Welcome back to our Workplace newsletter. This just in: Amazon exec Pravin Raj is leaving AWS. Raj is one of several of the cloud giant's top leaders named in a discrimination and harassment lawsuit by a former employee. Also today, chief people officers are taking breaks and switching gears after a trying two and a half years. Plus, teams are bogged down by software applications, with the average office worker switching between apps 1,200 times per day. Yeesh.

— Allison Levitsky, reporter (email | twitter)

Break time for CPOs

Senior HR talent is hard to find. Lately headhunters have noticed that it’s a challenge to find great people leaders. Many of the extraordinary challenges of the last two and a half years have fallen on the shoulders of chief people officers, leading some of them to step away from operating roles or leave the workforce altogether.

The last few years have brought a world of macro-level uncertainty, shifting power dynamics, and political tensions, both within companies and in the world at large. Between the pandemic, the economic downturn, and social changes, HR leaders are tired.

• “A lot of them have decided, ‘Yeah, it’s been a pressure cooker for a number of years now, and I need to step back,’” said John K. Anderson, managing director in the HR practice of the search firm Allegis Partners.
• HR leaders have been “literally dealing with the life and death of their employees,” said Brian Kropp, managing director at Accenture. Not to mention taking teams remote, hiring rapidly, planning for hybrid work when employees don’t want to return to the office, facing slow gains around DEI, and supporting employees through everything from social justice movements and U.S. political tensions to inflation, economic downturn, and war.

All of this is pushing senior HR talent to leave operating roles, either for retirement, sabbatical, consulting, or VC jobs. Greg Selker, managing director and North American technology practice leader for the recruiting firm Stanton Chase, has seen many HR leaders opt to go into consulting rather than another operating role.

• “A lot of them are stepping away to do something else, taking a break for a year from work, whatever it may be,” Kropp said.
• Consulting gigs allow execs to focus on the aspects of people leadership that they enjoyed the most while letting go of the rest, according to Anderson.
• Traunza Adams left her last CPO role after six months when she found that she had “values misalignment” with the company’s leadership. She still advises startups formally and informally, and while she says she “absolutely loved” being a people leader, she’s not planning a return to an operating role anytime soon.
• “Once I stopped working, I realized just how stressful it was,” Adams said. “And how nice it is to not have people depending on you every day and being beholden to people and having to fight for what you feel is right.”

As a result of all this, chief people officer searches are, well, “taking a bit longer,” Anderson said. “We’ll see what happens at the end of this year and the beginning of next year,” Anderson said. “And whether that changes or people feel they’ve had enough rest and they want to get back in.”

App attack

Office workers are inundated with software applications: The average business now runs 187, up from 77 in 2015, according to a report from Okta. Despite all these tools, federal data shows that worker productivity has slowed.

The rise of SaaS has led to some of this “software bloat,” Protocol's writer-at-large Joe Williams writes, and tech leaders have ended up stuck with extraneous software. Software companies are moving toward building tools to manage entire processes, with more integrated “workflows” and plugin capabilities (think Asana and Slack).

Read the full story.

A MESSAGE FROM BAMBOOHR

Flexible work and resignations are at historic highs and employees are questioning if their compensation matches their worth. What are business and HR leaders supposed to do about this? BambooHR surveyed full-time, salaried employees and discovered the top 2022 trends surrounding compensation and what employees really want.

Read the takeaways

Conflict o’clock

How much time did your company’s managers spend on conflict last week? It may well have been over four hours, according to a new report from The Myers-Briggs Company that found managers are dealing with a half day of conflict, on average, per week.

• Almost one in four respondents said their managers handle conflict “poorly or very poorly,” the report found.
• 36% of respondents said they deal with conflict often, very often, or all the time, according to the report — up from 29% in 2008.
• Poor communication was the biggest cause of conflict for in-office workers at 56% of the time. For hybrid workers, a lack of transparency caused the most conflicts at 32% of the time.

Some personnel news

Anyone else having a bad case of Great Resignation whiplash? It’s hard to keep up with which tech companies are growing, shrinking, floating, or sinking. We’re here to help.

⬇️ The cybersecurity company Snyk is reportedly cutting 14% of its workforce, or 198 employees, according to an Israeli business publication.

