company.

I knew immediately that we would lose some cohesion across the company, so I vowed to overcommunicate just so people could see my face and see the face of leadership. It was really important to me to have that connective tissue that makes a team feel like a team.

From the first day that we sold our very first pizza, we have been giving a percentage of sales to teaching gardens in schools across the country. When the pandemic hit, we realized that kids weren't in school. Not only were they not getting the produce from the teaching garden but kids weren’t even getting the daily lunch that these families counted on.

So in conjunction with the American Heart Association, we created a program where we bought fresh produce from local farmers in four cities and gave them out to 100,000 families. One day the team went to this site in Los Angeles and handed out free boxes of produce. It really was a perfect articulation of our mission. What it did was remind people in a very real way why we do what we do.

I’ve never felt more humble or proud to be in the food industry. Before the pandemic, food manufacturing wasn’t thought of as an essential business. Food insecurity has been a problem long before COVID, but what COVID did was put a fine point on it, and suddenly it was front-page news. We saw a lot of nice cars going through those [food] lines, and let me tell you, the lines went on after the food ran out.

There's so much uncertainty around the pandemic itself: Will the variants be a real problem, or will they be treated by the current vaccines or with the booster shots? There are a lot of things we can't predict. However, what we do know is that we have all now become sufficiently tech-enabled, and we really shouldn't ignore the gift that that has brought us. The essential workers do happen to work in a lab. You can't do laboratory experiments at home.

For the moment, we're going to continue with our current approach, with the essential workers working in the laboratories and the office-space workers on a wait-and-see approach, until we have a better sense about herd immunity.

Employees wanting to have more consistent and proactive conversations has been an important motivator. At the end of the day, while we're employees and teammates, we're all actually people living through the extraordinary moment that has been the pandemic and this moment in racial justice, and we're all affected by that.

We're developing a program within the company that will allow employees to discuss, debate, learn, understand, and do all of the things to create, perhaps, a more equitable set of circumstances for all Americans.

We're also trying to set an example, in terms of having arrangements with our contract research organizations, such that they're focused on diverse enrollment of clinical-trial participants. We've talked about it, but we've never really made it a clear business focus before. We're also trying to ramp up our efforts at creating a more diverse vendor and supplier base. It's not just the conversation but also some of the business metrics of those we do business with, and how they do business.

If we simply pay lip service to this, the country will continue to have the same business profile, in terms of diversity, that we've always had.

I am a Black man in America who happens to be a biopharma executive, and I bring all of those experiences with me wherever I show up. So if the occasion calls and there's an opportunity to provide a perspective that would be helpful on the issue of racial equity, I'm happy to do it. I think it's actually not just an opportunity but a right of business leaders to do that.

Before the pandemic we only had about 5% of our people working remote at any given time. Now we're at 85% fully remote. We've learned that whereas in the past we probably didn't think we could, we've been able to maintain and even improve productivity across the organization.

If I were to paint the picture of exactly what work looks like in the future, flexibility will certainly have a more important part, but the office will still be at the core of our work strategy. We intend to maintain 100% of our corporate headquarters here in Minneapolis, and we will continue to maintain most of our office footprint around the globe. But the intent of that office is really, where do people come in to collaborate? Where do they come to cocreate, to innovate?

The pandemic, as I describe it, is inclusive of the economic and health impacts of COVID-19 as well as all the racial issues that we've had. I think it's hard to decouple the learnings because they've been so intertwined.

It has clearly invited so many important and difficult conversations, so it was really important for us to just lean in. We didn't have all the answers, but we at least acknowledged what was happening in the world around us and anchored it to the core values of CH Robinson, and we are really staying focused on that.

Whereas in the past we would gather in large groups for meetings, I implemented last year global town halls for the first time, where we'd have 6,000 of our employees joining for a topical conversation about business results or something going on in our industry on a quarterly basis.

The power of listening has certainly come to the forefront this year in terms of really understanding what's on the minds of our employees. We hosted several listening sessions throughout the course of the year just to really understand the pulse of where our people are at, so we can help formulate our personnel strategy around the return to the office or community engagements.

Throughout the pandemic, we have prioritized keeping strong connections between employees while we work remotely. As we look to reopen the offices this year, we are very focused on how we keep our employees productive and connected. Those are goals in our workplace strategy. Through our regular check-in surveys with employees, we hear that employees want to primarily use the office for collaboration activities when we return. We are using this opportunity to reimagine what our workplace strategy looks like moving forward, given that we know employees can be highly productive working from home and we value face-to-face interactions among teams to foster teamwork and innovation.

One valuable tactic we've adopted during the pandemic is taking a data-driven approach to meeting employees' changing needs, using companywide surveys to get a pulse on what's working and where there might be gaps. Creating this extra level of communication on a regular basis has taken the guesswork out of organizational leadership and empowered us to make decisions that positively impacted our employees during a time when many other aspects of life were unpredictable.

There's still a lot of work to be done to address these issues. But I'm proud of the work we've put in to build out a formal structure around [diversity, equity, and inclusion] efforts at Databricks. We've made it a priority, and as a result, we've made significant progress over the past 18 months.

One example is our employee resource groups, which offer development opportunities and chances for employees to learn and grow together. ERGs provide the structure to involve our executive team and keep employees proactively engaged in DE&I efforts. ERG activities range from monthly coffee chats to formal events, book clubs, mentor programs, and companywide events to celebrate holidays like Black History Month, International Women's Day, and Hispanic Heritage Month. In times of crisis around issues of racial inequity, we have worked closely with our ERGs to understand how to respond and best support employees during these difficult times.

When it comes to diverse hiring, we've made a strong effort to standardize inclusive remote interview processes by providing unconscious-bias training, ensuring job descriptions are inclusive, and setting expectations for diverse interview loops and inclusive interview etiquette with hiring managers and all interviewers.

As a global airline, our offices are everywhere we operate — on our planes, at our gates, in the hangar, and throughout the airports in the cities and communities we serve.

We've focused on preventing and mitigating the virus — from employee testing to mask mandates. We will continue blocking middle seats at least through April 30, 2021, when we anticipate that a larger percentage of the population will be vaccinated. We will also continue our mask mandate.

