Welcome back to our Workplace newsletter. Today, Salesforce’s SVP of UX and product design is rethinking what it means to be a “team” in this new distributed world of work. Say goodbye to the Great Resignation, and hello to the Great Breakup. Plus, women in the U.S. were less likely than men to get raises this year — and when they did, they got smaller ones.

— Allison Levitsky, reporter (email | twitter)

Designing the 'next stage' of work

Here at Workplace we spend much of our time talking to CEOs and CHROs — but they’re far from the only tech leaders pondering the future of work. I recently caught up with Kat Holmes, SVP of UX and product design at Salesforce, about how she’s thinking about the challenges and advantages of working together in 2022 and beyond. Holmes wrote the book “Mismatch: How Inclusion Shapes Design” and spends much of her time contemplating the “next stage” of work, both with customers and internally with her own team. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

You’ve talked about how the new workplace means businesses need to become more interdependent and collaborative — how do you accomplish that when the remote environment can feel so siloed?

There’s some forced benefit that you get when we’re all sitting in the same office at the same time, but if we actually had to unpack it and look at it almost from a design perspective, what are the stages of getting to know people? What does it mean to make sure that our environments are accessible and participatory? And what does it really mean to contribute to each other?

That’s something I learned along the way with inclusive design: That sense of belonging that people have in relationships really comes down to being able to contribute to one another, and we can do that in a virtual environment. There’s places where that works very well, but in the business context, we just haven’t had to design that into the way that we work.

The way we reward employees or recognize employees is still very much built on this individual model of, “What impact did you have this quarter? What individual outcome did you accomplish?” The truth of it is, “Where did people contribute to you, and how did you contribute to other people’s success?” That’s a shift that’s deeper than just the language of it. It’s really in framing what it means to be a successful team in a virtual environment.

What practices does your team use to communicate and collaborate?

One of the things that’s been really interesting is thinking differently about “team.” I’m sitting in Seattle, and there’s 500 other Salesforce employees who aren’t working on the same product, but are sitting in Seattle as well. [There’s] connection that can be built through that local community. Some of the things that we’re doing locally is finding a shared time. As a leader, it takes me saying every Wednesday and Thursday, I go into the office. I communicate proactively. I sometimes bring treats. Even when people come into town, they know when to come into town. It’s just knowing when to be together.

My team’s spread between Tel Aviv and India, West Coast, East Coast, Buenos Aires, Brazil. I’m not a social psychologist, but … there’s some number in the human psyche that’s like, if I feel like I have physical connection with this core group, we facilitate that, then we know that that group has some shared accountability out to other groups that are dependent on them for work.

That’s a balance that we’re working on right now. At the smaller group, you want to have a tight sense of identity, a tight sense of counting on one another, being able to work in a similar style, and then being able to open up our paths of communication so we really understand who needs to know what I’m doing because they’re counting on me to get something else done.

What’s the hardest thing about this new way of working as a designer?

It’s the sense of shared time and being able to meet and build relationships and share time in a way that doesn’t always have to be structured. A lot of things happen through happy accidents and through chance meetings. I think one of the challenges is spontaneity and how to retain that in this environment. You can solve a system, you can reshape it and all those things, but leaving space for uncertainty and spontaneity and chance encounters is a real challenge.

— Allison Levitsky, reporter (email | twitter)

​The broken rung

Women want more from their workplaces and they aren’t afraid to walk away to get it.

Women are leaving workplaces at higher rates than ever, a study by McKinsey and LeanIn.org found. Women’s voluntary attrition was 10.5% this year, compared to 9% for men. That’s up from 7.2% for women and 7.1% for men the year before.

• Women are also still dramatically underrepresented in higher-level and C-suite roles, due to what the report calls the “broken rung”: For every 100 men promoted from entry level to manager, only 87 women are promoted, and only 82 women of color are promoted. Because of this, the higher you go, the fewer women there are to promote.

Women are leaving for more than just a higher paycheck or new title. Women often face more opposition, including microaggressions undermining their authority or bias in promoting, according to the report. They’re also often overworked and under-recognized, and will walk away from their companies if leaders don’t value employee well-being and DEI initiatives.

