The pandemic has drastically changed how and where we work. For some industries, this meant a total shutdown. For others, it was a new frontier of uncertain work-life balance and hiring challenges. Either way, leaders are looking at a work landscape that has permanently changed in many significant ways.
In this episode, we’re addressing something near and dear to the business community: company culture. We know the pandemic catalyzed some seismic shifts, but have we fully realized those impacts yet? And how do we move forward, out of this time of uncertainty, to create inclusive virtual and in-person spaces? Crisis can act as the flame that forges a better future — but what are we, as leaders, doing to ensure that happens? And is this kind of future-forging crisis necessary? Is it inevitable? We answer these questions and more as we investigate the equity issues surrounding workplace culture.
Highlights from this episode:
So, follow us on our journey this season as we investigate Boston’s challenges as a microcosm for bigger issues of equity and access. Through topics like access to technology, healthcare innovations, the future of education, and forward-thinking DE&I strategies, we take Boston’s Brand Problem out of the shadows — and onto the Tech Trail.
The pandemic has drastically changed how and where we work. For some industries, this meant a total shutdown. For others, it was a new frontier of uncertain work-life balance and hiring challenges. Either way, leaders are looking at a work landscape that has permanently changed in many significant ways.
In this episode, we’re addressing something near and dear to the business community: company culture. We know the pandemic catalyzed some seismic shifts, but have we fully realized those impacts yet? And how do we move forward, out of this time of uncertainty, to create inclusive virtual and in-person spaces? Crisis can act as the flame that forges a better future — but what are we, as leaders, doing to ensure that happens? And is this kind of future-forging crisis necessary? Is it inevitable? We answer these questions and more as we investigate the equity issues surrounding workplace culture.
Highlights from this episode:
So, follow us on our journey this season as we investigate Boston’s challenges as a microcosm for bigger issues of equity and access. Through topics like access to technology, healthcare innovations, the future of education, and forward-thinking DE&I strategies, we take Boston’s Brand Problem out of the shadows — and onto the Tech Trail.
Christina Luconi:
We are very much an in-person culture, and all of a sudden, we were at our homes.
David Meredith:
Every organization, whether it's a business, a hospital, or a government has a duty of care.
Mike Volpe:
I feel like the pandemic gave us all a little bit of an opportunity to do a little bit of disaster planning.
Tom Hopcroft:
Welcome to Season Two of On the Tech Trail. I'm MassTLC CEO, Tom Hopcroft. In this season, we hear candid stories of the pandemic from some of Boston's most influential voices. From issues of equity and access to technology and talent strategy, we're building off last season's insightful conversations as we tackle some of today's most burning questions.
Tom Hopcroft:
In this episode, we're addressing something near and dear to the business community: company culture. We know the pandemic catalyzed seismic shifts in the way we work, but have we fully realized those impacts yet? What are we doing as leaders to ensure that we capture this moment to create a better future for everyone, and how do we move forward out of this time of uncertainty to create more inclusive virtual and in-person spaces?
Tom Hopcroft:
Our first guest, Everbridge CEO David Meredith, kicks off our discussion with a closer look through the lens of critical event management.
Sponsor:
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David Meredith:
So COVID-19 has really raised the awareness level for everybody about the need to be prepared for a critical event. It could be a pandemic. It could be other types of critical events. And this is something we've been talking about for years, which is the necessity of having the right protocols, processes, technology, everything in place and ready to go when something happens. And prior to COVID really taking off, I was on CNBC doing interview with Jim Cramer on Mad Money. And I remember saying, "Jim, it's not a question of if an organization is going to be impacted by a critical event, but it's just when, what type of critical event, and how prepared can they be." We live in a very interconnected age and collaboration is extremely important. When we talk about critical event management, the company was actually founded originally after 9/11 and our founders saw people going back into the second tower after the first tower had fallen.
