The COVID-19 pandemic has had significant ramifications on the economy. One survey found that because of the virus, 31% of small and medium-sized businesses had to close down completely, and 41% of owners had to dip into their personal savings to stay …
While on maternity leave last summer, Chelsey Glasson made the difficult decision to leave Google. As Glasson exclusively told Fast Company in a detailed first-person account, it was the culmination of a year punctuated by alleged pregnancy discrimination and retaliatory behavior from multiple bosses. In September, Glasson filed a discrimination complaint with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC)—usually the first step toward taking legal action—and earlier this year, the agency opened an investigation into her claims.
This morning, Glasson officially filed a state lawsuit against Google. “Google has chosen to ignore the warning signs of a discriminatory culture,” the complaint reads. “As a result, the discriminatory culture and disdain for motherhood has been allowed to fester and expand, directly causing and allowing the unlawful discrimination against Plaintiff.” (Google was not immediately available for comment.)
The lawsuit comes after attempting to work with Google toward a resolution, according to Glasson. “It was not a decision that was easy to make,” she says of the decision to move forward with the suit. “From the beginning I knew it could end up there, and I’ve spent—with my family and others—a lot of time exploring it as an option and really thinking through: ‘Is this the right course of action?’”
When the EEOC launched its investigation in February, Glasson broached Google with a settlement offer. (Google had already responded to the initial complaint, in which the company argued it had “accommodated each of Ms. Glasson’s pregnancy-related requests,” and that there was “no support for Ms. Glasson’s contention that she suffered discrimination or retaliation as a result.”) She proposed that the tech giant partner with the Center for Parental Leave Leadership introduce training for managers and coaching to better support pregnant employees and new parents; she also requested emotional damages and reimbursement for her legal expenses. Google declined to settle.
For Glasson—who has now spent more than two years navigating the alleged discrimination and fallout from it—filing a lawsuit felt like the only way to command Google’s attention. The EEOC investigation will continue alongside the lawsuit, but Glasson’s team expects that it won’t come to a conclusion for many months or even a year.
“I needed my story to have some positive impact,” Glasson says. “There needed to be a reason for what happened to me. And second to that, I needed some recognition from Google that what happened wasn’t right—some acknowledgement in some form, whether it be a jury ruling in my favor in a lawsuit or the EEOC coming out with a finding. Without that, I will never feel like I fully recovered from the situation.”
Glasson’s allegations against Google first came to light in an anonymous memo that circulated last summer. During her initial four years at Google, Glasson had been promoted multiple times and consistently received high scores on her performance reviews, including two “superb” ratings, which she says only 3-5% of employees receive. In April 2018, Glasson reported her boss at the time (who is also named in Glasson’s lawsuit) to HR for making inappropriate comments about a team member’s pregnancy. When her boss’s behavior toward her changed significantly in response, Glasson—who became pregnant herself during that time—interviewed for and accepted a position on another team at Google. The new role was a management position with fewer responsibilities, and Glasson was told she wouldn’t be allowed to manage anyone until after she returned from maternity leave.
In the meantime, Glasson was diagnosed with a complete placenta previa, a serious and unpredictable condition in which the placenta covers the cervix. When she shared the news with her boss, Glasson claims her boss was dismissive and said that she had worked up until the day before she delivered her son via C-section. Glasson then hired an attorney to draft a demand letter to Google, in which she requested a transfer to another team and called for an investigation of her previous boss’s retaliation against her; Google countered with a walk-away agreement and payment of $30,000, which Glasson turned down. She ended up starting her maternity leave early and was hospitalized soon after, due to complications stemming from her diagnosis. While on leave, Glasson was given a “needs improvement” score in her performance review, which typically requires employees to get on a performance improvement plan. In August, she left Google for a role at Facebook.
In recent years, Google has become a hotbed for employee discontent and activism, particularly since the Google Walkout in 2018, which was sparked by the revelation that Google had paid millions of dollars to quietly dismiss male executives accused of sexual misconduct. A shareholder lawsuit brought against parent company Alphabet alleged that Google’s board of directors had an “active and direct role” in authorizing those payouts. (Glasson herself shared allegations of sexual harassment in a Medium post earlier this year. Google was not immediately available to comment on those allegations.)
