Is The Workplace Going To Be The Top Problem Solver?

Microsoft, Google, Facebook, United Airlines, Cisco, Tysons Foods, Walgreens, The Washington Post, and even Netflx productions are all requiring employees to be vaccinated to work in their facilities and others are requiring masks. President Joe Biden said all federal employees must be vaccinated to work as well.

Over 400 colleges and universities are requiring students, faculty and staff be vaccinated to return to campus.

Walmart has required its suppliers use sustainable business practices for many years, Unilever has taken its role in reducing the risks of climate change seriously for years too, starting under former CEO Paul Polman, and many other top companies are now as well. Look at how Coca Cola, Pepsi and Keurig/Dr. Pepper are partnering on the “Every Bottle Back” campaign to reduce, reuse and recycle plastic bottles.

Many large investors like BlackRock, the world’s largest asset management firm, are requiring companies disclose their carbon footprint, diversity of their boards and management teams and workforce, and the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is investigating putting such a rule in place as well. Climate-focused activist investors just won seats on the Exxon Mobil board demanding the company reduce its carbon footprint dramatically and report on these issues with full transparency.

The Department of Defense considers climate change a national security issue, as Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks explained at the 2021 Innovation Summit, produced by the Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency for Energy, ARPA-E, and has been aggressively reducing its carbon footprint for many years. That includes the Army’s Net Zero campaign, which then-Assistant Secretary for Energy, Installations and Environment Katharine Hammack explained on my podcast a few years ago.

Does this mean the workplace is now taking responsibility to address society’s ills? It seems that the workplace success is tied to more than just profitability, or whatever their financial metric is.

“The nature of business is to solve problems and move towards opportunities,” Harvard Professor Nancy Koehn told The Economic Times of India recently. I would revise that slightly to say the nature of the workplace is to solve problems.

Where all types are accountable for getting along to get our work done

The workplace is the one place where all different types of people come together toward one goal: making the organization and its mission successful, regardless if it’s a nonprofit, a for-profit, an academic institution or a government agency.

There are currently five generations in the workplace, all political persuasions, all races, religions, genders and levels of ability. In the workplace, then, we all have to find a way to do our jobs and get along. If we don’t, we lose our jobs. Period.

Whether we are working together via Zoom remotely or in an office, manufacturing plant, classroom or outdoors, that nature of the workplace is that we collaborate with other people. Even solopreneurs have to interact with their clients, and even writers at home have to interact with the people they interview and their agents or publishers. If we work, we all have workplace colleagues of some kind.

Koehn also told The Economic Times that, “Businesses are the single most powerful solution we have to the climate crisis. Business has a huge role in effecting the kind of energy and technology used and diffused among the public. But business also has the resources, mechanisms, people and perspectives to solve problems.”

As of July 2020, about 40% of Fortune 500 companies had diversity programs and the number of professionals with “diversity” in their titles has almost tripled since 2014, from 876 to 2,250, according to ZoomInfo. And, the 2021 Fortune 500 list itself is now going to include diversity data.

Could the workforce be the problem-solver we need?

Vaccinations. Masks. Climate change. Workforce equity and diversity by race, gender, abilities, beliefs. It’s all being actively addressed by the workplace now.

Though Americans see major responsibilities for government when it comes to clean water and air, public education, Social Security, infrastructure and Internet access, as Pew Research found recently, maybe the workplace is increasingly becoming the place that finds solutions to society’s challenges that partisan politics interferes with government resolving.