Talent gaps are wider in tech. In hardware, for example, women make up 32% of entry-level positions and 26% of the C-suite. In software, women represent 41% of entry-level jobs and 27% of C-suite roles. This includes tech roles at non-tech companies, Alexis Krivkovich, managing partner at McKinsey and co-author of the report, told me.

• These gaps are only getting wider, Krivkovich said. “The difference between men and women holding tech roles is 2.5 times more men than women. In 2018, it was 1.9 times.”
• Because few women are in the tech workforce, few women are wanting to join, she said. “Women in tech disproportionately experienced being an ‘only’ in the workplace. That is associated with worse day-to-day interactions.”

But there are ways to bridge the gap. Companies that train managers to care about and invest in DEI and wellness initiatives are more likely to recruit and retain women. Embracing a flexible work model — and avoiding proximity bias while doing so — can also help make women want to stay in your workforce.

—Nat Rubio-Licht, reporter (email | twitter)

Raises not coming

More than 1 in 3 U.S. workers haven’t received a raise in the last year, according to Bamboo HR’s 2022 Compensation Trends report. And men did better than women in terms of both getting raises and the size of their increase.

• Men were more likely than women to have received a raise, with 66% of men getting a pay bump, compared to 62% of women.
• Men’s raises were also larger than women’s raises, on average. Men walked away with 6.39% more pay this year, versus 5.24% for women.
• Women (16%) reported higher rates of frustration about their pay than men (11%) did. Across genders, almost 1 in 4 workers reported negative feelings (whether frustrated, unhappy, or resentful) about their compensation.

A MESSAGE FROM AUTOMATION ANYWHERE

Today, we expect instant results from our every action, from calling an Uber to ordering a t-shirt. Companies can no longer afford to not adopt technologies like automation. We are now living in the Automation Economy – a new world that requires agility and a complete reimagining of how we work.

Learn more

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.

⬇️ Attrition at Amazon costs the company $8 billion per year, according to leaked documents cited by Engadget.

⬇️ Microsoft announced layoffs on Monday, with an unnamed source telling Axios fewer than 1,000 jobs were cut.

⬇️ As heard on the stage at TechCrunch Disrupt. TC Editor-In-Chief Alex Wilhelm: "Is there anyone left at Better.com? Because I feel like — " Natasha Mascarenhas, senior reporter: "Their CEO. Just the CEO." (Editor’s note: This is an exaggeration.)

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

A MESSAGE FROM AUTOMATION ANYWHERE

Today, we expect instant results from our every action, from calling an Uber to ordering a t-shirt. Companies can no longer afford to not adopt technologies like automation. We are now living in the Automation Economy – a new world that requires agility and a complete reimagining of how we work.

Learn more

Around the internet

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

It’s a TRAP! Training Repayment Agreement Provisions are on the rise, but legislation might be coming soon that would prevent companies from charging employees for training after the employee quits.

HR teams at big tech companies don’t know what to do about TikToking at work.

Remote work means working moms are multitasking more than they ever did before.

That's one way to do it.

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

Shares of crypto-friendly bank Silvergate Capital fell by more than 20% Tuesday after its earnings report showed a decrease in deposits and its leadership announced a delay for a major stablecoin project.

The California-based company is one of the top providers of banking services to exchanges and other crypto companies, a market that has seen its digital tokens lose more than $2 trillion in value over the past year during a so-called crypto winter.

Silvergate reported earnings per share of $1.28 against expectations from Wall Street of $1.45, according to Zacks Investment Research. The deposits Silvergate holds from digital asset companies fell to $12 billion on average during the quarter, down about 13% from the previous quarter.

Adding to its pain, the bank’s big stablecoin project will not meet its goal of launching this year, President and CEO Alan Lane said on the company’s analyst call. Silvergate in January purchased the assets of Meta’s failed Diem blockchain project with plans to use the technology to launch a U.S.-dollar-backed stablecoin.

“Unfortunately, we no longer expect that to happen this year,” Lane said.

The technology is ready to go but the firm is “working with regulators and policymakers and making sure we get this right,” Lane said.

Lawmakers in the House of Representatives have been negotiating for months on a bill to regulate stablecoins, but nothing has advanced.