Google is currently under investigation by the National Labor Relations Board over the firings of four employees last fall, all of whom had been agitating against a potential contract with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Google’s alleged mistreatment of employees. The company is also still mired in a pay discrimination lawsuit brought by former female employees who claimed to have been paid less than their male counterparts; the plaintiffs are now seeking class-action status for the lawsuit.
Since going public with her allegations, Glasson has already won a small victory: The state of Washington recently passed legislation that extended the statute of limitations for reporting pregnancy discrimination to the Washington State Human Rights Commission. Glasson testified in support of the bill, which was sponsored by state senator Karen Keiser. With this next step, she hopes to demand action from Google and underscore how difficult it is for workers to hold their employers accountable for mistreatment.
“I think it’s important for people to understand just how incredibly hard it is to fight workplace harassment, discrimination, and retaliation, as the person who has experienced it,” she says. “A lot of these bigger law firms want to represent corporations—there’s a guaranteed paycheck there. A company like Google can spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on a lawsuit without blinking an eye.”
As a tech worker, Glasson knows she is privileged, both in terms of her financial resources and and her ability to speak out about her experience and former employer. “If this is hard for me—I have more job stability, given the nature of the work that I do,” she says. “In some professions, if you were to be as vocal as I’ve been, your career would stop.”
During conventional times, there are plenty of resources and suggestions available to help leaders taking on a new role, with onboarding and assimilating to a new team in regular times. Yet this transition is so immensely challenging that studies show as many as 40% of newly appointed managers derail in their first 18 months in a new role.
Now imagine that you were appointed into a new role just before the pandemic hit, so you have to manage greater responsibilities than you’re used to, as well as get things done through people you hardly know yet—and can’t get to know in-person.
You will have to go beyond the textbook onboarding material to stay on your feet, especially while the pandemic continues to affect everyone’s work and life. To help you meet success, consider these four strategies.
Be open to new ways of observing your team’s performance
During a period outside of a crisis, a new boss at our company will acquaint themselves with the team through a listening tour, asking open-ended questions to solicit opinions, and walking around the office to observe people in action. But these days, leaders must be more creative about their preferred mode of gathering information.
An executive coaching client of mine was promoted at the beginning of the year (two months before the pandemic hit) to a VP position leading a multibillion-dollar division of a Fortune 50 company. His plan before the pandemic was to visit his globally scattered teams to develop connections with his managers and gather a clearer view of work on the ground. My client is a visual and kinesthetic learner, so face-to-face meetings are critical for his success.
Suddenly he was forced to manage this brand-new team completely via virtual meetings. Struggling with the inability to observe their work up close, my client began to grow sour about his new promotion, believing that he was destined to fail for reasons out of his control.
Through our coaching, I encouraged him to ask himself: “If I can’t go to them, how is there a way for them to ‘come to me?’”
The executive decided to ask his team to send him packets of photos that would help him get up to speed on their work since he couldn’t visit himself. His team leaders also asked the operations managers on the ground to take short videos of themselves talking about their work and any challenges, similar to an in-person interaction.
The strategy proved helpful. By making this request, my client opened himself up to learning and presented his staff with more autonomy. His team stepped up, and he was able to get back on the learning curve.
Adapt to your employees’ new vulnerabilities
With most colleagues working remotely, leaders must recognize their employees’ vulnerability around an uncertain work-home environment, as well as their hesitance over potentially embarrassing video-feed situations at home.
Some of your new team members may feel uncomfortable when comparing their home spaces, however spacious or otherwise, with their colleagues’ homes. In a related situation, your reports who are parents may struggle to appear attentive and present while their kids run around and their spouses try to work within earshot.
Keep in mind, as a new team member, your team is trying to gauge your leadership style, as well as how they should present themselves in your eyes. These concerns heighten dramatically now as the pandemic is forcing us to expose parts of ourselves that we usually wouldn’t share with all of our colleagues. Maintain flexibility and pragmatism when collaborating.
