Hello, Quartz at Work readers!
In the last year or so, Edinburgh-based policy manager Sarah Cowie has worked from Amsterdam, London, and Bucharest. Cowie wasn’t taking business trips, nor was she dropping vacation days. She was, as many flexible employees put it, on workcation.
Cowie doesn’t credit her ability to work from a rotating cast of cities, though, to her flexible schedule or a pot of personal savings. It’s actually thanks, she says, to home-swaps accessed with the tap of an app. Cowie uses HomeExchange, a members-only platform for trading spaces in far-flung locales. And the platform is just one option in a new genre of exclusive travel apps that’s attracting remote and hybrid workers, writes Quartz contributor Brianna Holt.
As more companies call their teams back to the office, often by requiring in-person work for a few days each week, many workers are settling into semi-flexible schedules. But although they have to report to the office part of the time, plenty of people are finding they can still travel while working—no vacation days (or vacation budgets) necessary.
The barrier to entry is low: just pay a relatively small annual membership fee and pass a background check. Users can then list their homes on the platform’s marketplace and find others to plan vetted exchanges. It’s a boon, Holt writes, to all kinds of workers with flexible schedules.
“Many of our members are working professionals eager to travel more to take advantage of their remote or hybrid workplace policies. We call these trips ‘lifestyle travel’—it’s not quite a vacation, and it’s not quite a business trip,” Justine Palefsky, co-founder and CEO of the new entrant Kindred, told Quartz.
Quartz outlines the newest platforms to know—and how they offer a new, budget-friendly take on the workcation.
STRIKEWATCH GOES GLOBAL
Among the workers’ unions picketing across the US, collective momentum keeps building. This weekend, Hollywood’s striking actors passed the 100-day threshold, marking the longest work stoppage in the union’s history. Meanwhile, Detroit’s United Auto Workers have seen their walkouts make financial returns, with General Motors reporting yesterday that it’s already taken a profit hit from the ongoing strike.
Just as Oscar winners and Mustang makers garner headlines in the US, labor movements are picking up across the globe.
🇮🇸 A prime minister steps off the podium. Yesterday marked a nationwide strike for the women of Iceland—and its top leader took part, too. Prime minister Katrín Jakobsdóttir went on kvennaverkfall to protest unequal pay and gender violence.
🇨🇾 Hospital staff demand better care. In Cyprus, doctors and nurses are waging an eight-hour strike at state hospitals today. Among the issues they’ve diagnosed: shortfalls in salary, especially for contract staffers.
🇯🇵 Department store employees try a rare strike on for size. Japan hadn’t seen a worker walkout in decades—until late this summer, when employees at a major Tokyo department store banded together in protest of an American acquisition. It would be the first strike in more than sixty years.
ONE TRIPPY NUMBER
$16 million: The check a former Tesla director is giving Harvard University to study hallucinogenic drugs in modern culture.
Private equity investor Antonio Gracias calls Harvard “the ideal place to explore the topic of psychedelics from new angles,” and that the institution can “craft a framework for their legal, safe, and appropriate impact on society.” So could his funding make microdosing—say, in therapeutic treatments, or even on the job—go mainstream? Only time will tell.
ROBLOX RUNS FROM REMOTE
“While I’m confident we will get to a point where virtual workspaces are as engaging, collaborative, and productive as physical spaces, we aren’t there yet.”
That’s Roblox CEO David Baszucki last week, telling staff that the virtual gaming platform has a new IRL mandate: it’s reversing its remote work policy. Beginning this summer, employees will be expected to work from the company’s Bay Area headquarters three times a week—and those who don’t accept the new rules can take a severance package.
It’s a sharp about-face from just a year ago, when Roblox told staffers they could “primarily work remotely.” But maybe that’s not much of a surprise, given how some of the tech companies making the platforms for remote work don’t seem to believe in it themselves. Now even companies in the metaverse want their employees to work in person.
But even as big tech behemoths are shifting their stances on virtual collaboration, not all of them have rejected remote work outright. Quartz’s Ananya Bhattacharya rounds up where the major players stand in the return-to-office debate.
ONE 📊 THING
In the age of the purpose-driven company, leaders love to espouse their corporate values. But how well do they actually deliver on them? A scorecard released yesterday aims to put a number to those sweeping statements—and has ranked the likes of Alphabet, Disney, Nike, and more.
🌎 One unsurprising list-topper: Patagonia, which got a stamp of approval on its aims to protect the planet. It doesn’t hurt that its owners donated the company to two environmental philanthropies last year. For the full ranking, click over to Quartz.
YOUR WEEKLY WORK HACK
A Slackout could help your team tackle its communication crutches. “We used to think that by studying Slack traffic we would learn something about the flow of team operations,” Water & Wall agency partner Matthew Kirdahy writes for Quartz. But metrics on channels and pings didn’t tell his team much at all.
So they decided to go off-platform for a week to see how necessary their usual messaging—about client needs, deadlines, and celebrity breakups alike—really was to their work. The conclusion: Slack wasn’t going anywhere, but it did help rethink how (and where) to collaborate.
QUARTZ AT WORK’S TOP STORIES
🤖 AI firms are paying actors to lend emotions to avatars
💬 What we learned when we quit Slack
⭕️ Costco has only ever had insider CEOs
⚙️ Luddites saw the problem of AI coming from two centuries away
📝 Where Alphabet, Disney, and other brands rank on a new “purpose” scorecard
YOU GOT THE MEMO
Send questions, comments, and psychedelic trips to [email protected]. This edition of The Memo was written by Gabriela Riccardi.