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Theres no shortage of challenges facing employers and the U.S. workforce. From economic concerns to the impact of AI, both workers and organizational leaders are navigating big changes. One trend deserves particular attention: working mothers are reevaluating their place in the workforce. As reported by the Washington Post, the share of mothers aged 25 to 44 with young children who are in the workforce is on the decline, reaching its lowest level in more than three years. This shift has direct implications for recruiting, retention, and overall market competitiveness. But it also opens the door for leaders to make a meaningful difference for their employees. Understanding the pressures working mothers face Research by Harris Poll and KinderCare confirms this same reality: Working parents are balancing tremendous responsibilities at home and at work. As a working mother myself, I know firsthand how real these pressures feel. At the heart of the challenge is supportor too often, the lack of it. Our 2025 Parent Confidence Index, a survey of 2,000 U.S. parents with children under age 12 conducted with the Harris Poll, found that working parents are especially impacted by back-to-office mandates. Nearly three-quarters of parents are now working in-office full-time or in hybrid roles, and 60% say this has impacted their child care needs. Many would still prefer remote arrangements: 40% said all remote is their ideal, and nearly half felt pressured to return to the office. As employers continue to evolve their workplace policies, what working parents want from employers is clear. More than three-quarters believe employers should offset the cost of child care. Parents told us that they specifically want subsidized, on-demand, and on-site child care options, depending on their working scenario. Yet theres often a perception gap. While nearly half of all employees say they want child care benefits, only a third of chief HR officers (CHROs) believe their workforce needs them. And a striking 60% of employees say theyd rather have child care subsidies than a raise. Child care isnt just a nice-to-have when nearly three-quarters of parents say it would be impossible to do their job without reliable, high-quality care. Among those who already have benefits, 90% report that quality child care gives them peace of mind to perform well at work. Employers can be a part of the solution While many parents still say finding child care feels challenging, employers are uniquely positioned to be part of the solution. Child care benefits dont just support familiesthey strengthen business outcomes: Employee performance: Nearly 60% of parents say unreliable child care has hurt workplace performance. Retention: More than half would stay at a job because of child care benefits, and one-third or more would switch to get them. Reputation: More than 80% of employees believe how a company supports parents reflects how it cares for employees overall. Employers who lead here will be seen as family-oriented, caring, empathetic, and forward-thinking. A practical path forward The good news is that solutions are accessible and effective. Child care programs are not difficult or cost-prohibitive to implement, and their return on investment is significant when compared with the high cost of turnover (currently estimated at 50% to 200% of the employees annual salary). For example, Thomas Jefferson University and Jefferson Health partnered with KinderCare to assess how family care challenges affected their workforce. The survey revealed a clear ROI opportunity: Access to reliable child care would significantly reduce absenteeism, a critical issue in healthcare. The straightforward solution was to open an on-site child care center. KinderCare helped bring that vision to life, which continues to thrive, providing essential support to their working parents. Talent isnt disposable. It is the organizations margin of difference. Ultimately, the message for C-suite and talent leaders is simple: listen. More than 80% of employees who are parents believe that how a company supports its working parents reflects how it cares for its employees overall. Employees are telling us what matters mostsupporting the integration of home and work. By developing programs that speak directly to workforce realities, organizations strengthen retention, productivity, and competitive position.
Category:
E-Commerce
If you hear your organization talking about the Great ShakeOut, it has nothing to do with Taylor Swift or Florence and the Machine. Instead, this international event promotes earthquake preparedness. Having a plan greatly improves outcomes and saves lives. On October 16 at 10:16 a.m. local time, millions will be practicing how to properly drop, cover, and hold on. Lets take a look at the science behind earthquakes, the regions they impact, and how to participate in the Great ShakeOut. What actually causes an earthquake? The Earths outer layer is made up of seven major tectonic plates. Think of these as patches of a quilt that isnt stitched together perfectly. The places where the plates meet are called plate boundaries. Some of these contain fault lines. The patches or plates move since they are not properly connected, which causes stress to build up at the borders. When this reaches a boiling point, the pressure is released, causing the earth to shake. Which regions have the greatest earthquake risk? According to the United States Geological Survey, 81% of earthquakes take place along the Circum-Pacific seismic belt, which is located on the rim of the Pacific Ocean. This shaky area is also known as the Ring of Fire because of its plethora of volcanoes.Because of Japans advanced ability to detect earthquakes, it holds the dubious honor of having the most recorded quakes, though the USGS says its more likely that Indonesia experiences the most quakes annually by virtue of its larger size. The most catastrophic earthquakes have tended to occur in China, Iran, and Turkey. How can I participate? Organizations and individuals are welcome to participate in the Great ShakeOut. You can even make it a family affair. Register at shakeout.org to make sure your efforts are counted. There, youll find resources such as a drill narration and discussion questions for a post-event debrief. There are also steps to take to be ready for the big one. These include making sure furniture and decorative items are secure, having a disaster plan, and keeping emergency supply kits stocked and up to date with all the necessary items.