Check your prejudices around remote productivity
As companies began mandating employees to work from home, I observed something interesting in my work with corporate leaders. The executives who considered themselves introverted loved the policy, while my extroverted clients struggled with it. For these extroverted leaders, their concern was primarily based in a belief system that equated close physical proximity to coworkers with increased productivity.
Since introverted leaders typically flourish when left to themselves, many assumed the same of their colleagues; conversely, extroverts highly doubted how much their teams were getting done, remotely. When I asked one extroverted client why he was constantly texting his team during the day, he responded: “This way, I know they’re not sitting around watching Netflix all day.”
Therefore, when working remotely, resist projecting your discomfort about productivity under these conditions on others, just because you can’t observe them in real time. Monitoring people and mistrusting how they are operating when away from you removes their sense of autonomy and limits their discretionary effort.
Give before taking, and pull before pushing
Every newly appointed leader should work to find time to meet with their mentors and colleagues before big decisions. But this is hard to do because the pandemic has made your colleagues busier, more distracted, and physically distant. On an existential level, the crisis has also reminded people that life is too short to waste on things that seem superfluous right now.
For this reason, to establish yourself for success in a new role, you must prioritize giving value, rather than taking what you need from others. In the past, being pushy or “sales-y” was relatively harmless, but now, it can destroy valuable relationships.
To cultivate influence with colleagues, stop pushing your agenda and start gently pulling them toward you. For instance, if you want to meet with a peer or a direct report, rather than merely putting time on their calendar, try reaching out with a message asking if you can set up a meeting to talk about an issue and why this conversation may be helpful to them.
This is a time when it pays to ask before telling, pull before pushing, and invite before expecting. It’s the only way to attract (and not mandate) others to prioritize you in their increasingly busy life. Your chosen approach will establish you as a worthwhile leader (or not) through the pandemic and any future disruptions your team faces.
Nihar Chhaya is an executive coach to the C-suite and leaders at global companies, including American Airlines, Coca-Cola, Cigna, Cox Enterprises, Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, and more.
Before Teampay was forced to close its Manhattan offices in early March, the company had a lot of the features you’d expect to find at a startup: a healthy snack bar and a much more popular unhealthy snack bar, coffee machines, and comfortable hangout areas where staff would gather for informal conversations.
Each week the distributed spend management software company invited a guest speaker to host a lunch-and-learn. Every other week they hosted a demos-and-drinks night where the engineering team would show off its latest development over beer and cocktails, and each quarter the team would venture off for a surprise team outing.
So when the coronavirus forced the company to send its staff home, CEO Andrew Hoag says he wanted to do what he could to continue offering a similar work experience from home. “We continued the lunch-and-learn and the demos-and-drinks,” he says. “For example, instead of us bringing a catered lunch into the office, we used our product to give every employee a $20-a-week delivery stipend so they could order lunch.”
Teampay also offered staff a $500 stipend to put toward their home office setup and a more flexible work schedule so they could work around family responsibilities.
Since COVID-19 forced many workers out of their offices, employers have had to choose between delivering traditional perks to employees’ homes, abolishing the in-person parts of their benefits programs, or reconsidering their approach to employee benefits altogether. As the world of employee perks evolves to meet the needs of a rapidly changing workplace arrangement, many of these changes are expected to become yet another part of the “new normal.”
Redefining benefits for the COVID-19 era
In a recent study by talent mobility platform Topia, the majority of respondents indicated that empowerment and trust were the most important factors that contribute to a “great employee experience,” followed by job training opportunities and technology. Only 16% of employees indicated that a “cool” office space, including perks such as free food and games, were a priority.
“The pandemic has highlighted an extreme shift in what we are all looking for from a work experience,” says Jacky Cohen, Topia’s vice president of people and culture. “It’s an opportunity to rethink the term ‘benefits’ in general and really think about what companies offer to their employees in the new world of the distributed workforce.”
In recent months employers and HR departments have also been turning their attention toward the perks that employees are more likely to need to get through this turbulent period, says Natalie Baumgartner, chief workforce scientist for employee engagement platform Achievers. “It’s definitely forcing organizations to ask the question ‘What’s most important? Where do we put our dollars? And what’s most valuable to our employees?’” she says. “The things that fundamentally support our well-being need to come first.”
