Technology has the ability to be the great equalizer and so we really need to focus on this as a society, and on how we do this the right way.

—Jacky Wright, chief digital officer, Microsoft

Donna Morris was less than a month into her role as Walmart's chief people officer when the retail giant saw its first stateside case of Covid. Late on a Friday night, Donna was in her rental apartment in Bentonville when she got the call to come to the company's Emergency Operations Center (EOC) in northwest Arkansas early Saturday morning. Located in the company's home office, the EOC is where associates physically and virtually gather to deal with any kind of emergency, whether a natural disaster, a fire, or, in this case, a pandemic. With her bags and boxes not yet unpacked from her recent move from California, Donna immediately pivoted to crisis mode, preparing to head back to the offices in the early morning with no idea what she was about to face. When she arrived at the massive complex, she found her way to the situation room in the back, where about 40 colleagues were studying an entire wall of digital screens. The monitors were live streaming data from Johns Hopkins that showed the number of Covid cases across the country and the virus's rapid, state‐by‐state projected trajectory.

“We immediately started thinking about how we were going to run our stores, distribution, and fulfillment centers while protecting the 1.6 million associates who worked for us in the United States, and that started a domino effect of what my job became,” Donna told me.

The monumental challenge was that the majority of their associates weren’t office‐based who could go home and work from their laptops, although those who were office workers did. But the business would not function without its frontline associates, who interacted the most with the general public. With Donna and her team playing a key role, Walmart responded to the rapidly evolving situation by consulting with the CDC and with state and local health experts, implementing cleaning and sanitizing protocols and providing personal protective equipment. They immediately introduced an emergency leave policy, waiving the attendance policy for anyone who chose to stay home during that period of uncertainty (regardless of Covid or quarantine status), or for those required to quarantine, and provided up to 26 weeks of paid leave for those who contracted the virus. And they made all their associates eligible for funds from their Walmart Associates in Critical Need Trust, regardless of tenure.

It was a Herculean feat of logistics that required a 30,000‐foot understanding of a situation that was in constant flux, along with a deep sense of the individual needs of their associates and the customers they served. It required leadership that blended empathy, strategic thinking, and decisive action. But in addition to responding swiftly to the immediate and obvious needs that would keep the doors open and associates empowered to work, Donna soon turned her attention to ways her workforce could benefit beyond the pandemic. The innovation for the workforce needed to be focused on the front line. The team worked to develop “Me@Walmart,” an app that would support greater associate access to scheduling and work‐related benefits, along with tools for on the job. Ultimately, Walmart provided more than a million frontline workers with a digital device to support work and life, including the ability to have more command of their own schedules.

“There will be optionality, and that will allow people to engage on a different level. Hopefully more companies will offer these benefits so parents don't have to feel conflicted, an associate can take care of an elderly parent, receive health treatment, or they simply take a break if they feel stressed out.”

While Walmart does not have a hybrid model of working for all associates, the company is focused on providing flexibility for associates. Ultimately, Walmart is enabling associates to be more engaged and focused on serving customers and members, which is paying dividends in terms of productivity and retention.

Flexibility = Productivity

There has been an awakening to new ways of working and leading that has swept across industries, regardless of role or rank. Even CFOs, who used to spend weeks of their year flying into and then schlepping around New York and Boston visiting investors, have told me that for 90% of their interactions now, everything is so much more efficient over Zoom. The genie is out of the bottle, and most businesses will need to enable remote work or some hybrid model of remote and in‐person if they want to retain their best talent.

Nearly all the companies that used to be staunch believers in everyone being in the office together have now internalized that if they adhere to those old norms, they are going to miss the boat on the top talent in the market. Employees have options, and they want balance in their lives. They now know rationally that they don't have to waste hours and days of their lives driving and flying when, in many cases, their work can be accomplished just as successfully over Zoom. We have collectively proven it. And I predict that Millennials will continue to challenge our old assumptions and ways of doing business. By and large, Millennials aren't willing to sacrifice like my generation did – and they know that they don't have to.

