Envoy ‘Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop’ Making The Workplace Safer For People To Come Back

Larry Gadea, the CEO and founder of the $1.4 billion market valuation unicorn workplace app, Envoy, had a circuitous route to success compared to other Silicon Valley tech leaders.

As a young child he had to flee communist Romania with his family. He was smuggled out in the backseat of his parents’ car, lived in Germany, then moved onto Ottawa, Canada. His parents held Master’s degrees and had great careers in Romania, but they were forced to start all over again. They worked difficult blue-collar jobs. His mother cleaned houses, and his father picked berries.

Larry Gadea strived to build a better future for himself and his family. He joined Google as a software engineer, and later moved to Twitter to become one of the first fifty employees of the social media site. He noticed that there were many people coming and going into the fast-growing office, and couldn’t tell who worked there or were guests, clients, business partners or friends of employees.

To get a handle on the increased flow of unfamiliar faces, Gadea did what came naturally, he built an app. He designed a ‘visitor’ program to ‘sign-in’ folks and keep track of who is entering the building.

It was successful, and Gadea launched a business around the visitor app.

AI-Powered Bots May Be The Answer To The Great Resignation And War For Talent

When a new technology is developed, it's first met with skepticism by many and enthusiastically embraced by others. Over time, more often than not, people realize that smartphones, computers, the internet, cryptocurrency and virtual reality add value to our lives and work.

One company that is on a mission to fully automate businesses is UiPath. The tech company is a leading enterprise automation vendor, headquartered in New York City and has offices around the world with about 3,000 employees. Its sophisticated software platform helps clients build AI-powered bots that take care of important, but mundane tasks that bog down human workers.

Using machine learning, AI and bots, UiPath is changing and improving the way people work. Its mission is to unlock human creativity and potential by empowering workers through automation. It uses robotic process automation, a software technology that makes it easy to build, deploy and manage software robots that emulate human actions.

More than 9,600 customers, including 80% of the Fortune 10 and more than 60% of the Fortune Global 500, use UiPath’s technologies. Its clients include Chipotle, Eversource, Equifax, Cleveland Clinic and Autodesk.

Nowsta Is ‘Mission Control’ For Companies To Easily Find And Hire ‘Just-In-Time’ Workers

Throughout the beginning of the pandemic, frontline workers, restaurant staff and bartenders were furloughed and fired in alarmingly large numbers. As time progressed and the dire situation slightly improved, the deadly virus outbreak made people reevaluate their work lives. They decided that they will no longer kowtow to bosses who treat them poorly and don’t pay well.

Almost two years later, businesses can’t find enough workers to satiate their needs. In 2022, workers are in the driver's seat. Businesses are desperate to attract, recruit and retain people. Smart entrepreneurs are building apps and platforms to help find workers. One of these people is Nicholas Lillios, who is the cofounder and CEO of Nowsta. He built a business around just-in-time workers, creating an easier way to schedule, manage and pay hourly staff.

Employers often spend anywhere from 30 to 50 hours a week managing hourly, gig and temp workers. The Nowsta platform can streamline the process, reducing that time to 30 minutes per week. For workers, it also means getting paid instantly—something that has been a pain point for temporary and shift workers for years. Nick refers to Nowsta as “mission control” for gig, shift, temp and flex workforces.

Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, along with sophisticated payments technology, Lillios reimagined the way businesses communicate with and pay their hourly wage employees. The mission is to make a “better and more human work experience, equipping both employers and employees with tools they need to meet the challenges of work in the 21st century.”

The platform became one of the fastest-growing tech companies in the hotels, catering, restaurants, staffing, events and other customer-facing and frontline jobs. Nowsta helps manage more than 300,000 workers across more than 600 employers—ranging from stadiums and hotels, to food services vendors and warehouses every month with work schedules, communicating with their managers and instantly accessing their wages.

Basically, Nowsta, with sophisticated software, can find workers who are idle and alert them of an opening for work. For instance, one bar on the block may be slow, but has too many servers on the shift. The app can alert the waitstaff about the need for help at another restaurant a few blocks away. Multiply this scenario throughout New York City and other states across the country. The company presents it as a combination of “workforce management tools, like automated scheduling, real-time analytics and streamlined time-tracking, with an on-demand labor marketplace that connects employers to a skilled pool of workers sourced by trusted third-party staffing providers.”

Innovative startups are seeking out new creative ways to help businesses mentor, upskill, cross-train and help employees succeed, so that the odds will increase that people will stick around. GrowthSpace, an Israeli-based tech company, offers a clever way to help CEOs fight attrition by offering personalized learning and development programs (L&D), driven by an artificial intelligence data-driven platform.

The startup connects workers with an appropriate mentor. The employee will have one-on-one, personalized programs that match each employee’s challenge with the right expert, coach or mentor. In addition to specifically tailored advice and guidance, based on the employee’s needs, managers receive feedback simultaneously that measures progress to ensure the plan is efficient and effective.

Small Towns And Cities Are Offering Up To $20,000 For Remote Workers To Relocate

Remote, hybrid and flexibility—the ability to work whenever and wherever you want—will be the new future of work. This will cause significant societal changes.

Digital nomads, mainly single knowledge workers, have started relocating to beach towns, ski slopes and far-off, international, exotic locations. There’s been a shift from large crowded cities to the suburbs.