⬇️ Telehealth startup Cerebral is slashing 20% of its head count to match lower growth expectations, The Wall Street Journal reported.

⬇️ Snap is closing a San Francisco office that the company said was “lightly used” after it embraced flexible work, according to Bloomberg.

For more news on hiring, firing, and rewiring, see our tech company tracker.

Around the internet

A roundup of workplace news from the farthest corners of the internet.

Is the workday getting weirder? (ZDNet)

Big Tech is increasingly seeking tech talent in Africa. (TechCrunch)

Emoji translation: Your Gen Z employees might find your 👍 rude. (Axios)

San Francisco offices have hit a record high for vacancy levels. (SFGate)

A MESSAGE FROM BAMBOOHR

Low pay is the top reason employees decide to quit, followed by a lack of opportunities for advancement. Learn how an effective compensation plan can help combat these two major reasons.

Learn more

Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to workplace@protocol.com.

AWS executive Pravin Raj, one of several of the cloud giant's top leaders named in a discrimination and harassment lawsuit by a former employee, is leaving the company, AWS confirmed.

Raj co-led the company's professional services arm, a troubled division that former employees alleged was rife with bullying and other cultural problems, with much of the bad behavior reportedly perpetrated by Raj. An internal report, based on conversations with fewer than 100 ProServe workers, found no evidence of such claims.

A lawsuit filed against Amazon by former employee Cindy Warner named Raj as one ProServe exec "whose discriminatory and harassing conduct has been complained of by several other employees as well," per the suit.

The North Atlantic right whale is among the most endangered species in the world, having been hunted to near-extinction over a century ago. Fewer than 350 remain in the wild. While whaling is thankfully no longer a concern, the big-mouthed beauties now face a new threat: the offshore wind industry.

---

Reaching the Biden administration’s goal of developing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030 will require a huge uptick in boat traffic and infrastructure being built. Yet at the same time, North Atlantic right whales are in the midst of an “unusual mortality event,” which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration largely attributes to “rope entanglements or vessel strikes.” Underwater noise pollution is also a major concern due to the damage it can do to whales' hearing and behavior. That could put the whales and other wildlife at risk if the wind industry doesn't take proactive measures.

The need to monitor right whales as well as other wildlife that calls the areas around offshore wind farms home has already spawned the development of new climate tech. For instance, offshore wind developer Vineyard Wind and startup incubator Greentown Labs launched an accelerator program for three companies developing the tech to protect whales and other marine animals. The startups’ techniques to save the whales include aerial drone systems for sea inspection and night-vision cameras that can be customized to work on offshore turbines.

The federal government is getting in on the act, too. The Department of Energy (and the state of Maryland) has funded marine mammal research group SMRU Consulting's work on a “coastal acoustic buoy for offshore wind." The buoys can detect the high-frequency calls of the right whales to pinpoint their location. That could allow a developer to stop or minimize noisy pile driving used to install turbines in the seabed.

To protect the whales from further harm, NOAA and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management jointly released a strategy on how to balance the competing priorities of conservation and renewable energy development. It’s so far just a draft that amounts to little more than saying, “let’s research and be in touch about how much of a risk offshore wind is to these endangered animals.” But its very existence highlights that this balance should be top of mind for both the public and private sector.

Whether the tech and federal efforts will be enough to keep whale populations from dropping even further as construction picks up, however, remains to be seen.

A version of this story appeared in Protocol’s Climate newsletter. Sign up here to get it in your inbox twice a week.

Hello, and welcome to Protocol Entertainment, your guide to the business of the gaming and media industries. This Tuesday, we’re looking at the controversy surrounding Bayonetta 3, and how the story morphed dramatically over the course of a single week. Also: Reddit’s surprising success with NFTs and Apple’s aggressive App Store policy changes.

The Bayonetta bait and switch

A controversy around video game voice actor compensation engulfed the upcoming Nintendo action title Bayonetta 3 earlier this month. On Monday, the performer at the center of the dispute, voice actress Hellena Taylor, came clean, revealing she was in fact offered more money than she initially let on and confirming a report from Bloomberg last week that poked holes in her viral boycott effort.