And we have the numbers to prove it. Now that they have had a taste of it, 72% of workers say they prefer a flexible work model, according to a global survey of 9,000 knowledge workers conducted by Slack.¹ The workforce solutions platform ADP Research Institute² found that 67% of employees said they felt more empowered to take advantage of workplace flexibility, compared with 26% before the pandemic. This would seem to make workplace flexibility a critical tool not just for employee retention, but productivity. The 2021 State of Remote Work Report by videoconferencing technology company Owl Labs³ found that this was overwhelmingly the case, with 90% of employees reporting that they were as productive, if not more, working remotely. So, when leaders like Donna take pains to introduce more flexibility into the lives of their workers, it's not just about being a nice boss. It's good for business.

Equal Airtime

Videoconferencing tools like Zoom have now become an integral part of the way we work. The “future of work” has finally become our present. And the reality is that these tools can give a woman leader an advantage on multiple fronts. Broadly speaking, they are a means of visibility and networking that give access to all. While the picture of emerging technology and its effects on the workplace for women is nuanced, the clear upside is that they can be powerful weapons in the fight for parity. No longer does someone have to be judged negatively if she is stepping out of the office in the middle of the afternoon to take her child or elderly parent to a doctor's appointment, because it will be evident through her digital imprint that she's been just as productive as her colleagues, if not more, throughout the day.

As I mentioned at the beginning of this book, Zoom is a great corporate democratizer. It's much harder for one person to dominate the conversation in a Zoom meeting because each person's square is the same size. It is much easier to look at all your squares in one place than it is to crane your neck to look around a room to make sure everyone has had an opportunity to participate in the conversation. With everyone's faces before you, it's easier to observe their expressions to discern who might want to say something but is reluctant or shy until invited to speak. There is a whole new etiquette to videoconferencing that's more inclusive and makes us less at the mercy of the alpha personalities in the room.

“It's not just about who has the title, or who has inserted himself most,” observed Elena Gomez, chief financial officer (CFO) of Toast, a cloud‐based technology platform for restaurants.

Videoconferencing has also democratized access. It's much easier to grab five minutes of facetime with your boss or mentor, for example. Getting a meeting with a client used to require weeks of back and forth between administrative assistants to get lunch or coffee on the schedule. Often it would require flying to their city, taking time away from family and other work tasks. If you are a busy mom, logistically those dealmaking connections can be much harder to make.

“With Zoom it's just a quick call and you're in,” said Elena.

But the result can be just as impactful, enabling these women to bring in more customers and show more results, furthering their careers and moving them faster along on the parity path without having to rack up all those airmiles.

Output Versus Input

Of course, the big question on the minds of leaders is productivity. Many companies still don't fully trust those who are off‐site and unseen. They focus on input, concerned that individuals aren't plugged in nine to five, rather than the output that truly matters. But data‐driven organizations that are carefully measuring output are beginning to realize that past notions of how a hard‐working, go‐getting employee behaves don't necessarily line up with the facts. Again, the assumption was that the mom who leaves early to pick up her child from school isn't getting the same results as the guy who is always in the office. The first to get in and the last to leave must definitionally be the best, right? Or not.

“When we look at the outputs, it forces us to reassess our ideas around bias more honestly,” Christa told me. “People thought, Bob’s doing a great job. He’s getting in at 7 a.m. and leaving at 9 p.m. He’s a real killer. But we never really knew what Bob was doing all day. He could have been sitting in his office watching Netflix. (Christa was speaking hypothetically, of course.)

Digital empowerment, smartly managed with measurable results, favors the quiet achievers. As Susan Cain so smartly observed in Quiet, her seminal book on the power of introverts, “There's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas.”⁴

We might be attending a parent‐teacher meeting at 4 p.m., but we've been powering through one client call after another since 7 a.m., and we'll be reading reports and whitepapers starting again at 7 p.m., once we've fed, bathed, and tucked in our kids, until 10 p.m. That level of input isn't visible to our colleagues or bosses, and not all of us are inclined to shout from the rooftops about it.

There are ways to track how many calls an employee made, how many engagements with potential customers, the duration of the engagements, and closure rates. What I do each day as a leadership advisor, for example, is highly measurable in terms of the revenue it generates for my firm. Although I might enjoy it, I don't need to schmooze in person or be seen at my desk to get the work done.

