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Working from home to finish your taxes today rather than going into the office? You’re probably not alone. Mondays and Fridays are the least popular days for workers to commute to the office, according to data from Gallup. (Check out more data from the research outfit in our piece about employee engagement, below.)
But what if you could get more granular data on not only how many days a week other companies in your industry are working onsite, but how many employees they have per square foot, what the “desk ratio” is for their workers and what turnover rates look like for other firms with hybrid schedules? A software firm that curates a popular database for remote work policies is betting there’s an appetite for such benchmark data and starting a new service for it, which Forbes wrote about exclusively.
Don’t miss our look at that new data service, as well as Forbes’ annual list of the most promising artificial intelligence companies, many of which have big potential to help reshape work. And speaking of AI, check out our interview below with Euan Blair, founder of apprenticeship startup Multiverse, about his latest acquisition, talent platform Searchlight, a former Forbes Under 30 listmaker. Hope it’s a great week.
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
Forbes’ sixth annual AI 50 list, produced in partnership with Sequoia and Meritech Capital, has the skinny on which privately held artificial intelligence companies are most promising—with many of them already making a big impact on how the future works. From $10 billion productivity startup Notion—which Kenrick Cai profiles as having an opening in competing with bigger players in the workplace—to companies like Perplexity, Harvey and Cohere. Plus: Check out senior contributor Jack Kelly’s look at Indeed’s AI job matching tools.
HYBRID WORK
Just over a year later after creating the Flex Index, a searchable database of companies’ remote work policies, the tool has “blown up in a way we never anticipated,” says Rob Sadow, the CEO who launched it, doubling in size from 4,000 to 8,200 companies. Now, Sadow sees potential for the tool—combined with the additional office benchmarking data it aims to collect—to become a new revenue source for his hybrid work management firm, Scoop, helping data-hungry real estate and workplace executives with how to efficiently use office space in a hybrid work world. Check out Forbes’ exclusive coverage here.
WORKFORCE + EDUCATION
At a time when many employers are rethinking how many jobs require a college degree, young people may be rethinking it, too. The number of college students earning undergraduate degrees declined by 99,200 in the 2022-23 academic year, senior contributor Michael Nietzel reports, citing data released by the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center. It was the second straight annual decline after many years of gradual increases, Nietzel reports. Meanwhile, more students earned a certificate last year (figures were up 3.9%) than in any of the last 10 years.
GENDER + EQUITY
A new study published last month in Social Psychology Quarterly found that overwork, especially for women, is a lose-lose proposition, writes contributor Michelle Travis. In a survey of 230 U.S. employees, participants evaluated two worker profiles with identical performance reviews: one logging 40 hours per week, and one logging 60 hours per week. Participants selected one worker to receive management training and promotion opportunities, and they rated each worker on commitment and competence. Travis explains how gender bias impacted the results.
WORK TECH
Bloomberg reported on an interesting case of the downsides of using office software systems for outside interests. At Meta, an engineering recruiter who worked for the company began promoting his real estate investment service to colleagues on the company’s internal messaging system, giving it an “air of legitimacy.” When the service went under, employees felt burned, raising interesting questions: What role does HR have in policing work chats for workers’ outside interests? What limits should be placed on colleagues promoting investments to their colleagues? (Meta, Bloomberg reports, said the employee is no longer with the company.)
What’s Next: Multiverse Founder and CEO Euan Blair
Euan Blair, chief executive officer of Multiverse Group Ltd., speaks during the Bloomberg Technology Summit in London on Tuesday, Oct. 24, 2023. Photographer: Chris J. Ratcliffe/Bloomberg
© 2023 Bloomberg Finance LPBlair’s firm helps companies such as Verizon and American Express deploy apprenticeship programs at scale, bringing in workers without college degrees for formal in-house training, as well as offering upskilling programs for existing employees. Multiverse adds access to coaches and online communities for young apprentices. Forbes spoke recently with Blair, the son of former U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair, about Multiverse’s recently launched AI skilling programs, its AI assistant to help coach young apprentices and the acquisition of talent platform Searchlight, a former Forbes Under 30 listmaker. Excerpts from our conversation have been edited for length and clarity.
Tell me about your efforts around AI.
Coaching is a massive part of how we operate [with the apprenticeship program]. We launched Atlas, which is basically an AI on-demand coach, back in February, and we’ve seen 15,000 queries already submitted. Over half of the people who interact with it have become regular users. Eighty-five percent of people cited it to be very helpful or helpful, and it’s basically allowed us to have apprentices ask questions they might not always want to ask a human coach. They feel very safe about it.
Will it replace your human coaches?
It doesn’t replace coaches. It augments them. This allows us to reach far more people than we could before, because realistically, there is a limit to how frequently a human can be accessed. A generative AI tool—not only does it get smarter and more effective the more queries against it—but it is always on. Having humans in the loop is still critical. A lot of the coach’s role has historically been taken up by dealing with quite clerical, small queries that are not major, material things. You can free up the coach to have deeper, more in-depth conversations.
It might mean in the future we hire slightly fewer coaches, but it’s unlikely to impact that meaningfully.
How are you seeing organizations adapt and prepare for a generation of AI natives?
This is transforming the workplace as rapidly as it’s transforming anything consumers are touching. The fact that employers are investing so much in this area, and are so focused on skilling in this area, means you're going to find that people using it in the workplace to solve problems is as common as it is in schools. Some education systems will actively choose to reduce usage of generative AI or ChatGPT, whereas I think employers tend to have a far more open-minded mindset.
Among your clients, what kinds of jobs are you seeing AI really make a difference?
Unsurprisingly, in customer support functions you’re seeing a lot of this, especially because a lot of the early trials around using AI to resolve customer queries have been really successful. Copiloting is just becoming a massive thing in any operational, process-heavy job where you can reduce the admin load on individuals by using AI to take some of that burden. You’re seeing it in finance—in everything from asset management to insurance. We’re not seeing a lot of it yet, but we expect to see a lot of it in legal functions.
You’re acquiring Forbes Under 30 listmaker talent platform Searchlight. Does this mean you’re getting into hiring?
Originally that was a core part of their focus. But increasingly, as they work with employers, employers are saying this is useful. Given your assessing capability, why can’t we apply this to our [current] workforce? You’ve seen the shift from companies thinking less ‘How do we get external talent to fill our gaps?’ and more ‘Where can we provide opportunities internally?’ More and more, education as a benefit is becoming an expectation as opposed to an exception.
STRATEGIES + ADVICE
Celebrities like Andie MacDowell and Helen Mirren shared career advice in a new L'Oréal Paris ad campaign. Here’s what they said.
Virtual meetings have their own rules. Here’s what to know.
How to spot a ‘treadmill leader’—and avoid the pitfalls of working with them.
FACTS + COMMENT
Return-to-office policies, problematic managers, “mental distance” from coworkers and a lack of growth opportunities are all likely contributors to employee engagement scores that a new Gallup analysis found dropped to their lowest point in 11 years.
4.8 million: How many fewer employees are “engaged” in their work, the lowest since 2013, according to Gallup
30%: The percentage of workers engaged in their jobs, down three percentage points from the end of 2023 and down six percentage points from the peak engagement scores reached in 2020
“We’re down to a level of engagement now that we saw 11 years ago after a decade of growth,” says Jim Harter, Gallup’s chief scientist of workplace and wellbeing. “That’s disturbing.”
VIDEO
QUIZ
Which brand committed last week to never use AI-generated people in the making of its advertisements?
- Cover Girl
- Dove
- Sephora
- Estée Lauder
Check out whether you got it right here.