Once case numbers decline and more people are vaccinated, we will fill middle seats again, lift our mask requirements, and hopefully return to a state of normalcy we've all missed over the last year. Our health and safety processes, including thoroughly disinfecting surfaces and air filtration on board our aircraft and throughout our facilities, are here to stay.

During the pandemic, we implemented more than 100 layers of protection so that our customers and employees can feel confident and safe when traveling, including providing more space aboard our aircraft with blocked middle seats, requiring masks, and enhancing air-filtration systems.

We've had to make difficult but necessary decisions, including banning more than 1,200 customers for refusing to wear masks. As a values-led, people-first culture, sticking to our beliefs, while holding ourselves and our customers accountable, has been critical in our management of the crisis and will continue to be paramount in our recovery. To say we've learned a lot in the last year would be an understatement.

The last year has been a reminder of the challenges we face as a country. We have been listening, learning, and taking steps to rebuild a more inclusive Delta. This required us to take an honest look at ourselves and our own record of diversity, which, quite frankly, did not always reflect the customers and communities we serve.

Some of the immediate actions we've taken include offering virtual employee town halls, with leaders inside and outside of Delta, on the topics of racial justice, unity, and belonging to allow our team to listen, learn, and grow together. We've also updated our equal-opportunity and social-media guidelines, and we advocated for Georgia hate-crimes legislation and police reform in Minnesota.

We are working toward increasing the percentage of Black leaders to better reflect our employee base and doubling the percentage of Black officers and directors by 2025. And this is just the beginning.

Our company has 300 people across two offices and scattered about the country where we serve schools and districts.

Pre-pandemic we were primarily a learning-technology company that did some support and professional development. Then the pandemic hit, and overnight we turned into a support company that provided learning-technology solutions, so the relationship between our primary and secondary flipped.

We opened up our platform for free because we wanted learners and learning guardians to have one thing they didn’t have to worry about — their math instruction for K-8.

I have no idea what the impact of the pandemic is going to be on kids, teachers, and our country. We should take the pressure off ourselves as leaders of pretending we know. What we do know is the power and progress of adaptivity.

We didn’t realize this at the time, but in the midst of the pandemic, we were moving to a new office. I didn’t know when people were going to come back or who was going to be impacted. We learned that we’re pretty good at supporting our customers remotely, at selling to our customers remotely, and at partnering and collaborating with each other remotely. We are making the assumption that people will spend three or four days in the new office instead of five.

We took some risk, financial risk, by opening up the platform for free. We didn’t know what was going to happen. What we did know in this consequential moment is that if we did everything we could, we would do a lot to shape the future of learning.

We shifted from what we’d been planning to do in the classroom to what we can do to help administrators. We brought out DreamBox Predictive Insights so that the data and analysis solution that was going to be directed to the classroom teacher would now focus on the administrator. With an hour a week, the administrator will know who is on track for a year in success, and who is not.

I have a renewed appreciation for some things, especially for women leaders who are not encouraged to show vulnerability — and I think it is the new power lane of leadership. Don’t go up there and tell everyone it’s going to be OK when you don’t know. I would encourage people to acknowledge that the people we serve are smart, and that they know what we know and what we don’t know.

There’s a difference between stress and anxiety. Stress is discomfort from the known. Anxiety is stress from the unknown. [Employees] can deal with what is known. My job as a leader is to help them reduce anxiety.

We have a widening gap between the haves and have-nots. We have calcified structural racism and the lack of opportunity. The pandemic made more people courageous, and I don’t think we’re ever going back. Last time I looked, an estimated 2 million women were going to have to leave the workforce because of the pandemic. We should figure out a way to onboard them and to honor them for doing what they do.

While education is a necessary ingredient for personal family community and national global success, it’s not enough. If you really believe talent exists everywhere while opportunity does not, we have to double down to make sure educational opportunities and access are made available to everyone regardless of zip code or what language they speak.

And we have to know that [education] is not everything. George Floyd taught us that. We have to do more. Education is probably the most consequential. But we have to contend with the indignities that come generation to generation to generation from racial injustice.

We are at an inflection point. Education is never going to be the same — it can be good, or it can be bad. If we want it to be good, we’re going to have to think differently about federal, local, and state collaboration. Broadband has to be treated as a utility. We can’t be content to have generations of families lack the essential ingredients of what they need to survive in the current society.

We believe that the in-person experience plays a really important role, but we're not going to go back to exactly the way things were before — I think in a good way. We just thought about, how do you redesign work to get the best of both worlds? How do you give people the flexibility of remote work, but then also preserve what's great about being together in person? So we call our approach virtual-first. It's where focused solo work happens at home, and then we're reimagining the office as a place for convening people and collaboration and building relationships with teams and culture, because I think that's harder to do in a purely remote setting.

We think that it's an opportunity not just to redesign the office or rethink the workweek but to start with a blank slate around how work should really operate.

We found it helpful to focus on fundamentals: make sure we have strong balance sheets, a strong business model, generate a lot of cash, keep our customers happy. Making sure that no matter what happens with the outside market, we've got our bases covered.

The second big lesson is that crises always have a silver lining, and big changes can bring big opportunities. I think we'll look at this shift to distributed work as significant as the shift to mobile or the cloud, or the first inning of that. I think that experience could be a lot better. I think there's a lot of technology we can build to make that a more sustainable and pleasant experience.

The pandemic brought us a new way of thinking about our business. We reoriented our product road map around distributed work and fixing some of these pain points. When the floorboards are ripped up by something else, you can kind of put them back down in a way that you might not have been able to otherwise. Challenges can really make the company stronger too. It's like going to the gym.

Dropbox was built during the aftermath of the financial crisis. So trying to find the silver lining is something that has been helpful to us in terms of building the company and building culture.

We are excited to move into "Inception," our new headquarters in Manhattan Beach, California. Our new workplace maximizes collaboration, providing employees the flexibility to work remotely or in the office. Since we've added dozens of colleagues in the past few months, we're looking forward to everyone meeting in person safely as we adhere to appropriate COVID-19 protocols.