The Human Touch

For all its advantages, remote work obviously needs to be well‐managed, and this is a new muscle that we are collectively building. Leaders can't afford to lose touch with the people behind the Zoom screens.

The possibility of being “on” and available 24/7 can easily lead to burnout, for example. Zoom fatigue is real, and leaders need to check in more often with individual team members to encourage healthy work habits. Encourage feedback and never assume that technology solves everything.

Being digitally connected is part of daily work life for Jennifer Goldfarb, co‐founder of Ipsy, the iconic Silicon Valley‐based online beauty company that was born out of the YouTube beauty movement. Like most companies during the pandemic, working remotely and relying on technology for connectivity became even more the case, to the point where the script flipped, and most interaction was through digital screens. But the shift prompted Jen to become more intentional about those in‐person moments. When members of her team do enter the same physical space together, Jen tries to make it special, so it's not just another day in the office. Rather, it is an event with real purpose behind it – an office or conference that's designed to be memorable.

“It's almost like the digital is for the day to day and then we bring people together for collaboration, team building, rapport building, all of the stuff that used to come from everybody being immersed with each other five days a week,” Jen told me. “Technology is great for getting things done efficiently, but maybe a totally digital world is less good for some of the softer but important aspects of building a company, such as blue‐sky thinking, creativity, or building rapport with a young team.”

For all that is possible in a virtual workplace setting, it's about balancing and managing it, and injecting more meaning into those in‐person moments that we once took for granted.

Micro Moments

Toast's Elena Gomez is another leader who recognized the need to radically change the way we work. As a senior finance leader at companies including Visa, Charles Schwab, Salesforce, and Zendesk, she has a track record of implementing tools and making cultural adjustments to enhance quality of life and diversity among her team members. But it was at Zendesk, a global customer support software company, where she served as CFO during the first months of the pandemic, that she embraced tools like “Wellness Wednesdays” and “Recharge Fridays” to accommodate the work–life needs of her diverse team members.

Elena came to the realization that there was a need to build in some room to breathe when she caught a glimpse into the lives of her direct reports over Zoom.

Seeing moms with small children running around in the background, or moms having to nurse babies during a meeting, juggling it all on their own because they didn't have the resources for a babysitter, reminded Elena, whose own kids were a little older, that there was a whole other dimension to the lives of these individuals who were doing their best to show up in those uncertain times.

“We developed this thesis that if we don't give people a mental break, they're not going to be the best version of themselves at work. By offering them some flexibility at home with their partner, to take their child to the doctor or whatever their need was, they would be less tired or distracted.”

Busy working moms loved the program, although it was meant for everyone, including men.⁵ It had to be inclusive because, with everyone tethered to their technology beyond normal office hours, the prospect of Zoom burnout loomed large regardless of family status or demographics. Across 20 countries Zendesk implemented free digital mental health programs, mindfulness training, and coaching, as well as clinical support for those who needed it.

Zendesk has since mandated that all their employees take the second Friday of every month off to rest and recharge, so that no one feels singled out for choosing the timeout and “women don't feel it is focused on them,” Elena explained. The result is a grateful and more engaged workforce. While Elena is no longer there, as a leader she's taken these insights with her to Toast, which has a less formal though no less intentional approach with the same principles, avoiding scheduling meetings on Friday, offering counseling, and being more liberal with their leave policy in recognition of the stress and isolation wrought by national and global events.

“In return you get happier, more engaged employees, potentially more loyalty, and that translates to better retention over time,” Elena explained. “Think about how you feel when you come back from vacation. You have perspective and you feel reenergized.”

Beyond policies and broad‐based programs for wellness, Elena also makes a point of checking in with her people as individuals.

“As a leader, you've got to show empathy,” she told me. “Acknowledge the difficult times and have those micro moments. Hey, how's it going? All those big programs don't replace the day‐to‐day interactions. Human kindness, especially in this environment, goes a long way. And when you're behind Zoom for so long, you have to be intentional about how to make connections with your colleagues. Even a 15‐minute check‐in can be incredibly impactful. It's likely a micro moment in a day but to the person you have connected with, the impact can be exponential.”

