Tech’s work-from-home boom is leaving frontline workers behind. How leaders can close the gap

Azella Perryman
·8 min read
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Balance has always been a struggle for me: I’m a walking example of intersectionality. But being a leader in operations (moving tangible, physical goods/people) working in the tech industry (which is generally intangible-product/software-driven) has been a new level of walking a mental tightrope.

I’m a Black and Asian woman born and raised in small-town Alaska with a penchant for living on other continents. A kid from a working-class background now swimming in a sea of technorati, VC, and Ivy League–adjacent social circles. I’ve struggled with balancing and reconciling all the different facets of my identity my whole life. And now as an executive leader in a post–George Floyd era, I and many of my Black and brown friends are speaking up on the things that we normally don’t share in mixed company. There’s a lot to unpack and navigate just being Black in America today. Leading while Black is even more tricky.

While I don’t know that the focus on equity and racial justice will last (I truly hope it does, but as a Black person in America, I’m not holding my breath), I believe that COVID-19 has brought to the forefront the issues of mental health, self-care, compassion, and most important, what I call Balanced Leadership. It’s a subject I’ve been noodling on during COVID-19 (it certainly beats staring at a wall on yet another Friday night after running out of [hotlink]Netflix[/hotlink] to binge).

There are thousands of articles and blog posts on “leadership in unprecedented times” or “remembering to take care of yourself first so you can take care of others” or “managing a team remotely.” But there aren’t many folks talking about the unique challenges that exist in e-commerce tech companies that rely on frontline logistics to operate.

Managing a frontline essential workforce in the midst of a pandemic and civil unrest has raised new questions around balancing priorities in areas I hadn’t considered. COVID certainly highlighted the need for self-care, and George Floyd’s death forced companies to emphasize racial equity. But operations leadership is a conundrum because headquarters’ best practices and coping norms are less applicable to frontline workers, who are more likely to be people of color, and as such, disproportionately affected by both COVID and systemic racism. Complex decisions that have no right answer abound weekly when leading teams at the intersection of frontline essential workers and work-from-home, HQ-led decision-making.

“How long do you allow someone to stay on a leave of absence due to ‘possible’ hardship from COVID when other folks are struggling to pick up the slack and getting burned out as a result?”

“At what air quality level do you decide to shut down your fully outdoor rental fleet business, when wildfires are burning in adjacent counties and the air quality level is ‘not recommended’ but not technically ‘unsafe’?”

“When do I get to call out for ‘being sick of being Black in America,’ like other leaders who manage WFH teams, when my (very) diverse in-the-field team, who can’t take time off themselves, is looking for guidance on how to navigate difficult conversations and hold space for trauma?”

Even at a company as committed to taking care of its people as [hotlink]Lyft[/hotlink], there are still moments when you have to explain away something that makes little sense in the field and all the sense in the world for WFH employees. Walking that line feels perilous at times.

Tech companies have always held themselves to a higher standard when it comes to taking care of their employees. But oftentimes those wonderful cultural norms—town halls, performance reviews, career development sessions, etc.—aren’t at all geared toward or inclusive of the front line.

Field teams have 30-minute lunch breaks that are staggered throughout the day, so they can’t always come to the hour-long “lunchtime” town hall. They don’t have time to write performance reviews (except after 5 p.m.), because they’re literally physically working, away from computers all day. Free courses on “learning SQL” for career development aren’t as relevant when many need help with just the basics of résumé writing and interview skills. And more often than not they’re disproportionately people of color working for white managers. How do they explain to their white manager that they’re literally afraid of coming to work one day because the cops are patrolling the train stations due to civil unrest, and they might be shot?

A moral duty for leaders

It’s tricky, and nuanced. And as leaders—whether we’re managers, members of the human resources team, the CEO, or sitting on the board of directors—we have both a moral and fiduciary duty to consider the implications: 2020 made that all the more clear.

Boards and investors: 

  • Ask for specifics. If you’re investing in a company that will use warehouse or field staff in their business model, ask for specific details on what their HR and leadership team is doing intentionally to help that employee population specifically—from a racial awareness, mental health, and economic support perspective. If they haven’t considered those employees’ needs, uniquely and distinctly from what they’re offering the headquarters staff, high turnover and service and shipping delays are most likely in your future.

CEOs:

  • Actively and consistently drive the conversation around racial inequities. Require managers to incorporate not just the conversations, but the follow-ups into their OKRs, especially if you have white managers leading staff of color. Few people will do this very uncomfortable thing unless they’re being held accountable all the way up the line to the executive leadership team.

HR teams: 

  • Include your operations leaders in the policy-setting discussions. Ask for feedback from the managers on the front lines and ensure you’ve taken into account what the person making $20 an hour is going to think and feel, not just the folks who are questioning their tax domicile and their ergonomic workstation budgets.

  • Run the numbers. See where the glass ceiling is on entry-level people of color workers and how many are getting promoted to be mid-level managers of their peers. Inequality in leadership isn’t only a problem at the executive level; it’s just as insidious in the junior manager ranks. It’s likely that 70% to 80% of your level one and two staff are people of color: How many people of color are managing them?

  • Be willing to fight for a different type of “equity.” There may be perks that the front line receives that the WFH teams don’t. That’s okay—because there are risks the front line is taking every day that the WFH teams aren’t. While it’s easy to say they’re the most “replaceable” or that it’s more important to keep highly coveted engineering talent, that front line is what keeps your business humming, and your best frontline workers have deep institutional knowledge as well.

  • Ensure there are policies in place to account for the realities of life. When COVID hit, we set aside a bucket of hours for emergency time off (ETO) and built a system around how to get support if you suspected you might have been exposed, so people felt safe to raise the flag and not come to work if they felt sick. One day’s pay could mean the difference in paying rent in a multigenerational household, so those ETO days matter greatly.

Every situation is different, and every company has varying abilities to allocate funds and resources to the frontline versus the WFH teams. But if we don’t start to or continue to keep our frontline employees front of mind, we’re simply kicking the can down the road on a problem that will show up eventually—first in our culture, and then in our bottom lines. While the growing chasm between the haves and have-nots feels increasingly insurmountable in America, we can get ahead of the rift between our frontline and HQ teams in the tech industry if we’re willing to intentionally think about Balanced Leadership across our entire workforce.

I’m always exploring ways to improve the employee experience at the intersection of technology and operations. If you have thoughts or ideas on ways to do so, I’d love to hear them!

Azella Perryman is an operations executive at Lyft. Her prior roles include leading teams at Caviar, DoorDash, and StubHub. You can reach her at linkedin.com/in/azellaperryman.

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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com