David Meredith:
And there was no way to adequately communicate in that critical event situation to those people. And our founders felt like there had to be a better way. So the initial focus was around critical communications in a crisis. And the company became the leader in that space, very scalable, very resilient, and working with businesses, governments, healthcare organizations, first responders both in the US and around the world. And so critical event management at its core is there's two things. On the one hand, there's things you care about. Your people, whether it's your employees, your customers, your citizens, or residents, operations assets, supply chains, supply routes, brand reputation. These are all things that you care about. And on the other hand, you have things that can impact those things that you care about. It could be an active shooter, a hurricane, a cyber attack, an IT outage , a global pandemic, any of those things when they overlap.
David Meredith:
So if there's an earthquake halfway around the world, it's not a good thing, but it may not be a critical event for your country or your town or your business. But if there is an earthquake happening where you have things you care about, that is a critical event. There are a set of things we can do around best practices and technology to help mitigate the effects of that and to help keep people safer, keep your organization running. So what Everbridge does to help facilitate communications across people, whether it's for a national government, state government, city, or a hospital or business, we have over 100 different modalities. We try to predefine based on best practices. What are the right protocols? What are the processes? So everything's already embedded in the system in advance. So really a lot of that, the system helps to take that stress off of you and manage the process for you.
David Meredith:
So in real-time, you're not having to figure out what to do. It's already been determined in a calmer moment. The trends though, since we were formed about 20 years ago now you, see a 30 times increase in physical attacks and 20 times increase in cyber attacks, almost a doubling of natural disasters, whether it's wildfires in California, for example, or Australia, or hurricanes in the Southeast. Like a lot of problems we have in society, we can't always solve all of them right away. There's gridlock. Some of these issues are polarizing issues, but whatever side of the issue you're on, I think everyone kind of universally can agree that if we can use technology to mitigate these impacts and help people, that's a really good thing.
David Meredith:
Our chief experience officer, Dr. John Maeda likes to say, which C-level executive is most responsible for digital transformation? Is it the CEO, the CIO, or the C-O-V-I-D? And it's actually the C-O-V-I-D. So you're seeing a very rapid acceleration towards digital transformation. Another big trend is the internet of things, whether it's applied to smart buildings or safe cities. In the next few years, you're going to have 75 billion devices with an IP address. So my threat surface has just expanded exponentially because every one of those IP addresses is a potential vulnerability that I need to be aware of and protect against, but also a lot of those devices are sensors. So for example, in downtown London, you've got more cameras than you have human beings, and they're throwing off massive amounts of data, 22,000 data feeds coming in that we have to curate because when you're looking at critical event management, it's not a matter of days or hours, it's minutes matter, seconds matter.
David Meredith:
And having the ability to curate all of that data and figure out what's really going on and get the message to the right person is critical. And so again, IOT is a big part of that. So I think that interconnectedness that comes with IOT will be a big trend. And most critical events, they happen over a weekend or a week. You have a hurricane come and then a week later it's gone. And then a lot of the work comes after the hurricane leaves, all the cleanup and recovery, but it's still unusual. And it is a black swan event to say that we have a pervasive event that affects every country, every city, every business, every human being on the planet. We've never seen anything like this in our lifetimes, but it does bring home the point, which is kind of the essence of what we are as a company, which is it's no longer a nice-to-have to say I need to be prepared when something's going to happen.
David Meredith:
It's really a must-have. You've got to be prepared and you've got to take reasonable steps to be able to fulfill the duty of care for your people if you're a business for your investors, if you're a government for your citizens, and because a lot of the potential adverse impacts from these events can be mitigated with the tools and best practices that exist today. So as leaders, if you're on a board or if you're a CEO, if you're a prime minister, president, governor, mayor, I do think there's an obligation to take those steps to be as prepared as you reasonably can be.
Tom Hopcroft:
And not all industries face the same kind of threats or adapt as readily to a global health crisis, particularly if they rely on continuous engagement with physical or in-person activities. So the pandemic was especially tough on industries like hospitality, restaurants, and travel. Mike Volpe, CEO of the business travel company lola.com, experienced this firsthand.
