What Keeps Leaders Up At Night | Corporate America’s Strictest Vaccine Policy | The Google Veteran Building Better Managers

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Hello, and welcome to another edition of the CxO newsletter.

What keeps you up at night? Supply chain constraints, policy changes, inflation, a new variant of Covid-19—there’s no shortage of issues guaranteed to have you tossing and turning until the sun comes up. But if you’re like most leaders, I’d wager that what has you losing sleep hits even closer to home: your workforce.  

According to a survey by PwC, 77% of C-level execs say hiring and retaining talent is “very important” to their growth. And yet, despite this and the ongoing labor shortages, less than a third have implemented and plan to continue increasing compensation for employees through sign-on bonuses and raises outside the usual review cycle.

Another incentive that leaders say they’re still debating: Hybrid work arrangements. Though it’s the benefit the greatest percentage of employers (43%) plan to continue offering, 34% say they’ll revisit it. As my colleague Jena McGregor, senior editor of careers, reports, “Even if companies revisiting such policies ultimately decide to keep them in place, the survey appears to show that business leaders are at an inflection point, cautious about making long-term commitments to some of the more challenging or costly measures they’ve had to implement so far.”

So then, what else can leaders do to keep their best and brightest? Culture is crucial, asserts Joe Moglia, a contributor to Forbes. “Paying a bonus, while it certainly won’t hurt, also doesn’t treat the core problem, which is a lot of employees are burned out and want to leave their companies,” writes the former chairman and CEO of TD Ameritrade. “The organizations with great cultures—where success is valued and people are appreciated—are the ones that come out ahead in the talent race, regardless of how the world changes.”

Cultivating such a culture is, of course, easier said than done. But don’t lose sleep over it: Forbes Contributor Dede Henly outlines in her latest piece three steps leaders can take to bolster their acquisition and retention strategies. Creating a sense of belonging, she says, should always come first.

Thank you for reading, and feel free to share your ideas with me at vvalet@forbes.com.

What's Next

“Failures of leadership.” That’s how the actions of British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his staff were described in the initial findings of the U.K. government’s investigation into the Downing Street parties hosted during lockdown. In a speech to Parliament, Johnson apologized, taking full responsibility. “I know the rage [the people] feel with me and with the government I lead when they think that at Downing Street itself the rules are not being properly followed by the people who make the rules.” But Edward Segal, a senior contributor to Forbes, says it may all be too little too late. He spoke with crisis communications experts about what leaders who find themselves in similarly hot waters can do.

T-Mobile U.S. will reportedly fire its in-office employees who aren’t fully vaccinated against Covid-19, and haven’t received a medical or religious exemption, by April 2. One of the strictest vaccination policies to be put into effect by a large U.S. employer, it comes just weeks after the Supreme Court temporarily blocked the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate, prompting some companies such as Starbucks to scrap their plans. Interestingly, though, the requirement does not extend to field technicians and “most” in-store employees—the frontline workers who are arguably more exposed to Covid-19 than their corporate counterparts. If you’re still contemplating the future of your vaccine mandates, here’s what you need to know.

As artists including Neil Young, Nils Lofgren and Joni Mitchel pulled their music from Spotify to protest the vaccine misinformation perpetuated on the platform by podcaster Joe Rogan, its cofounder and CEO, Daniel Ek, shared in a note Sunday how the company plans to move forward. “We’ve heard the criticism and we’re implementing changes to help combat misinformation,” Ek wrote, noting how Spotify will, for example, add content warnings to podcast episodes in which Covid-19 is discussed. But he stopped short of anything resembling content moderation. Sound familiar? My colleague Abram Brown thought so, comparing Ek’s response to Mark Zuckerberg’s remarks in a 2018 interview with Recode’s Kara Swisher: “What we will do is we’ll say, ‘Okay, you have your page, and if you’re not trying to organize harm against someone, or attacking someone, then you can put up that content on your page, even if people might disagree with it or find it offensive.’” For more on Ek’s memo—and what business leaders can learn from it—read on.

By The Numbers

6.9%

The rate at which the U.S. economy grew in the fourth quarter of 2021—the fastest growth rate in nearly 40 years. But don’t expect a repeat in 2022: The International Monetary Fund says the economy will grow more slowly this year as supply chain constraints persist, pandemic-era stimulus ends and Build Back Better loses steam.

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