Forbes Careers: A NYC Law Could Help Your Job Search, Two Years Of Remote Work 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!

Beginning in May, a new law in New York City will make it illegal for most employers to exclude pay ranges from their advertised jobs or promotion opportunities. And no, many employers probably aren’t too happy about it.

But even if you don’t live in New York—or Colorado, where a similar law began early last year—the changes could have ripple effects. Labor lawyers, equal pay advocates and even some employers say the law could help narrow the gender pay gap, ensure current workers’ pay isn’t out of step with the piles of cash being thrown at new hires and—potentially—prompt companies fed up with a patchwork of local laws to just adopt the policy on a national scale. New York state, Washington state and California also have proposed bills at different stages that have similar requirements.

New York is such a big market, with such an in-demand pool of talent, that employers are unlikely to try to skirt the law the same way a few did in Colorado, lawyers say. And once the cat’s out of the bag about how much they’re offering Wall Street bankers or New York-based engineers, will the same employers really care about revealing their compensation in less expensive markets?

This week, we dig into how the new law is expected to have a broader impact with my latest story, here. And this Equal Pay Day, also check out Kim Elsesser’s take on the “exhaustion gap” hitting women, Holly Corbett’s look at what pay gap is data is telling us now and Hillary Clinton’s advice to a SpaceX engineer on working in a majority-male field from the Forbes 30/50 Summit.

Featured Story

More than 40% of companies say workers have asked for higher pay to offset inflation. Few say they’ve revised salary budgets.Inflation may be hitting new 40-year highs.

Inflation may be hitting new 40-year highs. But less than a quarter of U.S. organizations say they are revising their salary budgets due to inflation—despite many workers asking for raises or other actions to cope with higher prices, according to a new survey. Read more about this disconnect, and what some employers are doing to offset pay, here.

Work Smarter

It’s time to normalize career breaks. Here’s how to return to work after taking one.

Overwhelmed at work? You’re not alone. It’s one of the top reasons employees quit, according to new McKinsey research.

Meanwhile, a new study from Pew Research Center finds that most workers who quit their jobs in the “Great Resignation” of 2021 have gone on to higher pay.

Want a new job at a startup? Here is Forbes’ new list of America’s best startup employers.

Remote work is still everywhere. But are 19 million Americans really about to relocate?

On Our Agenda

War in Ukraine: The corporate exodus from Ukraine continues, often following pressure from employees. A parade of companies have left Russia, yet Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has called on Microsoft, Oracle and SAP, which have announced significant steps to roll back business operations in the country, to take further action against Russia.

Hybrid is here to stay: Two years into the pandemic, a new survey from Gallup released Tuesday shows how much has really changed about where employees work. Before 2020, Gallup’s research shows, just 8% of employees whose jobs allowed it worked fully remote. In February of 2022, that figure was 39%, and 24% anticipate that will be their arrangement long term. But nearly 60% say their preference is some kind of hybrid arrangement. Read my story here about how this grand work-from-home experiment is shaking out at the pandemic’s two-year milestone.

Rethinking work: H.R. analyst Josh Bersin says a big problem with the tight labor market is that companies need to redesign work, thinking differently about how roles are structured and separating jobs more by type of work. For instance, he says, healthcare organizations that rethink nursing jobs—splitting the roles by clinicians and operations managers who do scheduling and paperwork—see increased retention by letting more nurses do work they love rather than putting everyone in catch-all jobs. “It’s a bit of a crisis,” Bersin told me in advance of a new report he shared first with Forbes. “You can’t get enough people if you’re not rearranging or redesigning what they’re doing.”

Age matters: A new Harvard Business Review series is looking at the issue of age in the workplace, an often overlooked source of bias and lack of diversity in today’s world. The series is worth a read, particularly the pieces on managing in an ageist workplace and how shadow boards can help manage generational divides.

Are you a ‘workahome-ic’? Two professors from German business schools have coined a new phrase for people who can’t stop working despite being ill: They suffer from “workahomeism.” In their paper—particularly salient as remote work means it’s harder to take sick days and separate yourself from work obligations—they write about how much feelings of guilt drive the phenomenon. The problem, co-author Fabiola Gerpott told Forbes in a recent interview, is that people think “if I just continue working that might make me feel better.” But it doesn’t—people don’t recover and they’re unable to do their best quality work, which can let their colleagues down. Read more from their paper here.

Book Club

Want to know what the best CEOs have in common? What they spend their time on, how they think about their responsibilities and what makes their job so lonely at the top?

McKinsey & Co. partners Carolyn Dewar, Scott Keller and Vikram Malhotra’s new book, CEO Excellence, is the rare leadership book that takes an analytical look at not only who the best CEOs are—they started with a pool of 2,400 public company CEOs to come up with a list of 200, interviewing 67 of them in-depth, including JPMorgan Chase’s Jamie Dimon, Microsoft’s Satya Nadella and Netflix’s Reed Hastings. Forbes interviewed Dewar and Malhotra, who both had a takeaway to share from their interviews with Nadella:

• Dewar: “Satya Nadella talked about [the CEO’s job] being the loneliest role. Everyone does. But he said it’s actually an information asymmetry problem. No one else underneath you sees all the things you see. No one above you—like your board and other stakeholders—see everything you see. So [the CEO job] really is this unique node of integration … it all bubbles up to you. Realizing that and what that means for how you should spend your time was pretty striking.”
• Malhotra: “On culture, we’re just used to so many companies that will have a long list of 10 cultural items that they’re trying to shift at any one time. They want to shift accountability. They want to speed execution. They want to change x, they want to change y. These [CEOs] tended to pick on one cultural dimension, align very tightly to their vision and strategy and drive the heck out of it. Put metrics around it, measure it, manage it, role model it. There are obviously a bunch of other things going on, but one thing becomes the priority that they talk about.” Nadella, Malhotra says, wanted to shift the company to having more of a growth mindset, “and that’s all he talked about for three years.”