Category:
E-Commerce
The Interborough Express linethe long-awaited light-rail link between Brooklyn and Queens in New York Cityhasnt broken ground yet. But on my computer screen, one part of the route is already operational. A new simulation game called Subway Builder lets you design, build, and operate subway systems in 26 U.S. cities, from New York to Boston to San Francisco. The game uses real-life U.S. Census Bureau and employment data to map where residents and workers live, allowing you to simulate realistic passenger flows. Players must also contend with real-world constraints like tunnels, viaducts, existing foundations, and road layouts. [Image: courtesy Colin Miller] The goal is to design a subway network that gets the most people to their destinations as quickly as possible. But theres a deeper ambition: to spark more transit-minded thinking in a country that historically has underinvested in it. I would secretly hope that maybe someone in power sees this and says Maybe we can build something like this, says Colin Miller, a software engineer and creator of the game. [Image: courtesy Colin Miller] Building a hyperrealistic transit game Subway Builder launched on October 9 to much fanfare in the transit community. I’ve been playing Subway Builder for *checks notes* all night,” one user posted. I legitimately think this game is going to start a transit revolution in America, wrote another. Over the years, many developers have tried to gamify transit design with offerings like MetroConnect, Brand New Subway, and Mini Metro. But few have attempted to make their simulations realistic enough to replicate real transit-planning challenges at the scale of cities like New York or Seattle. To create Subway Builder, Miller drew on datasets from the U.S. Department of Education, the Federal Aviation Administration, and OpenStreetMap, among others. You can analyze demand statistics on a map of your chosen city; then, once you build a route, explore ridership station by station. One of the most satisfying features for me remains the constellation of red dots that represent riders commuting toward newly built stations and journeying across a network I just built. [Image: courtesy Colin Miller] The cost of building public transit in the U.S. Subway Builder bills itself as hyperrealistic, but there are two key exceptions: politics and budgeting. Miller says he did not take into account the political will in any given U.S. city, nor did he calibrate the games budget to U.S. infrastructure costs. Instead, he used Spanish construction costs, which are among the lowest in the world. (Madrid, for example, tripled its metro network in just 12 years.) If I had it set to realistic American construction prices, it would have made the game unplayable because youd run out of money, he concedes. Players can choose to play in sandbox mode, which comes with no budgetary constraints. Its the games normal mode that reveals a painful fact long criticized by expertsnamely that building transit in the U.S. is mind-bogglingly expensive. On average, domestic rail transit projects cost roughly twice as much per mile in the U.S. as they do in Europe or Canada, and as much as five times more in New York City. The relatively recent Second Avenue Subway expansion, for example, cost about $2.5 billion per mile. For reference, the Los Angeles Purple Line extension cost $800 million per mile, while Madrids extension was $320 million per mile. When I played the game, I quickly learned that even $3 billion would get me only three lines and about 20 stations in Brooklyn. I also learned that building a subway route is just the beginning of a long road plagued by never-ending signal failures, broken-down trains, and overall operational costs. And considering that every dollar collected from fares helps fund new routes and buy new trains, I gained a bit more sympathy for the MTAs recent war on fare evasion. [Image: courtesy Colin Miller] A tool for publication imagination Much ink has already been spilled on the state of mass transit in the United States. Transit advocates such as Yonah Freemark have frequently lamented declining ridership and funding shortfalls in American cities. Others, like Brent Toderian, have emphasized the role of transit in shaping equitable, walkable urban environments. While public transit has recently blossomed in many U.S. cities, the system remains plagued by some of the worlds highest construction costs, red tape, political fragmentation, and a misguided adulation for the freedom that cars provide for the benefit of the few at the expense of the many. Hayden Clarkin, a transport engineer and planner who recently published a Hitchhikers Guide to Building a Lot of Subways, argues the U.S. has the ability to build a world-class transit system but lacks the will. Imagine what we could achieve if we built up our institutional capacity and if leaders spent as much political capital on transit as they do on expanding highways, he told me via email. The systems other G7 nations have enjoyed for decades are not beyond our reachthey are a choice we can and must make. For Clarkin, games like Subway Builder arent just entertainment. He believes they could actually have real-world impact. This is a tool for public imagination, he says. Im genuinely excited for the day someone takes their in-game map to a city council meeting and says, Look at what we can achieve!