Mike Volpe:
We all know 2020 was not a good year for business travel, but I think if you're not in the industry, you may not know how bad it was. Imagine whatever business you're in and the amount of business that's being done in that industry declining by as close to 100% as possible. So if you compare, say January, February business travel volume to April, almost 100% decline. I mean, we saw ourselves a 97% decline, and that was really consistent with the number of people passing through TSA gates and other metrics in the industry. I feel like the pandemic gave us all a little bit of an opportunity to do a little bit of disaster planning. And what I really mean by that is I think that if you're never thinking at all about what could go wrong or what would you do, something went drastically wrong with your business, you could be caught really flat-footed when something bad happens.
Mike Volpe:
So I think another subtle benefit to all this pain that we've gone through is that it's kind of giving you an opportunity or a reminder that you should do a little bit of disaster planning and a little bit of contingency planning. Not a ton, but if something were to go vastly wrong in your main core area of business, where else would you go? What else would you explore? What else would you dive into? One of the things I think is really important for every startup is just having resiliency. And if you don't have resiliency, I think it's hard to be successful as a startup. We have a core value at Lola called all grit, no quit, which really speaks to that. But I think that's become even more important for us. And it's something that we're really looking for.
Mike Volpe:
So we're trying to find folks who had some experience during their lives, have had something that was difficult that they had to overcome. And that can be lots of different examples from lots of different people. I think we're trying to find something in everyone's background where they've gone through a tough experience before, because we know startups are hard. And while I hope there's never another global pandemic, there will be something else that poses a challenge to our business and having a resilience, dynamic employee base, and team is going to be what gets us over that more than any sort of specific strategy. It really boils down to the team and their capabilities. And as a startup, you don't have the luxury to kind of wait things out because every month that goes by, you're burning more cash, and that's more of your lifeline that's being cut short.
Mike Volpe:
And so we decided rather than kind of sit back, we would actually go out and sort of attack the problem and say, "What can we build that we can sell to our customers that doesn't need them to be traveling to get value out of it? And what's something that we can sell to not only the companies that we work with, but even the same buyer?" So we sold them to the finance department or the office of the CFO and we said, "What other challenges does that group have? Are there things that could work alongside our existing product and things that we could sell into them that would create value even if someone's traveling?" And that's what we ended up focusing on and trying to do. So at Lola, we felt like one of our core assets, one of our core capabilities was really innovation and being able to build products that customers love to use.
Mike Volpe:
And so we said, "If that's one of our key enabling kind of strengths, we need to lean into that strength." We were, in some ways... You can call it smart, but maybe it was more lucky that we had already done a bunch of research into new product lines, new areas we could go into outside of travel. And that really was so key for us to be able to pivot quickly. I think one big change within business travel is going to be more companies wanting to have a little bit more oversight. I think a lot of companies are going to think about how can I strike that balance between having a good customer experience for my employees and not burdening them with a lot of approvals and process and red tape, but still have some idea where they are. So if something happens in some portion of the world or something happens that's a global event, that I sort of know where everyone is and I can kind of work with them and help them.
Mike Volpe:
Within the industry, that's called sort of duty of care, the duty that employers have to take care of their employees. But that concept, I think, has not been common among midsize companies. I think large enterprises understand that, and they do some things there, but I think that that's one thing that's going to be interesting. People have talked about the idea of kind of a health passport and the idea of like, "Okay, have you been tested within the last X amount of hours?" Or, "Where have you been?" and all these things, and there's going to be some interesting kind of shorter-term, short-lived solutions that are going to have to exist within business travel to help companies and employees manage all of that. As we go from no one being vaccinated and very few people traveling to in that transition where more people are vaccinated.
Mike Volpe:
Some places are still having outbreaks and other places are not, and sort of managing that patchwork, I think is going to be a really interesting challenge, frankly, for everyone within business travel. I think the sort of world is always shifting. It may not be as big shifts as a giant global pandemic, but there's always things happening and always changes. And I think when you look at the most successful technology companies, it's very rare that they're kind of these one-hit wonders that really go on to long-term success.