The saga has been messy, especially given the fast-moving and chaotic nature of the online gaming community, which favors convenient narratives and easy villains. On one side was a worker who claimed she was exploited, and on the other a large corporate player in an industry with a devastating history and culture of exploiting workers. But the reality was not so simple.

Taylor misrepresented the offer. It’s unclear exactly why Taylor, who voiced title character Bayonetta’s first two installments, chose to take her dispute with developer PlatinumGames public knowing the truth might very well come out. Regardless, she claimed she was offered only $4,000 to reprise her role, a figure that has since been disputed.

• Bloomberg last week reported the number was inaccurate. Sources said Taylor was offered around $3,000 to $4,000 per day for at least a five-day job, more than three times the union minimum under SAG-AFTRA contract rules.
• Taylor’s latest thread, published Monday morning, clarified that she was initially offered $10,000 to reprise the role, asked for more, and was disappointed when Platinum countered with a raise of only $5,000 more.
• She declined the offer. Many months later Platinum offered her $4,000 for a cameo role, which she also declined.
• Taylor claims this was the number she was referencing in her initial boycott thread, although it’s now clear she was deliberately obfuscating the nature of the negotiations.
• “I was paid a shockingly low total of £3000 total for the first game. A little more for the second. I wanted to voice her. I have drummed up interest in this game ever since I started on Twitter in 2011,” Taylor said, adding that she felt her performance was worth more.

Taylor’s misrepresentations have divided the industry. Many notable voices in the gaming community have since voiced their disappointment in having participated in calls to boycott Bayonetta 3 and vilifying Platinum. But despite Taylor’s apparent deception, voice actor treatment remains a real and pressing issue for the industry.

• The studio never confirmed details about the contract negotiations, but it did release a statement of support for Jennifer Hale, the actress it hired as a replacement, who became a victim of online harassment following Taylor’s accusations.
• Hale released a statement of her own days prior, saying an NDA prevented her from discussing the situation in detail, calling for an “amicable and respectful” resolution between the parties, and reminding fans the game was created by a team of “hard-working, dedicated people.”
• Indie developer and industry consultant Rami Ismail said, “it should be notable how easy it was for industry-folks to accept this story,” adding that “it is obviously unfortunate that that means my trust led to a twisted story being broadcast.” Ismail also encouraged the public to lean toward siding with workers in most cases until proven wrong.
• “Regardless of current events, voice actors are often underpaid and undervalued and that’s an important conversation to have,” wrote content creator and game narrative writer Alanah Pearce.

The fight continues. At the heart of the controversy is the treatment of voice actors, and how video game voice actors in particular receive fewer benefits than their Hollywood counterparts.

• SAG-AFTRA declined to comment on the situation to Protocol, citing ongoing contract negotiations.
• The union is currently working to renew a media agreement that sets minimum hourly rates for video game voice actors. The last contract, the result of a major voice actor strike in 2017, helped raise those rates and secure improved benefits for voice actors, but as a compromise did not include residuals. It will expire on Nov. 7 after a two-year renewal in 2020.
• One of Taylor’s reported demands of Platinum during negotiations for Bayonetta 3 was for residuals, which are more common in film and TV and far less so in the realm of video game voice acting.
• Though game publishers and developers in the U.S. pay union rates to secure SAG-AFTRA actors, overseas developers often face fewer pressures to pay higher rates, especially for localizing products developed for the Japanese market.
• Though it’s now clear Platinum offered well over the minimum to secure Taylor and likely paid a comparable, if not higher, amount for Hale, one of the most high-profile English-language voice actors known for her work on Halo, Mass Effect, and scores of animated film and TV works.

Multiple takeaways from this situation can all be simultaneously true, even when they seem in conflict. Voice actors, especially for games, often work behind the scenes, are paid by the hour, and have few benefits. And a lack of residuals means those responsible for bringing characters to life almost never get to share in the product’s long-term success. Many harrowing stories from the worlds of gaming and anime have come to light as a result of Taylor speaking out.

But Taylor’s misrepresentations — and her doubling down, including her attacks on journalists — muddied the waters. Getting paid three times the standard union rate would appear, on its face, to be generous, but it’s hard to say considering how shrouded in secrecy and NDAs these contracts often are. At the same time, Taylor’s entirely justified pleas for a larger chunk of the industry’s enormous profits would likely still have sparked outrage had she been open about the total compensation from the start.