Specific changes we will retain include an option to work remotely, an open floor plan for social distancing if needed, and an informal but hardworking culture. Our employees are dedicated to our cause, and we want everyone to feel safe, secure, and confident returning to the workplace.

We've also added a mandatory weekly "watercooler" Zoom call, where we gather as a company, providing a chance to celebrate wins, evaluate opportunities for improvement, and highlight various colleagues even as we continue to grow. Five or six employees offer a glimpse into their world, both personal and professional, so we get to know each other despite working remotely. It's a great way to learn about our coworkers and find common bonds.

In terms of addressing equity, authentic, organic diversity of thought is mission critical at Fisker. We seek out the best talents, regardless of background, starting from the board of directors and through the entire company. Each individual brings a fresh perspective to our culture and our products, and we celebrate, learn from, and embrace different points of view.

Nobody learns when everyone agrees or everyone comes from the same business school. Debate and discussion in a constructive, open, supportive environment lead to better products for our stakeholders and a better corporate culture for our employees. "Because we've always done it that way" is the kiss of death for any company, even a startup. We're building a clean future for all, not for a few.

The office will remain integral to our company culture, serving as a hub for collaboration, creativity, and human connection. The past year has shown us that working remotely can be done successfully, and as we look toward the future, the virtual office will continue to play an important part of accommodating our thriving workforce. As we contemplate our reopening plans, the safety of our team members around the globe remains a top priority.

We elevated our focus on all levels of communication to be deeper and wider into the organization by embedding multiple technology tools, while emphasizing the need for connectivity through intentional acts of leadership. The pandemic reinforced the strong work culture that is embedded in the DNA of the organization, and that human connection — whether virtual or in person — is critical.

Beyond changing how we work, 2020 changed how we live and shop. We quickly adapted, moving to a digital-only selling environment while continuing to acknowledge the strong desire our customers have for an in-store experience. It all reinforced our focus on creating a true omnichannel experience for our customer.

While maintaining strong connections with our customers, throughout the pandemic we consistently engaged with the investment community, bringing them along on all our efforts to ensure the health and safety of our team members and consumers, while at the same time keeping our stores energetic, exciting, and safe places to shop.

The pandemic also reinforced our commitment to community and the role organizations like ours play to drive meaningful change. It was during this time that we announced a commitment to donate more than $1.5 million in footwear to youth communities most affected by the pandemic during the 2020 back-to-school season. Through our partnership with Soles4Souls, we were able to provide nearly 20,000 pairs of shoes to kids across the country and around the world.

I was CEO, and I think a month later, three weeks later, COVID hit. So I'm not so sure what a “normal CEO” looks like for me.

But I have to tell you: By not traveling, I ended up with more hours in the day. I've been “traveling virtually” — going around and meeting with various teams or just doing a Q&A session, which I think I'll continue to do going forward.

I met with a team today that I haven't met with in years altogether, but I was able to have the whole team on video. It's just a reminder about how important it is to connect with various parts of the organization. You learn something every time you do it.

We want to see more women and minorities and underrepresented groups as employees. We think that message has to start earlier. I always tell an anecdote about my daughters: When I asked whether my daughters would follow me in this business, they responded, “No, I want to do something that helps people.”

And I'm like, “Are you kidding me? This business helps people! We help people achieve the most important goals in their lives.”

So I am realizing that we need to do a better job of describing what we do as an industry to resonate with more of these people. We are involved in programs, Girls Who Invest [and the UK’s 100 Black Interns], to bring in interns. If you've been an intern, now you can see yourself actually working in that type of business.

Then it comes down to recruiting. If you fish in the same pond, you catch the same fish. So we're looking at things like historically Black colleges and making sure that we're bringing those in our pipeline.

Then, how are you retaining those employees? We do an engagement survey, and then we break down the data to look at different groups. We make sure that if there is a group that suddenly feels less engaged, why is it that they feel less engaged? Then you look at things like your attrition rate. If you don't measure it, you're not going to improve it.

So we are all about really being honest with ourselves, measuring where we are today, putting a stake in the ground, and being able to improve on that.

While we already had some employees working from home before the COVID-19 pandemic, the pandemic forced the majority of our company to work remotely. To keep everything running smoothly, we made significant investments in our tech infrastructure, like simulation tools for our automated-driving technology and cloud-computing services. Those investments allowed us to continue developing our technology at a steady pace.

But not being able to see our coworkers in person has been difficult for me and my colleagues. To help our employees stay connected during the pandemic, we've held virtual events and moved from weekly to daily all-hands meetings. As more people receive a COVID-19 vaccine, we'll start bringing more people back to the office, but we will make safety a priority. I'm looking forward to returning to the office.

Since we have automated-driving hardware to develop and self-driving delivery trucks to operate, we can't have everyone working from home. But where possible, we'll continue to allow those who want to work remotely to do so.

The pandemic has exposed the weaknesses in some companies' supply chains and underlined the importance of investing in logistics. With an increased demand for deliveries, our business and workforce have grown quickly. During the past year, we've more than doubled the size of our team, added new customers, and strengthened our relationships with our current customers.

That growth has challenged us. For example, it's important to me that Gatik maintains its culture as our head count grows. To make sure we're not getting off track, I've met with all of our new employees before we've hired them, so I can make sure they understand what it will be like to work at Gatik, and so I can get a sense of how they'll contribute to the company. We've done a good job of keeping our core values, and I think Gatik has grown stronger in the past year.

We've learned that many of the ways that we wanted to improve the consumer and clinician journey in health are valuable and needed to be accelerated.

But it's also been helpful for Google to realize that we have valuable partners outside of the medical system, and in the public health system.

This has been a huge area of focus for us — to partner with the CDC or academic public health institutions as a means of helping our users get quality information, and to think about ways that we can help with evidence generation for tools and actions that can help consumers lead healthier lives.

Whether it's through exposure notifications, community mobility reports, or search symptom trends, we've built bridges with public health, academia, and other parts of the health ecosystem. And it's the kinds of partnerships that help with a lot of our interest in equity and in democratizing access to health broadly, not just improving healthcare.