Outside of that initiative, one of Silvergate’s key products is a network that allows crypto exchanges and other clients to instantly transfer funds. But payments on the Silvergate Exchange Network fell by 41% on the quarter, to $112.6 billion.

“Volumes were mainly impacted by trends in the broader industry, specifically within stablecoins, as volumes from stablecoin issuers, such as USDC, saw a sizable drop in market cap during the quarter,” Lane said.

Lane said the company expects usage of its network won’t always be closely tied to crypto market values. “We remain confident in the power of the platform and the opportunities for expansion within the network,” he said.

Silvergate has grown its deposits from under $1 billion a decade ago to more than $13 billion, largely through providing banking services to crypto companies. Wall Street investors rewarded it during boom times for crypto last year, with Silvergate's share price peaking near $220 in November.

The firm hadn't been hit as hard on Wall Street as other crypto-focused companies in the first half of the year. Its share price climbed following its second-quarter earnings in July.

But some analysts were beginning to have doubts. Wells Fargo warned in a downgrade a couple weeks ago that the growth outlook for Silvergate Capital as a “pure-play crypto banking solution” is limited during a crypto winter.

Research firm Keefe, Bruyette & Woods still held a positive “outperform” stance on Silvergate in a report following earnings Tuesday, but noted that “outflow was more than we expected, and overall digital asset activity clearly slowed in Q3 as measured by SEN transfers.”

Lane told analysts that the recent moves by Mastercard, BNY Mellon, and BlackRock to expand crypto offerings should be taken as a positive sign for the industry.

“There is a lot of institutional adoption that is still coming — none of these things are live yet, they’ve all been an announcement about things to come — so we could not be more optimistic on the long-term trajectory,” Lane said. “But these things take time to play out.”

Correction: The original version of this story cited erroneous timing for the release of Wells Fargo's research report on Silvergate. This story was updated on Oct. 19, 2022.

Salesforce’s stock went up more than 7% on Tuesday, after activist investor Starboard Value revealed a significant stake in the company, according to CNBC. Starboard founder Jeff Smith told CNBC he remains confident in Salesforce’s ability to deliver value, and plans to invest in the company long term, but said the company has a "subpar mix of growth and profitability."

The move should make the last quarter of 2022 a little more interesting for Salesforce's executive leadership. During last quarter’s earnings call, Salesforce announced 26% year-over-year revenue growth, but also lowered its full-year guidance.

Then, during its flagship Dreamforce conference in September, the company announced new Slack features and the real-time customer data platform Genie, which were intended to push the company toward its $50 billion revenue goal.

But investors were skeptical that Genie was a real engine for growth. Although Salesforce has been a darling of the investor community based on its past performance, concerns about the company’s customer data platform vision, the price tag attached to the Slack deal, and its lack of profitability made more than one investor question the SaaS giant’s ambitions.

“I don’t see how they hit that $50 billion … It’s just not gonna happen,” Guggenheim Partners analyst John DiFucci told Protocol last month. “We can’t get there. I wish.”

And just weeks later, the company laid off a number of workers and implemented a hiring freeze through January 2023. At least 90 contractors were impacted by the layoffs, according to sources.

All of those developments sent Salesforce’s stock tumbling. So far this year, the SaaS giant’s stock is down more than 40%, making Tuesday's gains rather notable.

But Salesforce has a rocky road ahead as investors pressure the company to transition away from growth mode. Activist investors have a mixed track record in forcing tech companies to make big changes, but there's no question their presence makes the C-suite nervous; at least Salesforce has two people in the role to share the burden.

The Federal Trade Commission is planning to ask the public whether energy-efficiency labels on home appliances should also include information on repairing the tech as a way to help address its environmental impact, the agency said Monday.

The request for comment comes as FTC officials look skeptically at many restrictions on consumers' ability to repair the products they own. The commission's stance has been a boost for the so-called right-to-repair movement and helped nudge companies like Apple and Samsung to offer at-home, DIY fixes for smart devices like phones.

The right-to-repair movement has long looked beyond the highest-tech consumer gadgets, however, and modern home appliances increasingly have digital displays, internet connectivity, and even built-in smart assistants. Advocates of repair rights have also said that keeping devices from getting wheezy and ending up in a landfill is an environmental win.