“The fact that flexibility at work has been embraced is a beacon of hope,” Elena told me. It's about everyone who works. If you're female, especially someone who is raising kids, even better. But it's a good thing that women don't feel it is isolated to their needs.”

The rising tide lifts all boats, creating more room for diverse perspectives, experiences, and identities, which may ultimately lead us to the full democratization of corporate life. And women leaders are playing a huge part in enabling this change.

“If we can evolve that dramatically in two years, if we can change the norm after it's been the norm for over a hundred years, proving that this new way of working works for everyone, why can't we make this change to have more women run companies?” Elena asked.

We've seen a revolution in the workplace, but this is only the beginning. This new environment of flexibility, access, and empathy could become the launchpad that finally gets us to 50–50 at the highest levels. As “Sapient Leader” Elena well noted, “What we thought was impossible became possible right before our eyes.”

Below the Zoom Line

Dame Vivian Hunt, Senior Partner Emeritus at McKinsey's London office and author of The Power of Parity, agrees. She found that these digital workplace tools, when well‐managed, could free up time otherwise spent on routine or transactional tasks. For organizations operating on a hybrid model, that two or three days in the office should be quality time spent enriching relationships with our teams, expanding our networks, and investing in the professional development of ourselves and each other. Whatever we do with it, that time spent away from home needs to be valued at a premium.

“When I am staying out late or traveling for work it is a major priority for me to make that time away from my family even more effective and impactful,” said Dame Vivian.

Making remote work work is a matter of checking in with the whole person. Dame Vivian is a fan of Zoom and the “powerful, thoughtful, and engaging content” she receives online when engaging with her peers. As an author, all the discussions I've had for this book have been on Zoom, Microsoft Teams, or Google Meet, and the conversations with the women leaders I have quoted on these pages have been so fascinating and enlightening that we often lost track of time and went well beyond our allotted time. These kinds of exchanges are made possible when you are working with a group of skilled and motivated individuals, whether they are colleagues or interview subjects. But it remains incumbent upon leaders to put in the effort and bring about those deeper conversations.

“We have to remember to swipe right and see everyone on our screens,” said Dame Vivian, “Team leaders should be intentional online. We should manage hybrid working proactively to deliver inclusive and productive meetings.”

“Lots of things happen below the Zoom line.” Dame Vivian was reminded of this fact with a jolt when she learned that one of her direct reports was about to go on maternity leave. For months during the pandemic, her only contact with the woman had been via Zoom, from the neck up. Her facial features changed very little throughout those months, so Dame Vivian had no idea.

“Having had children myself, I can't imagine working with someone and them not knowing that I was pregnant.”

As a senior leader, she blamed herself for the oversight.

“I must apologize to you for not knowing about what will probably be one of the most important thing to happen in your life,” she said to the woman.

“Why?” the associate asked her. “I never told you.”

“Yes, but in these last nine months I should have checked in and asked about your life beyond just, ‘How are you?’ – I should have been more curious,” Dame Vivian explained to her. “It would surely have come out if I had made the effort to probe just a bit further in our conversations.”

The associate had always been treated with the utmost professional respect. As she did with all her team members, Dame Vivian supported, coached, and mentored this expectant mother in ways that enabled her to excel at her job. She has high potential, with plenty of opportunities to develop within the firm. Yet if this colleague were to ever leave McKinsey, “it will be because she is in an environment where she doesn't feel seen and known, even by people who mean well and have good intentions,” Dame Vivian explained.

So by all means, leverage technology for flexibility and inclusion. But never forget the human life that lives and breathes beyond those pixels. “You can become so ‘efficient’ that you aren’t building real relationships. When this happens, you are short‐changing yourself and your colleagues in the process.”

Instead, use the precious time and freedom clawed back by this technology for “building soft skills, investing in relationships, and coaching, both giving and receiving it,” Dame Vivian continued. Make all that extra bandwidth count.

Of course, it's not just Zoom that's rewriting the rules of the workplace (and leadership). We now have a whole slew of tech tools at our fingertips that, if harnessed effectively, could end up being a game changer for the visibility of women in the corporate world.