The thing about Google is, we're pretty good at taking complex data and ideas and creating a visualization of it. And then it becomes useful on the front lines.

With projects like the mobility reports that've tracked people's movement during the pandemic, it's very complex data. Most local public health in the US do not have data scientists or capabilities to deal with the files. So our team also created visualization platforms so that you could query it and find the information.

Similar to Johns Hopkins' cases tracker, that's the kind of innovation that starts to capture people's imagination. Because you can put it on the front page of a paper, and people can see for themselves that something doesn't look right, like disparities and hot spots in certain areas.

The more that I think we can help partner to make that data tell a story that is motivating, interesting, engaging, and helps people know what to do to protect themselves or their communities — that's precisely the kind of partner that we want to be in the global health stage.

Two words that jump out would be “transparency” and “communication.” We've always prided ourselves on that, in terms of a leadership attribute.

In the pandemic, we really saw that being a critical component to our customers — so they knew what was open, when it was open, how you can get the food, you can order online, you can dine out. Also, we see it equally as important with our partners in terms of our franchisees, as well as our employees in our restaurants.

Pre-pandemic, a lot of folks would leave the office to go out for lunch. A lot of folks would gather after work. So as they come back with the vaccines, I would anticipate more of that returning to normal.

I think offices that are still limited or perhaps are not going to come back fully, those folks have still enjoyed our product by either coming in on their own ... or obviously ordering the food to go. You can get stuff delivered because people are clearly tired of cooking at home, and they want convenience.

We've certainly learned that our business can not only survive but begin to thrive with folks working remotely — some days in the office, some days not in the office. I believe in having a culture where people enjoy where they work. We're going to continue to foster that culture.

One thing we've never abandoned through this whole process is our value that we place on the people who run our restaurants. We have launched and continue to launch a huge career path. And what that is, is advancement at the company. We've got people who start as maybe a cook and have moved their way into management. Maybe you were a Hooters girl and you've worked your way up into the corporate office.

I think as more folks are coming back to work, more people are excited to get back out. It is a great opportunity for us to talk about our management development program, as well as our career journeys.

As we survey our folks, there's the whole spectrum of people who can't wait to be full-time face-to-face again and those who never want to go to the office ever again. Starting this summer, we'll be taking a hybrid model where I think it'll probably be one, two, or three days a week face-to-face and the rest remote.

Increasingly we're a bit geography agnostic as well. Our system has a huge geographic footprint across the Intermountain West. We have leaders who work hundreds of miles away from each other every day.

We do think there's going to need to be some face-to-face for team building and acculturation, but increasingly I think we're becoming adept at the distance piece. As an organization that believes in keeping people well, we think the reduced environmental impact of a more virtual workforce is really powerful. We've saved millions of miles of driving, and that's good for the air and good for the land.

It's all about nimbleness and agility. We've learned that we can move fast, we can pivot, and we can still produce high-quality results.

We've added equity as a value of the organization. We build all of our strategies around our fundamentals: safety, quality, experience, access, stewardship. And now equity is built into it. We had an operating review, and I got to see the beginnings of our equity KPIs as they're beginning to roll out.

One of them, for instance, is looking at turnover for people of color who are in leadership positions to minimize that and understand how valuable these folks are, and to make sure that we're doing everything we can to develop and retain them. That's an example of one of them.

I believe that the pandemic is going to force the transformation from volume to value. It may be a tipping point. Economically, organizations that have taken substantial amounts of clinical and financial risk have actually stayed extremely stable and weathered the shifts in volume much, much better. We think that organizations that are going to try to go back to the way things were are going to really be in for a world of hurt.

The pandemic has sped up a lot of changes that people knew were coming, but to some degree were in denial about — an acceleration of the impact that digital is having in transforming business at a macro level.

We pivoted very quickly, so that reflects really well on our people. It's also indicative of the fact that we thought a lot about what technology and digitization meant to our business.

On a person-by-person human level, I am really pleased and impressed. On a macro level, I would have said that we could do it.

The pandemic has meaningfully changed where work happens. It has put a lot of stress on people who still have to do all of the work that we do, whether it's because they're doing it in their toddlers' rooms or in an apartment with three roommates.

Tech should allow us to flex in terms of how people work. When we go back to some measure of people working in offices and others working from home, it'll be a bit more complicated. Physical interactions anchor culture. In a hybrid world, how do we ensure that everybody is still getting equal exposure and opportunity? How do you systematize it so it doesn't create a two-tiered system?

My sense is that there's a meaningful benefit to spending time with clients in person, and we'll see an uptick in that regard.

We're going to go back to work — though everyone's been doing nothing but working — and then there will be different flavors and answers. If the nature of your job is more technical, maybe you can be away more often than not.

I don't know that it will be customized to the single individual, but we will need a couple of models to maximize results and outcomes for our clients, our people, and the business. It will be a while before anyone gets it right.

An important step we took last year was to begin sharing our EEO-1 data annually, so we can all see the degree to which our actions are delivering results. While 2020 was challenging for every business, at IPG we did see progress on a number of important trends, especially related to hiring, promotions and representation at the senior/executive management level of Black and African-Americans.

Nonetheless, there remains a great deal of work to be done to get to where we need to be. We need to be extremely disciplined to make consistent and meaningful change, and that’s a commitment we expect from all of our agency leaders.

At Mars, we have a huge mix of workplaces — from offices and stores to clinics and factories — so there won't be a “one size fits all” change. However, the pandemic has shown that a hybrid working model that offers more flexibility for many office roles is here to stay.

Our culture encourages spontaneous connection and the great ideas that can come from that. We also genuinely like one another and have fun working together, and having a place where we come together will remain an integral part of our work life. At the same time, working efficiently from home and providing more flexible work options for associates will also increase.

Travel is another area that we can reassess. The experience of the last year has taught us what we can accomplish virtually across time zones and borders.

It has been a strong reminder that there is no substitute for communicating frequently, transparently, and with empathy. Agility and speed have also been hallmarks of managing through this crisis. There are advantages of scale, but you also need to be fast.