Those perks, according to Baumgartner, include mental health resources, flexibility, and monetary incentives.
Shifting priorities—and budgets
“[Employers and HR departments] are changing their behaviors,” says Baumgartner. “What direction they’re changing depends on the financial viability of their company, the strategic direction—do we need to be literally together moving forward—and just their value system, which drives a lot of these decisions.”
Baumgartner adds that in the midst of an economic crisis many companies have had to tighten their belts and eliminate some of the benefits that they previously offered. For example, many are reducing benefits related to continuing education and employee training in the face of an uncertain economic future. “It was something that was offered by organizations as a massive perk—getting a higher education, going to business school. In many cases that’s gone by the wayside,” she says. “It’s something organizations simply can’t justify in this state of financial unpredictability.”
A reminder of simpler times
While employees are seeking more meaningful perks such as mental health resources and greater flexibility, there is still a demand for traditional perks that can offer consistency and comfort in uncertain times.
Prior to the coronavirus outbreak, New York-based Stadium provided a service that allowed office workers at a company to order food from several different restaurants on the same order, meaning colleagues didn’t have to agree on a lunch spot. Since the outbreak, cofounder and CEO Shaunak Amin has launched another business, SnackMagic, that allows remote staff to receive personalized snack boxes at their home office anywhere in the country.
According to Amin, the custom snack delivery company has doubled every two weeks since its launch just over two months ago. “There aren’t many tools or services that are built for the remote setting,” he says. “Based on the initial interest we’ve seen, I think it’s here to stay.”
While Amin admits that snacking isn’t a top priority for most companies in the midst of a global pandemic, the cost of a few treats is minimal compared to what they would otherwise spend on stocking office kitchens, and the gesture goes a long way. “It makes the employee feel like the employer cares, not just for me but also for my family, because often the kids are picking the snacks,” he says.
New Officemates, New Perks
Another major shift in the delivery of workplace benefits is the intended recipient. Prior to the pandemic, perks were primarily targeted toward employees, with family members occasionally added as a secondary recipient to health plans and other benefits.
“The biggest change we’re seeing with COVID is this understanding that no employee operates in isolation,” says Daniel Freedman, the cofounder and co-CEO of BurnAlong, a digital corporate wellness platform. “That’s the biggest shift that we’ve seen; families are central.”
BurnAlong offers a digital platform that allows users to receive one-on-one or group training sessions with hundreds of health and wellness providers, with classes ranging from traditional fitness to mindfulness and meditation to rehabilitation for medical conditions. Freedman says that the platform has doubled its client list since last year, with more than a quarter of all classes now dedicated to emotional support.
“That’s everything from parenting classes, arthritis, diabetes, adaptive workouts for people with disabilities, sleep, anxiety—and this mirrors what you’re seeing with a heightened focus on mental health and loneliness,” he says.
Some of the most popular options are also geared toward nonworking members of the household, such as virtual summer camp programs for kids. “If your spouse, your partner, your parent, your kids are struggling, that affects your productivity. So when it comes to health and wellness, every company is looking at how to deliver programming and support for families as well,” he says. “We even have pet workouts—workouts that people can do with their dogs. It’s all about meeting people wherever they are and with whoever their loved ones are.”
I made a major career change during the largest pandemic in history.
After nearly a decade at Zillow, I recently joined Ethos as their chief revenue officer. I went from helping people purchase homes to helping families get life insurance from the safe…
Years ago, when my wife, April, and I were getting married, we decided to DIY our wedding invitations to cut down on cost. What I didn’t know at the time was that this mundane task of assembling, addressing, and sealing 200+ invitations would te…
Global shift to work from home boosted sales for software and cloud service
Why do some leaders have trouble changing course? The escalation of commitment trap and how to avoid it.
Slack accusing Microsoft of unfairly foisting its Teams collaborative software on millions of users
People at all levels in the workplace say that “we don’t stop often enough to acknowledge what we’ve done and celebrate some of our successes.” Celebration and acknowledgment are the first steps in the continuous improvement…