In the battle for fair treatment, game workers are better served by a united front. Instead we’ve spent the last week sifting through social media detritus to find the truth, and no one seems much better off because of it.

—Nick Statt

A MESSAGE FROM AT-BAY

In 2021, there were 236 million cyberattacks worldwide. If there’s an opportunity to enter a business’s premises undetected, cybercriminals will find it. In the digital age, no organization is safe from cyberthreats. Size doesn’t matter.

Learn more

Overheard

“I’m much more interested in attracting a million free-to-play players than, you know, 10,000 rich whales, although we could use those rich whales … I don’t really want to be in the business of selling NFTs.” — Will Wright, designer of The Sims, talked to Axios about his new blockchain game, VoxVerse, and why he’s comfortable with players who might spend exorbitant amounts of money on the game.

“None of [the leaders] had any vision. They weren’t very present in day-to-day operations. We pivoted every time viewership was low. We never really gave our content time to gain traction. We were just constantly pivoting.” — A former employee of gaming and pop culture channel G4TV talked to The Washington Post about the network’s lack of direction. G4 was shut down just a year after its revival.

In other news

Reddit’s surprise success with NFTs. Reddit’s new series of “digital avatars” launched last week sold out in short order, and the platform now hosts 2.5 million NFT wallets opened since July.

Apple Music and TV+ are getting more expensive. Apple raised the prices of its entertainment services Monday, the first increase since the Apple Music launch in 2015.

Discord may finally arrive on PlayStation. The chat platform’s integration with Sony’s gaming console has been in the works since May 2021, and leaked screenshots indicate it may be launching soon.

Bono is still sorry about that free iTunes album. Eight years after Apple added a U2 album to everyone’s iTunes library, Bono sheds some light on the backstory.

U.K. regulators open the floodgates on the Activision deal. The Competition and Markets Authority overseeing Microsoft’s acquisition of Activision Blizzard says it wants public comment on the deal. What could possibly go wrong?

The game console market is starting to recover. While game industry revenue is still down this year compared to 2021, easier-to-find PlayStation 5 consoles are breathing some life into the hardware sector, according to new data from the NPD Group.

Blockchain gaming funding stays strong. Despite player backlash and the ongoing crypto winter, investors still see promise in NFT and blockchain gaming projects and poured more than $1.2 billion into private Web3 ventures last quarter.

Altimeter wants Meta to spend less on the metaverse. In an open letter, Altimeter Capital CEO Brad Gerstner implored Meta to cap metaverse spending at $5 billion a year.

Apple raises the rent

Life in the App Store is about to get much more expensive for certain sellers of digital goods. In a policy update published Monday, the iPhone maker disclosed two major changes to how it collects commissions on in-app purchases.

The first explicitly gives the green light to app developers wishing to sell and manage NFTs on iOS, so long as the app does not link out to or provide purchasing mechanisms other than Apple’s own payment system and "provided NFT ownership does not unlock functionality or features within the app."

• This is, of course, the same rule that governs mobile gaming, and why Fortnite publisher Epic Games sued Apple. (Sidenote: Oral arguments for the Epic v. Apple appeal are slated for November 14.)
• Metaverse expert Matthew Ball pointed out how this policy change means Apple is “devouring all the value” of mobile NFT trades unless the asset appreciates considerably.
• “To cryptocurrency enthusiasts, this means Apple is now adding a 30% tax on your so-called ‘true ownership’ of digital goods,” Epic CEO Tim Sweeney wrote.

The second change, however, is more audacious, and it’s yet another land grab from Apple as it advances further into the advertising industry.

• Apple says it will now require apps with advertising to use its payment system for the purchase of ads, including “boosting” social media posts to promote them on platforms like Facebook and Twitter.
• The change, effective immediately as part of iOS 16.1, will entitle Apple to 30% of revenue from boosted posts, already a lucrative market in sectors like dating apps.
• For Meta, this is just the latest in a long line of hostilities with Apple, which punched a $10 billion hole in its rival’s business with the launch of last year’s iOS privacy features.
• Apple seems largely undeterred by heightened antitrust scrutiny in the past few years, though the Justice Department is reportedly mulling over an investigation that could be launched by year’s end.