During the pandemic, a number of countries offered incentives to attract remote workers. As their economies were mainly tourism based, they were in dire need of revenue. Inducing knowledge workers to live and work in their country was a great way to bring in much needed revenue and taxes.

Barbados, Estonia, Bermuda and Georgia have all opened their doors to Americans, inviting them to come, work, pay taxes and contribute to the economy. In an open letter from Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, she warmly encouraged people to migrate to her country. “On behalf of our beautiful island of Barbados, I would like to extend a warm welcome to you.”

In the U.S., smaller cities and towns are attempting to attract remote workers. They are offering lucrative sign-on bonuses to help with the move. They are also leveraging good, old-fashioned amenities to draw people in.

Alain Dehaze, CEO of Adecco, Shares His Insights On The Future Of Work And The ‘Great Reevaluation’

Alain Dehaze, the CEO of Adecco, one of the largest, diversified international talent staffing firms in the world, shared his views on the future of work.

Dehaze, comes across as the antithesis of the perception of a CEO presiding over a large, sprawling organization. He’s humble, polite, candid, transparent and passionate about advocating for a better workplace experience for employees and empowering managers to empathetically lead their respective teams. In this fast-changing Covid-19 environment, leadership, he contends, must be on top of trends and workers’ attitudes, desires, needs and the way in which they want to work on a daily basis.

Due to the large global reach of Adecco and its array of divisions throughout the world, the company offers a unique global perspective on the current and future trends of work. By recognizing the changes and taking appropriate actions, both management and workers can succeed during these tumultuous and uncertain times. Companies are starting to critically rethink how they can build and lead.

His Swiss-based company recently conducted a “Resetting Normal 2021” study of 14,800 knowledge-workers across 25 countries, in an effort to gain market intelligence and important insights into what is happening in the work world.

Please listen to the highlights of the study.

Working at Coinbase, the large cryptocurrency exchange, Amy Yin recognized that the world was fast moving toward a distributed, flexible remote workplace. As this quickly happens, there’s a dire need to make the lives of both employees and managers easier.

Yin left her good job at Coinbase to prove her thesis by focusing on building an office reservation and scheduling tool specifically designed with hybrid remote offices in mind. She started OfficeTogether, a company that offers a software platform to enhance the experience of remote workers. The product also makes the lives of human resources and management easier and more productive.

OfficeTogether strives to make it easy for a business to become a hybrid-office company by creating a cool scheduling and capacity management software that can integrate your physical space with the Slack, Google Calendar, Okta and other platforms.

An important feature for workers is that you can check the app to see who will be in the office on any given day. If the people you need to collaborate with aren’t scheduled, then it may not make sense to spend three hours commuting back and forth to the office just to go on Zoom calls, which could just be done at home. It could also help employees from showing up to an office that is already at capacity, or when a big, noisy and rambunctious sales meeting is scheduled to take place.

Yin is focused on productively helping teams plan their time in office together.

A Single Mother, Self-Taught Software Developer Living With Mental Illness Raises Concerns Over Apple’s Limited Remote-Work Policy

Tim Cook, the CEO of Apple, recently told his global workforce of 137,000 employees that they’d have to return to the office beginning early September. It's expected that employees will spend about three days a week at the office and the other two at home or remotely.

In an open letter to Cook, some employees of Apple voiced their concerns about returning to an in-person office setting stating, “We feel like the current policy is not sufficient in addressing many of our needs.” The letter pointed out that workers delivered “the same quality of products and services that Apple is known for, all while working almost completely remotely.”

Despite protests from workers, Apple is remaining resolute in its position. Remote-work positions will be limited and decisions made “on a case-by-case basis with any new remote positions requiring executive approval.”

Otmar Szafnauer has been on a wild ride. Born in Semlac, a small village in Romania, he immigrated with his family to Detroit, Michigan as a young boy.

Szafnauer received a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering from Wayne State University and a master's degree in business and finance from the University of Detroit.

He joined the Ford Motor Company and was appointed program manager for Ford in the United States. While he was working at Ford, Szafnauer had larger ambitions and attended the Jim Russell Car Racing School. The engineer turned race car driver.

After Ford, Szafnauer became the operations director at British American Racing in Formula 1 (F1), hired by Honda. He then rose to vice-president of Honda racing developments and became a member of the management board of the Honda F1 team. Szafnauer later joined Force India. He was, up until very recently, the CEO and team principal of the Aston Martin F1 Team.

In an in-depth conversation, Szafnauer shared his management philosophy.

In an interview with Ginnie Carlier, EY Americas vice chair of talent, we discuss the movement that she is spearheading.

Oftentimes, when you speak with top executives they use meaningless jargon, espouse platitudes and nothing gets accomplished. Carlier is direct and a woman of action. She is on a mission to make EY an empathetic workplace.

By doing so, it will improve the mental health and well-being of her employees. Happier workers, who feel empowered, respected and trusted by managers, will outperform, as they greatly appreciate the confidence and autonomy. This should result in satisfied clients, as appreciative professionals work harder and smarter. Revenue and profit growth then follow suit.

Carlier discussed that EY will have a “flexible” workstyle. This means that if a person wants to work remotely, that’s fine. Should they want to come into the office a couple of days a week, the office is open. The employees are treated like adults who can make their own informed decisions on what type of schedules work best for them. Of course, there will be times when meetings, a client’s desire for an in-person conversation or a team leader needing a person to be in the office will be honored and the relevant professionals would be asked to be available.

The secret sauce, according to Carlier, is to be empathetic.