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Last week, 3M’s new CEO joined the chorus of business leaders expecting more workers to return to the office, telling managers that the company expects them to be in its Minnesota office Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. But unlike other companies starting hybrid work programs, attending on those “collaboration days” is voluntary for lower level workers, Bloomberg reported.
The move drew attention not only because it followed Amazon’s widely covered decree that all workers should be back in the office five days a week, but also because it appeared to be something of a reversal for 3M. The industrial giant had long been a proponent of work-from-home policies, calling its approach “Work Your Way” and continuing to promote its remote-friendly policy as recently as this spring.
But the policy was also notable for having different requirements for managers and their employees. Brian Elliott, an executive leadership advisor on future of work issues, told me he has heard of other organizations with such policies, but it’s “unusual.” And Rob Sadow, CEO of Flex Index, an insights platform on flexible work, said in an email that while its database doesn’t explicitly track companies with different policies for managers and workers, he also doesn’t believe such policies are common. One reason, he suggested, might be that it could suggest to employees “that their growth is capped professionally without coming into the office three days a week.”
One common complaint about hybrid work policies, generally, is that young workers go to the office but find managers don’t attend, meaning they can miss out on in-person mentorship, training or development. While that could be helped by having a higher expectation of office time for managers, Sadow’s point is also a good one—such measures could send the signal that junior employees really should be there too if they want to get ahead.
For more on the impact of return-to-office mandates, check out some of our contributors’ recent views here and here. And in this week’s newsletter, we check in on new investments for some of our Under 30 alumni in the work and education space—including an exclusive report on a new perks platform—as well as updates on worker surveillance, the Boeing strike and more.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
When the founders of Nooks launched the startup during the pandemic, they aimed to create a “virtual office,” a Zoom-like interface where remote teams could collaborate and tune in to other people’s calls. Once they realized sales teams were Nooks’ power users, the company pivoted to focus on AI tools for sales in 2022, a prescient decision amid more in-office work. Forbes’ Rashi Shrivastava has the details on Nooks’ capital raise of $43 million led by Kleiner Perkins, with participation from Tola Capital and angel investor Lachy Groom. With $70 million in total funding, the startup is now valued at $285 million.
POLICY + PRACTICE
The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) said Thursday it had issued new guidance warning that companies using third-party consumer reports—which include background dossiers and “black box” AI or algorithmic scores about their workers—must follow Fair Credit Reporting Act rules. In a statement about the guidance, the agency said that “means employers must obtain worker consent, provide transparency about data used in adverse decisions, and allow workers to dispute inaccurate information.” The same day, CFPB Director Rohit Chopra and Acting Labor Secretary Julie Su held a hearing and panel discussion with workers and advocates in Michigan to discuss worker tracking systems.
HUMAN CAPITAL
Katie Fang, a 2018 Forbes Under 30 lister, has raised $80 million in a Series B round of funding for SchooLinks, her Austin-based platform that’s gamifying how students prepare for college and their careers. In an exclusive interview with Forbes, Fang shared how an unsolicited term sheet sparked nine total offers for funding from investors.
Boeing’s striking factory workers voted to reject the company’s latest contract offer and extend their work stoppage—which initially began six weeks ago—in a major blow to the plane maker, which reported a $6 billion quarterly loss on Wednesday. The striking workers’ union, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, said Boeing’s latest offer was rejected by 64% of members who voted.
WHAT’S NEXT: WIZARD PERKS CEO AND FOUNDER FAIZAN BHATTY
Forbes Under 30 list alum Faizan Bhatty sold his first startup, the rideshare vehicle ad space company Halo Cars, to Lyft. But the experience of running that startup, along with time he spent at Google, pointed him to a new idea: Creating a platform that connects merchants with large groups of workers as a way of both lowering new customer acquisition costs and letting employers share more free perks.
“It’s very difficult, in a cost effective way, to acquire new users on Google and Facebook,” Bhatty told Forbes. ”What we’re telling them is send your product to all of these employees and have them try it out.”
The result: Wizard, a new platform that lets employers offer free perks to their workers. Merchants such as Avis or Priceline pay a fee when employees make purchases through the platform, but employers can access perks for their employees at no cost, such as elite status at some hotel chains, discounts at Six Flags or freebies and giveaways from local vendors.
In some cases, merchants might want to only offer discounts or freebies to groups of workers who are high volume users, such as gas discounts for Lyft drivers. “I fundamentally believe there is an arbitrage opportunity here,” Bhatty says. “Can I pick these merchants who really, really value certain employer bases and have them connect these offerings directly to [them]?”
Bhatty told Forbes exclusively that Wizard plans to launch in the first quarter of next year with a $2.5 million pre-seed funding round led by Village Global, the venture capital firm chaired by Reid Hoffman that pools money from high-profile founders like Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and Bill Gates. Some 30,000 employees have signed up for Wizard’s wait list, Bhatty says.
While there are other platforms that also connect merchants and employers to offer workers perks, Bhatty says those platforms don’t work with smaller employers or smaller local brands. He also believes Wizard will stand out for its automation—employees can load their credit cards into an app and automatically get discounts or freebies as they shop, rather than having to remember which places have benefits and which don’t.
It also plans to target certain perk offerings to life events the employer knows the worker is experiencing. For instance, some companies have employees register new pets in their HR system, which might trigger offers for free pet food samples; a parental leave after a new baby could trigger an offer for free meal kits.
While the new platform has the potential to set up a marketing or advertising relationship in the workplace, Bhatty says he will set a high bar for discounts, and if a merchant isn’t able to offer a deal significantly better than what’s publicly available, it won’t accept them.
Wizard launches at a time when companies are closely watching how much they spend on workers, making the offer of free perks attractive to both employers and the people who work for them. “There’s always demand to save money,” says Anne Dwane, a general partner at Village Global, “and this seems like a very fresh approach.”
FACTS + COMMENT
The latest monthly Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes, one of the most widely cited and well-known research studies on remote work, looks at how much working from home is worth to workers:
7.6%: The percentage pay increase the typical employee who has worked from home at some point since 2020 said they would require to go onsite full-time, the September survey of 9,457 Americans found.
10% to 15%: The pay raise that workers in their 30s with children and a college degree said they’d need in order to come back to the office full-time, Stanford University economist Nicholas Bloom told Business Insider.
“If you force folks back to the office five days a week, they are going to be very unhappy,” Bloom told BI. “You have taken away something they value about the same as a 7% or 8% pay cut.”
STRATEGIES + ADVICE
Why your next business trip should be just across town.
Forget work-life balance, but consider a future of less work.
Here’s how to make the workplace common ground amid political division.
This new book shows why many CEO tenures don’t follow an expected narrative.
VIDEO
This CEO Is Using Game Theory To Solve Complex Business Problems And Her Work Won Her An Emmy
QUIZ
Twenty-eight states and Washington, D.C. require businesses to give their employees time off on Election Day to vote. However, seven of those states do not require employers to continue paying workers while they are casting their ballots, according to management services firm ADP. Which of these states is among them?
- Massachusetts
- Illinois
- California
- New York
Check if you got the answer right here.