Lastly, I'd emphasize the need for balance and timing. I want recovery from this pandemic to include focus on creating more equal, inclusive, and sustainable economies, including fighting climate change, fixing the broken global supply chains, and eradicating social and racial injustice.

More equal, inclusive, and sustainable economies must be at the heart of the future for all of us.

Take gender equity. Removing barriers and working to unlock opportunities for women isn't new to Mars. But we are approaching it with more rigor than ever before. In our workplaces, we're committed to ensuring that women have an equal seat at the table and that our management teams reflect gender balance.

We're not starting from scratch. An in-depth assessment confirmed that we have equitable pay practices across genders, and 43% of our leadership teams are already gender balanced. But we're committed to getting that number to 100%.

It's also critical that we have a global workforce that reflects the racial diversity that makes us proudly Mars ... For example, in the US we're committed to increasing racial-minority representation in management, analyzing our practices and policies to ensure they yield racially equitable outcomes, and funding scholarships through the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

There's going to be some middle ground between flexibility and being in the office. But we are going to get to a place where the office is going to play a role, because we're fundamentally a communal industry, and we're fundamentally social people. For our culture and creativity to survive, we need some element of being together.

We're also moving offices, and that's going to breathe new life into how we work and give us the opportunity to start from a blank state. At the moment, we're not just recalibrating how many days somebody comes in, who comes in, and how they do it. We’re also looking at how technology can make all of that fluid and comfortable for everybody.

One of the biggest things that I'm doing as a leader is being deliberate — about communication, leadership, and empathy. It's important to make people feel heard and feel seen. Even when I do Zoom drinks with colleagues and clients, I'm trying to replicate what it would be like [in real life] by sending them a bottle of wine with a personal note.

All of this is uncharted territory. We've had to be there for our clients, more than we've ever been there for them before, and had to be over-delivering. We're not waiting for briefs to come. We know our clients’ businesses, so we're going to them with solutions. We're not nickeling-and-diming every single thing.

I grew up in India, in a very large family with two older brothers. It was very loving, but I always heard the phrase “You're a girl. You can't do this or that.” So I learned how to pee standing up. I practiced so hard because [in my head] the only thing my brothers had over me was that they could pee standing up.

I came to this country because I wanted to be a working woman. I didn’t want to have an arranged marriage and never work. My kids have grown up feeling what it's like to be a minority. So gender equality and racial equity are important to me.

Whenever I find an obvious injustice or something isn't right, I always say, “Let's fix it.” I will be looking across the board at the makeup of our organization — from a gender perspective but also from a race perspective — and how people are paid and compensated.

You never would have convinced me before last March that we could effectively work remotely, but it's been an amazing year with our ability to do it. That means we can afford to be extra cautious in bringing people back.

As the vaccine becomes more available, we'll be able to accommodate more people in the office. But there are other concerns people have. It's not just you. It's also whom you live with. Do you take care of a person who is compromised?

Probably about 8% of our workforce can work remotely with no interruptions.

But what's terribly important in all of our agencies is culture. You can't create culture remotely. With new employees, we'll insist, to the extent that it is safe, they come back to the office so that they become familiar with the culture. As a result, we'll have to bring managers back full time. Then there will be a broad group of people who will work flexibly.

What we've learned is how to be more agile. Response times to clients are quicker.

In terms of the way management has changed, there have been some really positive things. Since the beginning of COVID, I've probably delivered more messages to the company than I did in the 20 years that preceded. We've had weekly meetings with the leadership of all our practice areas, where they've shared opportunities and problems they're facing.

We did quite a number of layoffs last March, April, and have been bringing people back as business comes back.

A weekly topic is the mental health of our employees. There's been greater focus on expanding areas where, without playing doctor, we can add to the benefits we offer.

And it's been quite a wake-up call when we talk about diversity.

The first thing we did is a serious self-assessment of where we were and how we were going to effectively drive change. We agreed to the objectives in our Open 2.0 plan.

Now we're in the process of selecting four or five KPIs to hold everyone within Omnicom responsible for delivering on, and to tie into every aspect of their career planning — their promotions, bonuses, etc.

No excuses. If someone doesn't have the resources to get from A to Z, we'll get them those resources.

As terrible as COVID has been, there have been a lot of learnings, which make us better.

At Otis, we’re in the life-safety business. There is nothing more important to us than the health and safety of our colleagues, customers, and the riding public. More than half of our 69,000 colleagues work in the field — rather than an office — installing and maintaining equipment. Throughout the pandemic our teams kept critical infrastructure safe and moving, such as hospitals and transportation hubs.

As a global company that does business in more than 200 countries and territories, we want to create workplace models where people connect and cultures thrive. So we endorse shared team spaces and office locations as an essential piece to any future workplace strategy.

There is an undeniable need for distinct workplaces to enable collaborative team and customer engagements, allow for personal and professional boundaries, and serve as the hub for company culture and best-practices sharing while also fueling innovation.

We also believe cities are on their way to being vibrant again, and the office will be back — it may be different, but it will be back.

For us, and many others, the challenges created by the pandemic accelerated digital transformation and increased our pace to innovate both in what we offer and how we work. We expect this to continue beyond the pandemic.

We recently recognized our one-year anniversary as a stand-alone, publicly traded company. While our strategy as an independent company didn’t change, the pandemic allowed us to exercise some new muscles and build our foundation with focused investments.

We quickly innovated to bring new, important products, such as touchless technologies and air-purification fans, to market to help passengers during the pandemic. We also promoted and expanded mental-health and well-being benefits and resources for our colleagues. These benefit enhancements will outlive the pandemic.

Our colleagues gave back tirelessly throughout the pandemic — from in-kind donations such as masks and safety shields to cash donations, matched dollar for dollar, for local and global COVID relief organizations. Our commitment to our communities has never been stronger.

We also launched our cornerstone global social-responsibility program, Made to Move Communities, to inspire students to use STEM-based solutions to address real-world mobility challenges in underserved communities. This year’s challenge focused on communities most impacted by COVID-19.