Mike Volpe:
I think if you have a company that has had some success, there's a real risk that you become very entrenched. And I think when you look at the most successful companies, they always have a second and a third and a fourth act. So my advice to most companies would be don't feel like because you've had one thing and built one product that works really well, that you've made it. It's like, what's next, what's next, what's next, and constantly have this pipeline that may all not work well, but constantly have this pipeline of how you're thinking about launching a new product every year to 24 months and just using that to drive more innovation and more growth because otherwise, someone else is going to come along and do that one thing that you do better than you do.
Michelle Serpa:
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Tom Hopcroft:
The ability to pivot, diversify, and survive times of crisis can define the culture of your business. Our next guest, Toast CEO Chris Comparato explains what that can mean to industries that are built upon in-person interactions that the pandemic quickly dismantled.
Chris Comparato:
As a business leader, how do you lead in periods of massive uncertainty? Any business leader had to evaluate their strategy, figure out how to adapt, show amazing resilience, and still execute at the same time. As a community, we all had to figure out together how to operate in this new normal. And then lastly, as an individual, if I look at the individual lens, you've got a global pandemic that's affecting loved ones. And how do you act and behave both as a professional as well as a individual and family member and sort of navigate this world where we don't have connections in person and we're relying on connections through phone, through audio, through Zoom? And then how do you deal with the distraction and anxiety that comes along with that and make sure that you're mindful of what everybody else is going through?
Chris Comparato:
We saw restaurant revenues across the country fall by 75 to 80%. So the average restaurant had to answer the question, how do we drive revenue and get orders in the door? How do we treat consumers and our employees with health and safety in mind? And then how do we maintain operational efficiency as a small business that's threatened to survive? It's been a pivotal year, at least for a company like Toast, to fast-forward our product roadmap and release products that transform the experience between consumers and restaurants themselves.
Chris Comparato:
So our mission continues to be to empower the restaurant community, to delight their guests, do what they love and thrive. I think the speed at which we execute that mission in 2020 and release products that allow restaurants to adapt was fast-forwarded by two years. So 2020 has been a massive year for innovation. And specifically within the restaurant industry, examples are the move from on-premise dining to off-premise dining and the ease in which consumers could access technologies for delivery or mobile takeout and order ahead or curbside pickup.
Chris Comparato:
Another good example is the ability to have a tremendous restaurant experience, but order and pay at the table without having to interface with a menu and exchange payment via credit card. So having the health and safety of the consumer and the health and safety of the restaurant, waitstaff as top of mind, the ability to have an amazing experience, but do that through contactless payments and ordering. So I think a lot of what has transpired in the past 12 months are now becoming must-have indispensable solutions to navigate the new future.
Chris Comparato:
Consumer behaviors and habits moving forward have changed significantly. And that's one thing that small businesses like restaurants need to recognize where the default was to go into a restaurant, order a drink, have a fantastic meal. That may have been the default. Consumers now have this optionality to perhaps enjoy dinner at home, enjoy dinner on the run. That's one thing that small businesses and restaurants need to adapt to, which is the many different forms of what a consumer experience looks like. We have an opportunity to drive change like never before, and I think it's on us to instill that focus.
Tom Hopcroft:
And these changes directly impact more than just what our businesses do. They also impact how we do it. Here's Pratt Wiley, CEO of The Partnership.
Pratt Wiley:
As you're planning on returning to work, what are the accommodations that you're making for those who are differently abled? We walked around one of our client companies and they had installed hand sanitizers across the building, but they weren't at wheelchair height. And so those are some of the very practical solutions, but there was also dealing with some of the larger psychological challenges that folks were dealing with. And how do you deal with grief and how do you deal with folks who are really going through trauma and how do you manage towards that? How do you recognize that and then manage towards that? And then those conversations, in a lot of ways, flowed directly into the responses that companies had after the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. And as companies, regardless of where they were on their diversity and inclusion journey, everyone stopped, assessed, and said that we need to do better. We need to do better.