When Agnes Heftberger first relocated to Singapore with IBM in February 2022, many of the countries in her remit were still in lockdown. In her new role as general manager and technology leader of IBM ASEANZK, she had the monumental task of merging operations in nine fast‐growing and strategically important markets across Australia, Southeast Asia, New Zealand, and Korea. Top of mind was how to create a new organization and community across such a diverse geography – not least because the pandemic was still forcing everyone to work remotely and in‐person meetings were not happening.

Since the 1990s, IBM has invested in the infrastructure and tools to enable employees to work from anywhere. But being able to log in and see the faces of your colleagues and customers doesn't necessarily solve the problem of managing projects that require true collaboration, alignment, creativity, and innovation.

Agnes was looking for feedback on strategic topics like market opportunities, cultural transformation, and collaboration, and knew that she had to find a way to enable individuals who had never been in the same room together to share ideas and brainstorm – even if they're not sitting around the same table with a whiteboard, coffee, and takeout sandwiches. How could she make it work without that human chemistry of being face to face?

The answer was to use IBM's companywide messaging platform for a four‐day‐long “storm” that gathered feedback across nine countries and eight product groups. Through this system, IBMers could work from different locations in a way that was asynchronistic, catching up in their own time, asking questions and sharing updates without having to coordinate their schedules.

But Agnes took it a step further. Her leadership teams started having other real‐time remote brainstorming sessions.

“We asked ourselves, ‘What are the most burning issues in terms of establishing this new market?” Agnes recalled.

They distilled these concerns into four themes, then every day on a company‐wide messaging platform, the leadership team solicited 12,000 items of feedback from associates on specific questions. People could jump on various threads to discuss and exchange ideas, then vote on which solution they thought best.

“It gave us a way to innovate,” Agnes explained. “It enabled us to collaborate across cultural differences, different job roles, and different parts of the organizations in remote ways.”

The Data Advantage

Of course, there is a whole menu of team collaboration tools now available for remote work, including cloud storage, file‐sharing, instant messaging, digital whiteboards, and document synchronization. Some may be more appropriate than others depending on the size of your organization, the composition of your teams, and the nature of your industry.

For a woman competing for those top positions yet not completely comfortable declaring her accomplishments, the evidence is also right there in the data. These tools can get her the credit she deserves for the ideas she's put forth in a Slack message, for example, because she is tagged on that message no matter how many conversation threads get woven around it in companywide discourse. This digital trail makes it difficult for co‐workers to claim another person's ideas as their own.

Virtual workplace technology can also give a female employee access to invitation‐only women's networks and affinity groups where she can talk openly about discrimination, unfair compensation practices, and other challenges, while receiving moral support and suggestions for solutions from her Slack comrades. In short, these platforms can be galvanizing, spurring women into action who might otherwise have kept silent or confided only in a trusted friend.⁶

Even more openly, in companywide Slack chats, women have become more emboldened to speak up. In more traditional collaborative settings that hasn't always been the case. Research by Princeton and Brigham Young Universities in 2012 found that men typically take up 75% of the conversation in meetings where there is a mixed populations around the table.⁷

Of course, the digital empowerment revolution applies to some industries more than others. A November 2020 McKinsey⁸ study found that the finance and insurance industries have the highest potential for remote work, with workers reporting they have the ability to spend 75% of their time working remotely without a loss of productivity. There are many industries in which operations can't be carried out from home, including construction, film production, transportation, and healthcare, but the study finds that most exist on a “spectrum of flexibility.” The research suggests that there is some economic disparity between those who can take advantage of remote work and those who cannot. The potential for remote work is most concentrated for highly skilled and highly educated workers in the most developed economies. But for women managers, professionals, and executives at least, the normalization of remote work in industries where it is possible is undoubtedly a win.

What was initially regarded as just a means of getting through to the other side of the lockdowns has, in many respects, led to a new and, in my opinion, better standard for how we interact in the workplace setting. And, with the right digital infrastructure, organizations can bring even more flexibility into the workplace. These solutions would, in turn, include women and other underrepresented groups who could get onto a faster leadership track when they're enabled and empowered to show up for their working lives in more nontraditional, remote ways.

As Christa Quarles, the CEO of Alludo introduced in the first pages of this book, so aptly put it, “Why would anyone with a blank sheet of paper want to create the 2019 version of an office?”

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