The FTC said that, as part of seeking input on potential changes to the labeling rule, new language could also address the fact that many consumers buy their appliances online, while regulations only require manufacturers to put labels on physical devices such as dishwashers and refrigerators. In addition, the FTC asked about broadening the types of appliances that need to have the familiar yellow EnergyGuide tags, potentially adding clothes dryers, air purifiers, cooktops, electric spas, and others to the rules.

Still, any final move by the commission, which is already eying an expansive regulatory agenda that threatens to require years of work at the expense of other priorities, could be far in the future. The FTC has also previously sought comments on changes that wouldn't have brought in label format or repairability.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated the date of the FTC's announcement. This story was updated on Oct. 18, 2022.

Happy Tuesday, Protocol Climate pals. We’re here today to share a few exclusives. First, we’re talking with a new nonprofit that channels philanthropy to carbon removal. Then, we’re diving into a report on the Inflation Reduction Act’s secret superpower. We also have Olivia Wilde’s salad dressing recipe. Or do we? You’ll have to read on to find out.

Carbon removal’s new funding model

Tech companies have gone all in on carbon dioxide removal. Now philanthropists are following suit. The nonprofit Terraset exited stealth mode on Tuesday and shared its mission exclusively with Protocol.

There’s a gap in how carbon removal gets funded. Tech leaders have committed to spending more than $1 billion on the industry’s services, while venture capitalists have done deals galore. Until now, though, individuals who want to pool their resources to pay for carbon removal and help the industry gain a toehold have had very few options outside purchasing services from direct air capture company Climeworks.

• “There’s this gulf between how much people want to act and the options available to them,” Alex Roetter, who’s currently a managing director and general partner at Moxxie Ventures and previously was president at Kittyhawk and head of engineering at Twitter, told Protocol.
• When it comes to CDR, “there can’t be large supply without a really strong signal that there’s demand.”
• Enter Terraset, Roetter’s new venture, which is attempting to bridge that gulf by funneling private philanthropy to the most promising carbon removal startups that need capital to scale.

Terraset already has some big donors — but it’s also accessible to anyone with an interest in giving money to sucking carbon from the sky.

• The nonprofit, which has been operating in stealth mode since early this year, has secured annual donations in the “low six figures,” according to Roetter, from a handful of donors.
• Among them are investor Tim Ferriss and Segment co-founder Calvin French-Owen.
• Starting today, anyone can donate any amount to Terraset. The organization pools the funds, then vets and selects the CDR projects using a handful of requirements.

The nonprofit has already funded two startups. Initial donations have been used to back Charm and Heirloom, two of the proliferating number of CDR providers.

• “We need a lot of diversified buyers from various different parts of the economy,” including corporations, governments, high net worth individuals, and people giving small amounts, Shashank Samala, the CEO and co-founder of Heirloom, said, since every additional buyer helps companies like Heirloom scale up and reduce costs as a result.
• For its part, Terraset does due diligence and selects CDR projects it backs based on them meeting a handful of requirements, including scientific rigor and a commitment to ethical carbon removal.
• Though the group doesn’t have scientists on staff, it uses guidance of groups like advance market commitment organization Frontier and nonprofit CarbonPlan to help evaluate CDR startups.

Read the full story here.

— Michelle Ma

Trucking’s overlooked IRA tax credits

Tired: the Inflation Reduction Act’s electric passenger vehicle tax credits.

Wired: the IRA’s EV tax credits for medium- and heavy-duty vehicles.

A lot of digital ink has been spilled about nearly all aspects of the $7,500 EV tax credit. But the law may have an even bigger impact on electrifying medium- and heavy-duty trucking. A new report shared exclusively with Protocol reveals just how big an impact the under-the-radar tax credits could have on cleaning up one of the dirtiest segments of the transportation sector.

The IRA has some unprecedented tax credits for delivery vans, long-haul trucks, buses, and more. Among them are a $7,500 credit for light- and medium-duty vehicles and $40,000 for heavy-duty trucks. Those credits don’t come with any requirements for where battery components and minerals can be sourced from or how much vehicles cost, both of which are facets of the passenger EV tax credits.

