COVID-19 has upended working life, changing how and where people do their jobs.
Millions of people in China have returned to work, and other countries are considering easing lockdowns in phases.
Organizations should plan how to adapt offices to comply with social distancing rules.
Real estate company Cushman & Wakefield has designed an office where workers can keep six feet apart.
But with governments and companies around the world looking to ease lockdowns, minimizing virus transmission at work is now at the top of many organizations’ agendas.
The coronavirus pandemic is fundamentally reshaping global trade.
• The coronavirus crisis has revealed the fragility of the modern supply chain.
• Recent data shows the devastating economic impact as week-on-week trade in China, the US and Europe halved because of the crisis.
• Diverse sourcing and digitization will be the key to building stronger, smarter supply chains and ensuring a lasting recovery.
The COVID-19 pandemic has hit global trade and investment at an unprecedented speed and scale. Multinational companies faced an initial supply shock, then a demand shock as more and more countries ordered people to stay at home. Governments, businesses and individual consumers suddenly struggled to procure basic products and materials, and were forced to confront the fragility of the modern supply chain. The urgent need to design smarter, stronger and more diverse supply chains has been one of the main lessons of this crisis.
Every Western institution was unprepared for the coronavirus pandemic, despite many prior warnings. This monumental failure of institutional effectiveness will reverberate for the rest of the decade, but it’s not too early to ask why, and what we need to do about it.
Many of us would like to pin the cause on one political party or another, on one government or another. But the harsh reality is that it all failed — no Western country, or state, or city was prepared — and despite hard work and often extraordinary sacrifice by many people within these institutions. So the problem runs deeper than your favorite political opponent or your home nation.
Part of the problem is clearly foresight, a failure of imagination. But the other part of the problem is what we didn’t *do* in advance, and what we’re failing to do now. And that is a failure of action, and specifically our widespread inability to *build*.
What are the most critical soft and hard skills that organizations are hiring for and training for in 2020?
In the recently released LinkedIn Learning 2020 Workplace Learning Report, LinkedIn analyzed data from 660+ million professionals and 20+ million jobs to map the 15 most in-demand skills. More specifically, they looked at the skills that are in demand relative to the supply of people who have those skills—in other words, the skill gap.
An unintended and unexpected consequence of the multitrillion dollar stimulus package is that workers are asking to be laid off or reluctant to go back to work after being furloughed.
In an effort to help people financially cope with their job losses in the midst of a pandemic, the federal government—through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief and Economic Security Act (CARES Act)—is providing an extra $600 per week in unemployment benefits. This amount is in addition to what the states already pay, which is in the range of $200 to $300 per week.
A person could conceivably earn $1,000 per week on unemployment, depending upon the state he or she resides in. In addition to the enhanced benefits, most Americans, earning less than $75,000 in 2019, received a one-time check for $1,200 and $500 for each child under 17 years of age.
Here’s the situation facing companies that have already been financially hurt by the consequences of the COVID-19 outbreak. Consider a worker in an Amazon warehouse. The worker has to be on their feet all day, lift heavy boxes onto and off of high shelves and race around the facility to fulfill orders. Earning a minimum wage of $15 per hour, the person may make pre-tax $525 per week. Think of how many millions of other people work at dangerous, physically demanding or unpleasant jobs earning a similar amount.
The coronavirus outbreak has left India’s startups and small businesses jittery about their future.
As much as 61% startups and small & medium enterprises (SMEs) in the country are staring at the possibility of scaling down their business in the next six months. Only 13% are expecting their business to grow, according to a survey conducted between April 18 and 23 by LocalCircles, a community-led social media engagement platform.
Domio, a startup that offers short-term rentals, has its headquarters in a New York City loft that features beer on tap, a game room and a wall of house slippers for visitors. The fast-growing and unprofitable company has raised $117 million in venture capital, including $100 million in August.
When the coronavirus pandemic caused Domio’s bookings to dry up last month, it laid off staff but did not ask its investors for more funding. Jay Roberts, Domio’s chief executive, said it had no immediate need to raise more money and most likely had enough cash to last until 2021.
Instead, Domio applied for a federal loan under the Paycheck Protection Program, the $349 billion plan to save jobs at small businesses during the outbreak. It received a loan on April 13. Three days later, the program’s funding ran out, even as hundreds of hard-hit restaurants, hair salons and shops around the country missed out on the relief.