We have taken a leadership role within our industry on social justice and DEI. We were the first in our industry to join Paradigm for Parity, committing to achieve gender parity in our executive ranks by 2030. More than a third of our global executives are women. So while we still have work to do, we are confident we will reach our 2030 goal. We also developed and shared Our Commitment to Change, a six-point framework to identify and prioritize the actions we must take to live up to our ideals and ensure all colleagues feel safe, welcome, and heard.

Vaccine distribution is kind of widely varied if you have a global business. So you can't take an all-for-one approach.

I think we're going to have a couple of different employee types going forward. We'll have some employees who will work from a PagerDuty office. I think the majority of our employees will be hybrid: They’ll come into the office on a weekly basis, maybe a couple of times a week. But they’ll also want the flexibility to work from home and avoid a commute, and to have the flexibility that they've had in the past. And then I think we'll continue to have remote employees who want to be able to work from anywhere. So that means our offices will become more connection hubs and collaboration points, as opposed to places for individual work. I think we are saying goodbye to the long rows of everybody, communal desks, etc., and thinking more about how to make this an engaging space to team-build, to create, to ideate, and to problem-solve together.

One of our areas of focus at our company kickoff this year was simplification, which is really in service of making decisions more quickly, pivoting quickly. And we made some, I think, pretty big decisions over the course of the pandemic. They've actually helped us demonstrate to ourselves how quickly we can move when we need to, and we don't need to wait for a pandemic to exercise that muscle. The human-centric side of leadership has become so important because every single person — be it a customer, partner, or employee — is experiencing this pandemic differently. There's no playbook. You can't apply a one-size-fits-all solution to the challenges that we hear about every day.

I think we have not even touched the surface of what needs to be done to support all communities in not just getting through this pandemic and recessive environment but coming out the other side of it stronger and more resilient.

Even as recently as February, in both my leadership kickoff speech and my company kickoff talk, I actually challenged our organization — every leader in our organization, every individual — to think about how we can leverage our products, our services, and our people to help close that misery gap, to help improve the outlook for others who are less fortunate than us.

In stressful times, that's really when leadership evolves. It's always easy to be a good leader when things are good, and more difficult when things are not as good. That consistency, that real empathy and authenticity, shines through.

You can't go into corporate-speak about your mission and your values. You really have to bring them to life. You need to act on them. You need to not say one thing externally and do something different internally. They really need to harmonize.

I think one of the reasons our employee-engagement scores are at their all-time highest right now, in the midst of the pandemic, is because we stepped up with benefits. A lot of things around mental stress, because people are really trying to balance their work lives and their personal lives, which are very much blended together.

I think the way we work, live, and play will be fundamentally different as a result of the leapfrogging of three to five years into the next phase of the digital era.

No doubt that will also change the way we work. We will have people who will be at home and stay at home because they're very productive and they're very happy doing that. There's no reason for them to come back into the office. But the vast majority of our workforce will do some sort of hybrid, two to three days in the office or at home. We'll do that in a team-oriented manner. We'll bring people who are part of a team back into the office at the same time so that they can be together; they can cocreate.

[The pandemic] forced, I think, leaders both in the public and private sector to confront these issues. To look at racial inequalities, because the pandemic affected, for instance, Black-owned businesses almost at two times the rate of other businesses.

I've always felt that business leaders and CEOs have a real obligation to stand up, to address the issues that are consistent with our values as a company, to not always wait for the public sector to step in, because sometimes the public sector can't do that. I think we need to take a difficult stance that can sometimes put you in the spotlight. But I think it's absolutely necessary. We did that with our $535 million commitment to lessen the racial wealth gap.

I've worked at lots of different companies. Petco has an amazing office space and an amazing office culture because of the pets that are walking around. We're all meeting each other with our pets, and they're all engaging with each other. I want to retain that, and it's part of what makes us special. But at the same time, COVID has come, and it's changed us forever — just like the Depression changed earlier generations. If employees have personal needs or desires to work from home, we would work around that. But I believe we have a very rich culture here. That is a differentiator.

We want to be a part of making offices more pet-friendly. There are all these adoptions. Is there fear of abandonment? We want to make sure that doesn't happen by being a catalyst for shifting more offices to being more pet-friendly.

On [our employees'] emotional well-being, we've had significant efforts to make sure that people are feeling supported. We actually paid for a membership in an app called Calm. Last year at this time, when you didn't know what was going to happen with COVID and our business was down 15% to 20%, we went out of our way to make sure that no single employee got laid off because of COVID.

We went from 200 ship-from-store locations to 600 ship-from-store locations in two weeks. We launched curbside pickup in two weeks. That would have taken us three to six months. Our ability to meet consumers' needs, but also speed our own processes, will be an outgrowth of COVID in a positive way.

All of a sudden, there are 3 million new pets, which are growing our business and the pet industry beyond expectations. We shifted 80% of our fulfillment to our pet-care centers, and we could get products to our customers faster and at lower costs than our online competitors. That was a competitive opportunity that came from COVID, and it allowed us to meet customer demand faster and be advantaged versus our key competitors.

We will maintain offices where people could go, but they are not encouraged to come every day. There will be people who work in a lab or manufacturing that come every day. But all of the office people will come two days a week, three days a week.

I do want to maintain an office, and I do want to maintain the environment that will create the sense of belonging to people, that will be a gathering place, so people can meet each other, and people can get the cultural vibes.

We overcommunicated. I overcommunicated with my people inside Pfizer. I kept giving them updates personally in big Webex meetings.

I stayed very close to the administration, Operation Warp Speed. Even if we didn't take money from the government, I was keeping them informed of what was going on [with the coronavirus vaccine] so that they would not feel isolated from us. I did the same with the Biden campaign.

I gave a lot of interviews, and I did it because I wanted to make sure the press is well informed and the public is well informed. And I spoke a lot with investors.

Of course, my board — from day one, I was very close to them. I made it very clear that the best chance we have to be successful is if we finance [the coronavirus vaccine] ourselves. That would mean that if we fail, and the chances we fail are very high, we may write off $2 billion. I assured them that that would not take us down, that we have enough financial flexibility. It would be very painful but not fatal for us.

[Equity] was the area that was less understood from the other values. The other values were courage, and people got it. We need to think big. We need to jump.