• “The fact that the IRA includes a new commercial EV tax credit is, to my mind, a game changer,” Sara Baldwin, the director of electrification at policy shop Energy Innovation, said.
• The group is responsible for the new report that shows that the law’s tax credits could rapidly increase the share of electrified trucks and vans used in fleets by 2030 compared to business as usual.
• Without any additional policies, 17% of new sales would be battery EVs by 2030. With the IRA, though, that percentage could rise to as high as 38%.
• Heavy-duty electric truck sales could nearly triple due to the IRA, reaching 27% by 2030.
• “The medium- and heavy-duty vehicle market is much more nascent,” when it comes to electric options, Baldwin said. “There’s a lot more opportunity for growth, as well as innovation.”

It’s not just tax credits for fleet EVs that could speed their adoption. The IRA essentially turned to the EV industry and Oprah’d it with tax credits. Beyond the vehicles, charging also got a huge boost with tax credits of up to $100,000 per charger.

• Meanwhile, the bipartisan infrastructure law set aside $7.5 billion for states to build the charging networks of their dreams.
• Baldwin said the various tax credits plus the charger funding could send “the up-front cost barrier and then the charging and range anxiety barrier” tumbling down for fleet owners.
• Some major businesses have already made major pledges to electrify their fleets. Amazon, for example, put in an order for 100,000 electric vans from Rivian and installed some of its own charging stations.
• The new tax credits could provide incentives for it and other major companies to make more EV purchases, including heavy-duty trucks, as well as make it easier for smaller companies to transition to electric fleets.

Regulations could further tip the scales. Carrots won’t get us to full electrification, tasty as they may be. Sticks will also play a role in convincing fleet owners that electric options are the best ones.

• The Environmental Protection Agency is considering new emissions standards for medium- and heavy-duty trucks.
• States could also take a lead. On the heels of phasing out gas-powered car sales by 2035, California is considering banning diesel truck sales by 2040.

Read the full story here.

— Brian Kahn

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1,200 kilowatt-hours

Carbon removal will likely play some role in reaching net zero. But doing so will require huge amounts of energy. It takes around 1,200 kilowatt-hours to remove a ton of carbon from the sky using direct air capture. That could be a barrier to widespread use, according to MIT Energy Initiative’s senior research engineer Howard Herzog.

The carbon removal industry expects to scale to capture billions of tons per year. That could put it in direct competition with renewable needs for other purposes like, say, keeping the lights on. (For reference, the average American home uses a little less than 900 kilowatt-hours of energy per month.) Capturing “just” 1 billion tons would essentially require all of the carbon-free energy that’s available today, including nuclear.

The high energy use also hides carbon removal’s true cost, according to Herzog, who did the energy use analysis and is skeptical the industry can reach its target price point of $100 per ton.

• Even the lowest-carbon fossil fuel, natural gas, generates almost half a ton of carbon dioxide for every ton that is taken out of the atmosphere via DAC, according to his estimates.
• In that scenario, if a DAC company says they can perform the capture for $100 per ton, that’s really the gross capture cost. The net cost is actually double that amount.
• What that means is that, for DAC to be economically feasible, the energy powering it has to be carbon-free. (Which also makes sense, because if you’re trying to pull carbon dioxide out of the air, it kind of defeats the purpose if you’re adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in the process.)

DAC’s high energy use points to the value of decarbonizing everything as fast as possible. One ton of carbon that doesn’t make it into the atmosphere today is one less to remove tomorrow. And that means less conflict over future renewable energy.

– Michelle Ma

​Hot links

Climate tech is a bright spot in the bleak venture capital landscape. Startups in climate and energy represented five of the top 10 equity deals in the third quarter.

The Nikola saga ended in a guilty verdict. Trevor Milton, the founder of the EV company Nikola, was convicted of multiple counts of fraud after lying to investors about the company’s technology.

E-waste is an underutilized source of critical minerals. Only an average of 17% of e-waste is recycled, which means vast amounts of resources needed by the energy transition are being, well, wasted.

Carbon capture is a secret water hog. Using it at scale could double the entire world’s water use.

California’s Prop 30 has become a tech battleground. The ballot measure would tax the state’s richest residents to subsidize the EV transition. Lyft supports it, while an array of tech leaders, including Netflix’s Reed Hastings and OpenAI’s Sam Altman (plus Gov. Gavin Newsom), oppose it.

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