—Nick Statt

A MESSAGE FROM AT-BAY

With the amount of our economy now dependent on technology, the lack of government regulation is resulting in major risk to companies, and in the end, our own citizens. In the absence of government action, insurance steps in.

Learn more

Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to entertainment@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you Thursday.

Good day! Your Protocol Climate team feels like it’s in a cloud here in New York. But we’re pushing through the fog to bring you the top climate tech news. Today, we have an exclusive chat with Carbon Direct’s new head of climate justice and a dive into Form Energy’s unique iron-air batteries. Plus, what the Biden administration is doing to save the whales from offshore wind development.

Carbon removal justice takes center stage

Christian Braneon has been thinking about climate justice for nearly 20 years. A civil engineer by training, it’s what drew him to graduate school and made him want to study climate change in the first place.

Now, he’s getting a chance to ensure it's central to the nascent carbon removal industry. Braneon, a former NASA climate scientist, has joined carbon management platform Carbon Direct as its first head of climate justice. In that unique role, he’ll ensure that the company’s software and advisory services — used by some of the world’s biggest tech companies — aren’t just scientifically rigorous, but equitable too.

“Sometimes we have a paternalistic approach to deciding what environmental justice looks like or what equitable benefits look like,” Braneon said. One of the first things he told his colleagues at Carbon Direct when he started was, “We don’t get to decide what community benefits are. The community tells us what they perceive as benefits.”

In his first chat after starting the role, he spoke with Protocol about why he thinks climate justice should be central to the carbon removal industry’s work and how to center it the right way.

This conversation has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

What does the role of head of climate justice entail? How do you define climate justice, particularly in the context of carbon removal?

Climate change projections suggest that low-income countries are going to bear the brunt of the climate impacts. They’re not well positioned to deal with extreme weather events and the shocks to agriculture and other sectors of society, and yet they contributed the least to greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon dioxide removal presents an opportunity for wealthy nations to remove legacy emissions they’ve already put in the atmosphere and help society avert these climate change impacts that will disproportionately affect low-income countries. In my role, I’m aiming to deepen and sharpen how we think about environmental and climate justice internally, influencing our culture, our operations, as well as our client engagement.

How would you ensure that Carbon Direct’s platform incorporates consideration of these potential harms when evaluating carbon removal solutions?

We want to make sure that our clients understand all the different dimensions of their impact. In our platform right now, you can get a sense for the tons that you’re managing now and your carbon impact. But what we need to shift to is understanding your broader impact: How many jobs did you create? What’s the quality of those jobs? Perhaps in a place like Kenya, a project is developed and a road is also built, and that is actually the core benefit to the community: having a roadway where there was not a roadway before. So part of what we want to do in our platform is help our clients really understand the broader impact beyond just tons managed.

Read the full interview here.

— Michelle Ma

The $800 million battery tech

The world won’t reach net zero without batteries. Lots of them.

So far, utilities have largely used lithium-ion batteries to store renewable energy when the sun sets or the wind stops blowing. However, existing utility-scale storage can only discharge energy for up to four hours at a time, meaning that systems can falter when the grid needs to provide widespread power for a long period of time, such as during a heat wave or major storm. Form Energy is developing batteries that use iron-air technology and could be poised to fill that power gap.

Fossil fuels currently act as baseload power for the grid. That’s because you can turn a gas power plant off and on relatively easily, regardless of whether it’s sunny or windy. (Nuclear is also another source of baseload power.) But winding down gas and coal use is vital to lowering emissions from the power sector.

Long-duration batteries could offer an offramp. Form Energy’s technology can charge and discharge energy over the course of several days. The company’s iron-air batteries sound deceptively simple.

• Form Energy submerges a porous piece of iron (the anode, reminiscent of a flat and thin brick) in an electrolyte solution.
• Oxygen enters the washer-and-dryer-sized batteries through a specialized membrane that keeps it from going out again.
• Once it makes contact with the electrolyte solution, a series of chemical reactions causes the iron to rust. The natural rusting process is a source of charge and discharge.
• “Before we zeroed in on iron-air batteries, we considered what is fundamentally able to scale and what is fundamentally safe, and what is fundamentally available to us to work with,” CEO Mateo Jaramillo said. “Iron ticks all of those boxes.”