It was about excellence, and people got it. We need to make sure we execute well, and we decide when we know who's doing what. It was joy, and people got it. We wanted to create an atmosphere where we are taking pride in what we do for society. The equity was less understood.

When COVID came, people immediately got why this is so important. I think we will continue on that level. We need to be — and also as a result, we need to be perceived by society as — an organization that has equity deep in its roots.

I've never been a very big fan of the office. We're a very global company. We’re probably unique in the fact that I've organized my leadership team to be scattered around the world, so we've been working digital for 10 years.

As we look to the future, everyone has been forced into the full exercise of remote practices. So what I see in the future is less square footage, shared offices, and more centralized offices where people can gather when needed.

You won't normally go to the office, but when you need to do certain meetings, you would just rent out a space. And we've already started to move on that as we renew leases. Frankly, the old concept of the office, where they meet you at the coffee machine, is great on paper, but it's anything but efficient.

We've innovated everything in 2020. Every day there was something new, and there were plenty of things we have learned that we shall never forget.

Everything that is managed locally works better. Companies are based on the fact that they have to globalize, but you can ensure that you empower people locally to make decisions for themselves.

We're also big on the subject of diversity and inclusion. With COVID, families had to take care of their kids, who were often stuck at home, and very often women were considered more in charge of that. So we had to be very flexible. We've had multiple meetings with kids on the screen. But beyond that, there's flexibility on when you work, how you work, and when you start your work.

But we didn't start DEI efforts last year at all, and I don’t think it's a one-year journey. It's a cultural journey, and you don't nudge a culture in days. It takes years. By nature we have a lot of origin diversity in our company because we decided we don't have one fixed headquarters but multiple local headquarters.

We recruit at least 50% women, and we have a diverse environment. Our board has more than 40% women, the executive committee has more than 40% women, and we have fixed ourselves the objective of having 30% women in the top 1,000 people in the company by 2025.

DEI is never-ending. It's something you have to work on every day, but we see diversity as the biggest source of innovation and community engagement.

When the pandemic hit, we had people on the front lines. They had to stay present. And priority one was keeping them healthy. So we've got new techniques for keeping our buildings healthy.

Then we had people who could work virtually and transitioned overnight. Suddenly there were things that we were doing in new and different ways.

We could send a very tiny team out, equip them with virtual reality, and then have experts available on the line. That was never possible before because we had so many people in the air traveling from place to place. We can make the best use of certain people's time and expertise by making them virtually available.

We're going to rethink office spaces, so they're more about a place for convening. And then we're going to basically say to all employees that you can, if your job doesn't require you to be present, work two to three days a week wherever you want to be.

One of the things we've discovered is that it's really hard to run a hybrid mode of operation. It's easy to forget the people who are at the other end of a computer connection.

So I think we've got to ask some big questions about our meetings. Is it ever appropriate to do hybrid meetings? Probably so, when you're in information-transfer mode. But when you're in a decision-making mode, my preference is that we're all virtual or we're all together.

We discovered that when you're in a moment like this, the No. 1 thing people want is to feel useful. The best way to get over anxiety is to be busy, be focused on solving a problem.

Empathy has also surged to the forefront as perhaps one of the most important leadership skills a person can have during the pandemic. In the wake of George Floyd's killing, we had spoken as a leadership team about what to say first. The leadership team acknowledged and challenged each other, saying, "It's not about what we say. It's about what we do."

Maybe in the past people said to themselves, “The most qualified candidates tend to look a lot like me, right? Caucasian male.” And we're really challenging that. We really want to get more talent interested in what we do because we think talent is equally distributed across the human population.

Starbucks was founded as a company that is grounded in a mission of humanity. And in many ways, this was a year that was a reflection of the human experience in a global pandemic.

And I think the important lesson for me was that at times of adversity, values matter. And the way that we took care of all of our stakeholders, starting with our Starbucks partners, when we had to shut down stores a year ago, we gave our partners economic certainty. We paid them whether they came to work or not. That's the type of company we are. I think it certainly starts with our partners, but goes well beyond that. This was a year that — I think through being intentional, being transparent, being accountable — we basically built trust with all of our stakeholders. And I think that that will be something that is enduring for Starbucks and the customers we serve.

So if you look at what we've done throughout this pandemic, we prioritize three simple principles: No. 1 was taking care or focusing on the health and well-being of our Starbucks partners and the customers we serve. No. 2 was basically supporting local health officials as they work to mitigate and contain the spread of the virus. And No. 3 was showing up in a positive and responsible way in every community we serve.

So we went out and we did all the audits on our carbon, water, and waste. And we committed to targets by 2030. And we committed to a long-term aspiration that says we want to give more than we take from the planet. So we are finding ways to reduce the carbon footprint beyond net zero, to where we're actually storing more carbon than we emit. We have initiatives underway to reduce waste. And certainly we have great opportunity with the number of cups and the number of single-use serveware that's out there — big opportunity there. And water, finding ways to reduce water. In addition, this last year, we just introduced what we call people-positive. People-positive is all about inclusion. It's about creating opportunity, and it's about community. So when you look at it, we think in three simple dimensions: No. 1, are we a planet-positive company? Are we giving more than we take from the planet? No. 2, are we a people-positive company? Are we investing in the future of humanity? And No. 3, we're going to continue to be a profit-positive company where we responsibly and thoughtfully grow our business. And I think those three things can work in harmony. And that's what we're demonstrating as we continue to build on the wonderful first 50 years at this great company.

While we've learned that our teams can still be effective, productive, and innovative when not physically in the office, our physical office space still plays a key role in the connected and collaborative culture at Taco Bell HQ, especially for our chefs in the test kitchen.

When indoor dining was put on pause and businesses shifted to drive-through, I recognized the added pressure that was placed on our restaurant teams. Fortunately, Taco Bell's strong relationship with our franchisees allowed us to make quick and efficient operational pivots, such as improving drive-through speed of service, putting a stronger focus on digital offerings, implementing rigorous COVID safety measures, and reworking our existing fundraising model to support organizations addressing food insecurity in communities affected by the pandemic. These operational shifts also opened the door for us to continue modernizing and bring tech-focused innovation to our guests, including the Go Mobile restaurant concept and our taco e-gifting service.