Questions about whether the funds were disbursed fairly and whether some applicants deserved them have drawn scrutiny to the aid program. Several companies that got millions of dollars in loans, such as the Shake Shack and Kura Sushi restaurant chains, faced criticism and eventually gave the money back. On Friday, President Donald Trump signed legislation approving a fresh $320 billion to replenish the program, which the Small Business Administration is directing.
Now, scrutiny of the program has reached technology startups like Domio. While many of these young companies have been hurt by the pandemic, they are not ailing in the same way that traditional small businesses are. Many mom-and-pop enterprises, which tend to employ hourly workers and operate on razor-thin margins, are shutting down immediately because of economic pain or begging for donations via GoFundMe campaigns.
Some businesses that want to stay open say it’s hard to do so when employees can make more money by staying home.
$600 per week.
That’s what the federal government is now offering to people who’ve lost their jobs because of the coronavirus.
For many workers and employers, that money is a godsend — a way to keep food on the table while also cutting payroll costs.
But the extra money can create some awkward situations. Some businesses that want to keep their doors open say it’s hard to do so when employees can make more money by staying home.
“We basically have this situation where it would be a logical choice for a lot of people to be unemployed,” said Sky Marietta, who opened a coffee shop along with her husband, Geoff, last year in Harlan, Ky.
Calvin Klein, Tommy Hilfiger and other PVH stores in North America and Europe have been closed since mid-March.
The company has furloughed about 75% of its workforce in North America.
With stores closed, the retail industry is struggling with inventory piling up in warehouses and no place to sell it, the head of the company that owns such names as Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger told CNBC on Wednesday.
“Retail companies are not built to have their stores closed for extended periods of time,” PVH CEO Manny Chirico said in an interview with Becky Quick on “Squawk Box.”
PVH’s stores in North America and Europe have been closed since mid-March, along with many other businesses. The closures as expected to drag on for weeks if not months as the world tries to contain the coronavirus pandemic.
The company has furloughed about 75% of its workforce in North America, Chirico said, adding to the hundreds of thousands of furloughs taking place in an industry that employees more than 50 million people in the U.S. alone.
Dan Barber, the vanguard chef behind Blue Hill at Stone Barns, earned two Michelin stars as he championed the farm-to-table movement in New York State. But rave reviews have spared no one in the ailing food world, as restaurants have gone into perilous hibernation, leaving workers unemployed and thoroughfares eerily quiet around the country.
Barber shut the doors of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, in Westchester County, and a second location in New York City in mid-March. With hopes of keeping some income flowing to struggling employees and suppliers, his team started offering to-go boxes of produce, meat, fish and other items that loyal patrons could make and consume at home. But even at prices ranging up to $170, Barber says, it’s hardly a drop in the bucket. “It’s like whack-a-mole,” he says. “There’s problems everywhere with everyone.”
I live in Los Angeles, CA, where we have now been on lockdown for about a month.
A few days ago, California Governor Newsom announced a 30-day extension of the shelter-at-home order, through at least May 15th. Ouch. The same is happening in states and countries worldwide.
While I’ve never sat still for so long, I also have never worked harder and been more productive.
Yet the question remains: how long will we be on lockdown? When will life return to some semblance of normalcy?
Starsky Robotics is a self-driving truck company that was the first company to run an unmanned semi on a public highway. It’s now shutting down though, and its co-founder has some unusually sensible and honest things to say about the industry, unusual only because the industry is stuffed with charlatans.
Stefan Seltz-Axmacher co-founded Starsky around four years ago, eventually equipping a fleet of three tractor-trailers with self-driving equipment, making them capable of navigating private truck yards and, once, nine miles of a Florida highway.
Those might seem like modest accomplishments, but they were almost intentionally so, Seltz-Axmacher told Automotive News in an exit interview of sorts. That’s because the company placed a big emphasis on safety, which, shockingly, wasn’t popular with investors.
While competitors expended effort adding machine learning-based features such as enabling trucks to change lanes on their own, Seltz-Axmacher said he threw resources into safety engineering. The company was the first autonomous trucking company to submit a Voluntary Safety Self Assessment to the U.S. Department of Transportation.
But a problem emerged: that safety focus didn’t excite investors. Venture capitalists, Seltz-Axmacher said, had trouble grasping why the company expended massive resources preparing, validating and vetting his system, then preparing a backup system, before the initial unmanned test run. That work essentially didn’t matter when he went in search of more funding.
