Prior to the pandemic, employees who wanted to work remotely could expect to wrestle with significant trade-offs, assuming their employers gave them permission at all.
These employees likely wouldn’t be given the necessary tools and resources to work effectively, for one. Even if their office used collaborative software like Airtable or Slack, their superiors probably lacked much experience managing remote staff. Recognition and career advancement opportunities might have been hard to come by.
But when a whole company (or planet) transitions to remote work simultaneously, it puts everyone on an even playing field—in more ways than one.
“It should make it more equitable for people to get praised and promoted for the right things—that is, the results that they drive—not the wrong things, like the kinds of clothes that you wear, or the way you verbalize in a meeting, or just because you happened to get an office next to someone you can rub shoulders with,” Murph says. “The politicking that had a negative impact on anyone that wasn’t a white male, hopefully that will start to degrade, and you can build more equity around advancement and career progression tied to results.”
The office as we know it is over-and that's a good thing
Last spring, when hospitals were filling up with Covid-19 patients and restaurants were struggling to survive, Frank Barbieri and Ryan Sarver, two San Francisco tech veterans, and their friend Sydney Gressel, a nurse in the medical system of the University of California, San Francisco, came up with the idea of connecting hungry frontline health workers with local restaurants that badly needed more business. They began raising money and soliciting help from their networks in the tech community to send restaurant meals to health workers, and Frontline Foods was born.
Today, Frontline Foods is part of World Central Kitchen, the nonprofit started by the chef José Andrés. It has raised more than $10 million, has hundreds of volunteers throughout the country coordinating meal drop-offs using tools like Slack and AirTable, and has served more than 500,000 meals to hospitals and clinics, while keeping many struggling restaurants busy and afloat.
UK’s Royal National Institute of Blind People has prototyped the world’s first accessible pregnancy test for people with impaired vision. Results are tactile, with raised bumps indicating a pregnancy. With existing tests, women with impaired vision need help to read a result, which means they can never be the first to know, and can’t experience that moment privately.
15% (!) of the world’s population has some form of disability, which means you’ll gain access to a significant group of potential customers if you take their needs into account. And creative solutions might end up improving your products and services for everyone.
💡 How can you adapt your products and services to be more accessible?
When George Floyd was killed in May, lots of Silicon Valley tech companies raced to voice their support for racial justice. But many of those companies have continued to make products that put Black communities at risk — whether it’s through amplifying misinformation, deploying biased artificial intelligence or perpetuating racism in their work forces.
This year, I’ve been more impressed by community-based efforts I’ve seen to support Black Lives Matter and other anti-racist movements using the tools of technology to hold institutions accountable. One of these efforts, Our Data Bodies, is an education project run by researchers and organizers in Los Angeles; Detroit; Charlotte, N.C.; and other cities. It has worked to teach communities of color how their personal data is collected and used by tech firms and government agencies. This year, it hosted virtual trainings for community organizers to teach them how to fight potentially harmful technologies like facial recognition.
Another effort, Data for Black Lives, is a group of technologists and activists led by Yeshimabeit Milner who are using the tools of data science to empower Black communities. This year, the group compiled state-level data about the impact of Covid-19 on Black people, and it is in the early stages of putting together a nationwide database of technologies used by police departments, with evidence of how those technologies disproportionately harm Black people.
Because of climate change, we’re probably in for many more wildfires like the ones that burned through the West Coast this summer, driving hundreds of thousands of people from their homes. But in future years, we might be better equipped to deal with them thanks to tools like those made by Perimeter, Technosylva and Ignis, three start-ups that are trying to modernize the firefighter’s outdated arsenal.