It has also been exciting to see our employees develop all kinds of new ideas for keeping our culture alive in a hybrid world. To continue encouraging this kind of creativity even after the pandemic, we are in the process of launching a new program that gives employees at all levels the opportunity to share big ideas and contribute to the voice of the Taco Bell brand — something we intend to make a staple of Taco Bell workplace culture in the future.

There's no question that the office will continue to remain an important part of the work experience for many of us, myself included. The best strategy for workplace evolution (and the one that we've embraced) is employee-centric, which supports the diverse needs of our teams across roles and locations.

Based on an internal global survey, we learned that most employees overwhelmingly prefer a mix of in-office and remote work. We are therefore planning to transition to this hybrid model long term for a majority of our workforce. This approach will combine the best aspects of both cultures, and will leverage our learnings during COVID-19 to create a more flexible, balanced, and engaging employee experience, which in turn will help us attract and retain the best talent.

It may seem counterintuitive, but by being physically apart and not working in the office every day, we've actually become closer. So we'll continue to strengthen our adoption and use of certain technologies, including remote videoconferencing, cloud-based software, and communication platforms like Slack that will increase our productivity, agility, and collaboration.

We've come together to support those most impacted by the pandemic. ViacomCBS has committed $100 million through grants to the Motion Picture & Television Fund, The Actors Fund, and other organizations providing relief to the creative community. Our brands have hosted televised events to raise funds for frontline healthcare workers and communities of color that have been disproportionately affected by COVID-19.

We've also used our platforms to condemn systemic racism, drive change, and empower civic engagement. Nickelodeon held “Kids, Race and Unity: A Nick News Special” to amplify young, Black voices and help families have constructive conversations about race and inclusivity. We drove voter awareness through inventive campaigns to increase Black participation in the 2020 census and the 2020 elections.

We have more to do, but we've taken steps to develop diverse talent in front of and behind the camera. ViacomCBS Networks International has instituted a "No Diversity, No Commission" policy that spans 180 countries, and we've set a target for CBS writers rooms to be staffed with a minimum of 40% BIPOC representation beginning with the 2021-2022 broadcast television season, with a goal to increase to 50% the following season.

Even though there are many benefits to remote work — more flexibility, the democratization of idea sharing — our offices will continue to be essential hubs for our agency and culture. There’s no substitute for the electricity that can be generated in a real room.

At the same time, we recognized that there’s no “going back,” and that we needed to intentionally build a workplace of the future — one that captures the best parts of remote work and office work. So we asked our people what they needed to make work and life work better together, and created a hybrid model with flexibility and inclusion at its core.

Our hybrid approach — three days in the office and two days remote, once it’s safe to return — is designed to capture the best of both worlds: time together in the office and flexible remote time to work in the way that is best for each individual.

Problem-solving and collaboration have always been at the core of who we are and what we do, but this past year, we collaborated in an agile, much deeper way and worked across disciplines to address the complex, rapidly shifting issues that our clients were facing.

In regard to leadership, I have always believed that good leaders lead by listening. This past year, though, I have realized that in order to more deeply understand and anticipate needs, leaders must listen on two levels: “listening big” and “listening small.”

We have to listen big on the enterprise level — ongoing employee surveys and other ways of putting your ear to the ground to hear the rhythms of culture within your organization. It’s getting a broad understanding of what your teams are thinking through regular pulse checks.

Listening small means listening hard to individuals everywhere within your organization, whenever possible. There’s so much you can learn in a few minutes of candid chatter while waiting for the critical mass on a call or, eventually, in line at the coffee bar. While listening big creates directional data, listening small ensures that humanity and real understanding are foundational to every move you make.

We have strengthened our commitments to address structural inequities within our agency, industry, and society at large.

We took a series of important steps to help ensure that our overall commitments have a meaningful, lasting impact, which include:

* Increasing the diversity of our agency at every level. We were the first large PR firm to disclose our US workforce diversity data and will continue to report back annually. We’ve also developed an action plan with rigor and resources to recruit, mentor, sponsor, and advance our BIPOC colleagues.

* We’ve ramped up training for our teams and have conducted cultural competency evaluations of our senior team.

* We’ve also committed $1 million of our time and resources to work with organizations that fight racial inequality and injustice.

There’s still a long way to go, but we’ve made foundational progress and are fully dedicated to making necessary changes to ensure that equity and inclusion are embedded in our workplace and our work in the long term.

We call our value system the Wingstop Way. And it was well, well in place prior to the pandemic.

If I think about new things I learned and new approaches we took, I really wouldn't say there was anything different we did. We relied on our value system. What I think the pandemic showed us was the strength of our culture and our ability to lean in on those values.

It was a tough time, but it doesn't mean you can't have fun. And fun is a key core value. And wings are a fun food. They're a convivial food. People come together and share it. So it was kind of hard to figure out, like — how do we share more and come together more in the conversation during the pandemic? So we met frequently as entire teams once a week, the whole company, in a vlog talking about the business. But we also incorporated fun. We used things like our backgrounds behind us — some themed engagements to make sure that people still recognize that we can have fun during a difficult time.

If you reflect on 2020, and just the whole reality of the pandemic first being a challenge to us, there's no doubt that our country received yet another gut punch with the killing of George Floyd. When I saw it, I was outraged, upset for all the reasons that we all were. It was disgusting what happened. And it did shine a light on the challenges of inequality and racism in our community.

So these weekly vlogs I mentioned, we had one the week that Mr. Floyd was killed. I spoke about it from the heart. And I could look across all the faces on the screen, and you could see the sadness and irritation and anger and frustration and emotion in people's eyes.

Usually on those calls we mute everybody, and I, or a member of our management team, kind of talk about what's going on. We open up for questions, but we usually do it in the chat room. But that day I was inspired for whatever reason. I said, “Just unmute the line. I want to hear what you have to say.” And what came out was one of the more emotionally charged, rich conversations I've ever seen in my career. People spoke out, and they talked about what they've experienced in life, how that impacts them, and what they've gone through.