Pratt Wiley:
And the form that that has taken is as varied as the companies themselves, because again, you're talking about culture. And so some companies have really focused on their recruiting strategies, making sure that every level of their organization reflects a diversity of ideas and experiences from the board all the way down to folks who are just graduating from college. Some companies have changed their policies so that 40% of all of their new hires will be people of color. They looked at their employment caps and assessed, "This is basically what we need to do over the next two or three years in order to have some form of equity within our own company." Looking at the board of directors and doing the same. Other companies have looked at their spending. Who are the companies that we are partnering with and what are the opportunities for us to invest in vendors who are of different ethnicities?
Tom Hopcroft:
Doing better is a central theme to the development of company culture, especially coming out of the pandemic. And that begins and ends with people. Christina Luconi, chief people officer at Rapid7, explains what that means on the ground.
Christina Luconi:
Chief people officer is a title I've been using for 20-plus years. I think it means different things to different people. Candidly, for me, I have a perspective on my field that's a little bit different than that of many of my peers. I've sort of always shunned away or shied away from the concept of human resources. I don't believe people are resources. I think my printer is one. My scope or the things that I focus on on a daily basis start with culture. How do you build culture from scratch and how do you scale it in a hyper-growth company? The pandemic has played in actually pretty significantly to my strategy.
Christina Luconi:
At first, it was really personal, right? I mean, the pandemic itself has been... You could look at it as the dumpster fire that clearly has been for so many, but I'm choosing to look at all the positives that have come out of it. I've been at Rapid7 for 10 years. I might argue this is my favorite year there. When things like this that no one would have ever anticipated happened that you realized, are we good? Are we really good? And I think all that work we've done over the past 10 years, laying the foundation and just reiterating how incredibly important our value set is to this company, has been something we've been able to constantly touch back on during this year. And I think it's allowed us to really thrive through some really, truly difficult times.
Christina Luconi:
Do I see 2020 as a turning point year? I do. I mean both for our company, but I think just for the world in general, right? I think it's really forced adaptability for those of us that are in sort of thriving entrepreneurial kind of environments or anybody else. I mean, it's been really amazing to sort of flex those adaptability muscles, right? I think if I look at the flow of COVID from the non-medical standpoint, just the business standpoint, I watched in March companies struggle, do we send people home or not? And that was sort of the big topic at the beginning of March. And then everybody sent their people home, and then it was, "Oh my gosh, this is the worst thing ever. What am I going to do? I'm not set up for this." And I think companies that had... especially tech companies, were very fortunate.
Christina Luconi:
Employees definitely have felt more voice. At least we've seen our employees who were already pretty vocal. I can't speak for all companies, right? But I think in our company, we've definitely seen a lot of very vocal people asking us to do things and what they'd like. We will listen and we will try to adapt as much as we possibly can. But at the end of the day, it's still a business. It's not about you and your needs. It's about what we're trying to do for our customers. So I think being comfortable having those difficult conversations is really, really important for businesses. I've watched, again, people over-correct and say, "My people are going to quit." If we say that we have to go back to the office in 2021, at some point, they're all going to quit because they want to work from home now.
Christina Luconi:
Well, I love people. I want to create a great environment for people, but that doesn't mean you let all of your people make every business decision for you. So I think it's listening and trying to create a solution that works for all and remembering you're still a business is really important. Companies are going to have to figure out what works best for them, but this is a thriving community. And I think we will rally around each other and help support each other to the largest extent. And maybe things have gotten a little bit better for us because if companies choose to be a bit more flexible, then maybe that eases off some of the commuter challenges that companies faced or things like that.
Christina Luconi:
I think for some people that commute in from a long distance because it's more affordable to live an hour outside the city to give them the reprieve of saying, "You know what? You only need to come in three days a week," could be game-changing for people. I think marginalized groups, in some ways, there's been a lightning rod. So when we watched all of the stuff happened with George Floyd and others earlier in the year, I think for a number of companies, it was really sort of the kick in the butt that they needed to say, "Hey, this is really important. And we should have been thinking about this, but we weren't, but here we go." And I think employees are holding their companies accountable to really focus and lean in on it. I think for a number of companies that deeply care, they're going all in, which is really great to see.