Investors and utilities seem to think Form Energy’s tech could be a winner. The 5-year-old company has raised eye-popping amounts of cash and is forging ties with utilities and industries that need long-duration storage to cut emissions ASAP and ultimately reach net zero.

• Form Energy brought in a whopping $450 million in its series E funding round, bringing its total investment to around $800 million.
• It counts high-profile VCs like Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Energy Impact Partners among its investors.
• Form Energy signed a partnership with Georgia Power, its first with an investor-owned utility, earlier this year. The duo will work to deploy up to 15 megawatts of storage capacity.
• In 2020, it announced a much smaller 1 MW pilot project with the Minnesota cooperative Great River Energy.

Read the full story here.

— Lisa Martine Jenkins

A MESSAGE FROM SLB

The world is rapidly changing; the scales are imbalanced, and many are feeling the effects. SLB is committed to helping deliver the world’s greatest balancing act—enabling secure, accessible, sustainable energy to meet growing demand.

Learn more

One big number: 350 (or less!) 

The North Atlantic right whale is among the most endangered whales in the world, having been hunted to near-extinction over a century ago. Fewer than 350 remain in the wild. While whaling is thankfully no longer a concern, the big-mouthed beauties now face a new threat: the offshore wind industry.

The whales are in the midst of an “unusual mortality event,” which the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration attributes largely to “rope entanglements or vessel strikes.” Reaching the Biden administration’s goal of developing 30 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2030 will require a huge uptick in boat traffic and infrastructure being built.

The need to monitor right whales as well as other wildlife that calls the areas around offshore wind farms home has already spawned the development of new climate tech. For instance, offshore wind developer Vineyard Wind and startup incubator Greentown Labs launched an accelerator program for three companies developing the tech to protect whales and other marine animals. The startups’ techniques to save the whales include aerial drone systems for sea inspection and night-vision cameras that can be customized to work on offshore turbines.

The federal government is getting in on the act, too. To protect the whales from further harm, NOAA and the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management jointly released a strategy on how to balance the competing priorities of conservation and renewable energy development. It’s so far just a draft that amounts to little more than saying, “let’s research and be in touch about how much of a risk offshore wind is to these endangered animals.” But its very existence highlights that this balance should be top of mind for both the public and private sector.

Whether the tech and federal efforts will be enough to keep whale populations from dropping even further as construction picks up, however, remains to be seen.

— Lisa Martine Jenkins

Hot links

Rivian CEO RJ Scaringe thinks the future is e-bikes. RJ, welcome to the club.

AWS is doubling down on diesel. Amid concerns about electricity shortfalls in Ireland this winter, the data center giant has applied for permits for 105 diesel generators to keep its new Dublin operation up and running.

Toyota is considering a rewrite of its EV plan. The automaker’s potential shift could help it compete with Tesla — but it would slow the rollout of the EVs that are closest to market.

Landfills could be a solar energy goldmine. Turning dumps in solar farms could power 7.8 million homes and undo decades of environmental injustices. That’s what we in the climate biz call a win-win.

Take a look inside GM’s approach to building EVs. Going electric isn’t as simple as merely replacing conventional engines with battery systems; it requires a complete reorientation of U.S. auto manufacturing.

The EPA is creating a bank to protect the climate, equitably. The agency is setting up a green bank with $27 billion in seed money from the Inflation Reduction Act that will offer grants for carbon-free projects in disadvantaged communities.

A habitable planet and fossil fuel expansion can’t co-exist. Sorry to Exxon and company, but a growing body of research shows new oil and gas projects are incompatible with a 1.5-degree-Celsius climate.

A MESSAGE FROM SLB

Our planet needs balance to thrive; for the climate, for people, and for nature. Together, we will pave the way to a balanced planet through better practices, innovative technology, and the commitment to help others on their journey across the globe.

Learn more

Thanks for reading! As ever, you can send any and all feedback to climate@protocol.com. See you Thursday!