Forbes Careers: Abortion Access Benefits, Breaking Your Worst Work Habits—And More

Here is this week’s Careers newsletter, which brings the latest news, commentary and ideas about the workplace, leadership and the future of work straight to your inbox every Tuesday. Click here to get on the newsletter list!

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orporate America would prefer to talk about just about anything other than abortion. Climate change? A no-brainer. Voting access? An American right. So-called “bathroom bills”? A threat to employee well-being and safety.

But now, thanks to a leaked draft of a Supreme Court decision that would overturn Roe v. Wade, companies are being asked to take a position on—and in a growing number of cases, offer new benefits or funds to address—what’s widely considered the third rail of American politics. My colleague Maggie McGrath and I started a tracker over the weekend detailing which companies have added travel reimbursement for employees who might have to go out of state to access abortion services, which employers have offered to let workers move if their state enacts restrictive abortion-related laws and which businesses already have healthcare plans in place that cover out-of-state healthcare-related travel costs.

I’m guessing there may be more of the latter than we know—but companies don’t exactly want to advertise it. Doing so would mean wading into the electrified debate over abortion and the likely repeal of the landmark decision, which guarantees the right to abortion in the U.S. Already, lawmakers are threatening to penalize companies that provide such benefits, or hit back at those who offer them by restricting business. That’s why senior contributor Edward Segal suggests some companies may remain on the sidelines.

For companies that have chosen to speak out about same-sex marriage on behalf of their LGBTQ employees, or “bathroom bills” for their transgender workers, it will be hard to say nothing on behalf of the rights of women and their families. As Anthony Johndrow, who leads a reputation advisory firm, told us: “Like anything else social and political, there’s no middle ground anymore. Companies have found that to their chagrin, and it would be tough to find an issue that’s more emotionally loaded than this.”

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FEATURED STORY

Just 4% Of Employers Are Making Everyone Return To The Office Full-Time, Survey Finds

If it seems like the same Wall Street banks keep getting mentioned again and again as examples of companies requiring full-time, in-office work, there may be a reason: They don’t have much company. A new survey of human resources leaders from the Conference Board, a nonprofit business research group, finds that just 4% said they are requiring all employees to return to the workplace full-time. And less than half (45%) said they were requiring some workers to return to the office five days a week. Read more in my story here.

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WORK SMARTER

Could your new degree take you to the corner office? Here are the undergraduate degrees and majors of 100 top CEOs.

Ramp up your resiliency—in your career and your company’s culture—by taking these four steps and growing these seven factors.

Show gratitude at work with these five practices.

First impressions, building community: How to get the most out of LinkedIn when you’re not searching for a job.

Listen like a pro using the “disciplined listening” method.

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ON OUR AGENDA

Break your worst work habits: Forbes’ subscriber series on Conquering Career Obstacles wrapped up this week with my conversation with bestselling author Gretchen Rubin about the best ways to break your worst professional habits—whether that’s procrastinating on deadlines, spending too much time on social media or becoming distracted while working from home. It’s the last in our series of conversations with bestselling authors about managing personal career threats, which last week included venture capitalist Arlan Hamilton on how to stop underestimating yourself and writer Dan Pink about reckoning with regret.

He made how much? After an Airbnb engineer’s LinkedIn post went viral covering the salaries he’s made at different jobs in his career, more organizations need to prepare to discuss compensation, writes senior contributor Kim Elsesser. “As pay transparency becomes more common, employees are questioning their pay, and employers are scrambling to defend their pay strategies,” Elsesser writes.

Crisis lessons from Jen Psaki: The White House is about to have a new press secretary, who will not only be the first Black person but first openly gay woman to hold the job, the Washington Post reported. Senior contributor Edward Segal shares what Psaki’s tenure taught us about the power of consistency, professionalism and not equivocating.

Layoffs brewing: The Bureau of Labor Statistics may have reported strong job gains Friday, but the employment picture isn’t great everywhere. Last week witnessed a wave of layoffs across tech startups, and some companies are expressing caution amid shifting investor sentiment: Uber, for instance, is saying it will cut costs and treat hiring as a “privilege,” the Wall Street Journal reported.

“Notification fatigue”: A report by collaboration software firm Asana finds that the average U.S. worker uses nine apps a day to do their work, and suffers from app-switching productivity loss as they move between applications, HR Dive reports. We also can’t seem to quit email: Nearly two-thirds of U.S. workers check email outside of standard hours, the highest percentage of any country in the international survey.

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BOOK CLUB

Bonobos founder Andy Dunn writes about his bipolar disorder and the impact his mental health had on being an entrepreneur in his stunningly candid memoir Burn Rate: Launching a Startup and Losing My Mind. As founder of the menswear startup, which was acquired by Walmart in 2017, Dunn offers a high-profile personal voice for the mental health issues we hear so much about—but few business leaders are vulnerable enough to share.

Key quote: “Manic delusions and entrepreneurial delusions, while not twins, are not unrelated. They’re more like distant cousins,” Dunn writes in the book. “The capacity for one doesn’t guarantee—but can indicate—the capacity for the other.”