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Tom Hopcroft:
This engagement, this focus on accountability seeing from leaders in our community is shaping the future of our workplaces. Our next and final guest, PTC, chief strategy officer Kathleen Mitford explains how and why that's so important moving out of the pandemic.
Kathleen Mitford:
I think for our talent strategy, we believe that a diverse workforce drives new innovative ideas. So we continue to be focused on and really accelerating and leaning in to making sure that we have a diverse and inclusive environment for our employees. And we're seeing that some of the best, innovative ideas are people earlier in their career as well that know a lot of these new technologies that are really going to differentiate our company long-term. For the post-pandemic workplace and our geographic footprint, we're headquartered in Boston, we will continue to be headquartered in Boston, and we are committed to Boston. I think that we will be much more flexible with our employees in the number of days that they work from home. Pre-pandemic, our policy was you can work from home one day a week, maybe more if you get agreement with your manager.
Kathleen Mitford:
But I think that we will be much more flexible with that moving forward. I think we also will be a little bit more open as to where employees are located. We are a global company. We weren't completely open to people working from home depending upon their role, but now our focus is on the talent and where's the right talent. And that talent may not be at one of our major hubs.
Kathleen Mitford:
I think the other thing that's changing as well is as many of us have seen with kids in the background and dogs barking, that we will continue to be flexible with our employees and realize that employees can always work the 8:00 to 5:00 or 9:00 to 5:00 hours. And we've seen that our employees are efficient and they work well in the hours that they work. And I think we'll continue to give flexibility to make sure that our employees have a good balance between work and their family life.
Kathleen Mitford:
In 10 years from now, I think that we will see mass adoption of cloud and SaaS. I think the way that humans and machines interface will change. I think things like augmented reality are going to change not only how we help frontline workers be more effective and get up-skilled more quickly, but I think that augmented and virtual reality is going to change the way that we as people interact with machines.
Kathleen Mitford:
And then I also think that we'll see an advancement in spatial computing. And when you combine the human, the machine in their space and use technology like IOT, like augmented reality with spatial computing, I think that's going to change a lot of things for us as well. And then I also hope to see that in 10 years from now that diversity and inclusion is not something that we have to have a special focus on, that it's just part of the culture of the way that we live and the way that we work and the way that we do business.
Tom Hopcroft:
Workplace and company culture have been hard to maintain in the face of the pandemic, but through it all, we've found ways to make inclusive virtual spaces as we more deeply ingrain diversity, equity, and inclusion strategies into our businesses. Special thanks to our guests, David Meredith, Mike Volpe, Chris Comparato, Kathleen Mitford, and Christina Luconi for sharing their experiences, leading the charge to re-imagine workplace culture. And thank you listeners for joining us today. Follow us on our journey this season as we investigate Boston's challenges as a microcosm for bigger issues of equity and access through topics like access to technology, healthcare innovations, the future of education, and forward-thinking diversity equity and inclusion strategies. We take Boston's brand problem out of the shadows and onto the tech trail.
Beth York:
On The Tech Trail is a joint effort by the Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council and Matter, a brand elevation agency, and is made in partnership with Invest Northern Ireland. Our host is Tom Hopcroft. Special thanks to Kristen Keane and Mackenzie LeBert from MassTLC for booking our incredible guests. Our producers are Gabe Gerzon, David Riemer, and me, Beth York. Without our editors David Riemer and Mandy Lawson, each episode would have been three hours long at least. Our graphic designer Tanner Bjorlie makes us look good, and writer Shaw Flick makes sense of it all. Our executive producer is Tim Bradley, who works inside a closet. Our theme music is by Mikey Geiger. Thanks to everyone involved for contributing, collaborating, and bringing season two to life. If you loved it too, keep the conversation going by sharing on social, or by leaving us a rating or review in your podcast app. It makes a huge difference. And if you've got an idea for a pod, let us know at podcasts@matternow.com and maybe I'll be reading your name in the credits one of these days. Until then, see you next time On the Tech Trail.