Category:
E-Commerce
The whole idea of advertisingusing pictures and words to get people to buy stuff, or to do somethingis old indeed, with the first known example dating back almost 5,000 years to the heady days of Ancient Egypt. The ads business changed a lot since we were writing notices on papyrus, but one thing thatuntil recentlyremained the same was that it was a deeply intentional business. The advertiser had to think about the language they used, the imagery they employed, the types of people they sought to reach, and how they would go about doing that. Whether the advertiser was touting a weaving shop on the banks of the Nile during the days of the Pharaohs, or selling detergent or cigarettes through new mass media innovations like the television or the radio, that same thoughtfulness was a constant. Advertisers had to thinkand, by virtue of the fact they were forced to make decisions, they were in control of everything. My biggest complaint with the digital ads ecosystem is it, by design, strips the ability of the advertiser to make some of those decisionsnot merely placement, but targeting, and with the emergence of dynamic creative and generative AI, messaging too. In the process, weve turned advertising from a very deliberately engineered systemwhere the architect knows what each part of the process should dointo one thats, essentially, a black box. And within this black box, theres little room for creativity. The Process Is Creative When we think about advertisingand, in particular, good advertisingwe always think about the messaging. Its true that some of the best campaigns in history have always used clever wordplay, or coy psychological tactics, to drive a point home. The Pepsi Challenge, for example, started off as a series of in-person taste tests and culminated in a campaign that could confidently say (though some have identified flaws in the test itself) that Pepsi was Americas preferred cola. Not only did this directly undercut Pepsis main adversaryCoca-Cola, which easily had the most powerful brand perceptionbut it also allowed people to differentiate between products that people might otherwise think of as identical. Messaging is important, but its far from the only creative part of the marketing process. Take Subaru, for example. In the 1990s, it was a struggling car brandeclipsed not only by its Japanese rivals like Nissan and Toyota, but also by fierce domestic competition in the U.S. market. Subaru hired a new advertising firm to turn its fortunes around, which ran a series of focus groups that asked why existing Subaru owners chose its vehicles, as opposed to those from one of its healthier rivals. That firm noticed that women dominated those focus groups, and many of those women identified as lesbian. The company then launched a campaign that targeted both women and lesbiansitself a brave choice, considering the climate of the 1990s, which saw the passage of both the Defense of Marriage Act and Dont Ask, Dont Tell. To help it reach lesbian audiences, it hired Mulryan/Nash to create content specifically for the gay press, and to handle ad buying. This campaign wasnt just pioneeringit also, arguably, helped revive Subarus fortunes, and the brand remains vibrant and relevant, especially in the U.S., where it sold over 667,000 cars in the 2024 calendar year. The Subaru example is a potent one, not simply because it was so successful, but because it illustrates how each step of the processfrom identifying the customer, to determining where to reach them, to crafting the messagingrequired human thought and human creativity. If were looking for a more contemporary example, Spotifys controversial Thanks 2016, its been weird springs to mind. Capitalizing on a year defined by seismic political shifts, celebrity deaths, and countless surreal moments to mention in the confines of this piece, Spotify tapped into its data, identifying equally surreal trends and turning them into highly relatable billboards positioned in prime urban locations. These billboards featured pithy one-liners (for example, Dear person who played ‘Sorry’ 42 times on Valentines Day, what did you do?), with the text localized for target markets (Dear 3,749 people who streamed Its the end of the world as we know it the day of the Brexit vote, hang in there). It served as a reminder of how music isnt simply a form of entertainment, but a way in which we process events in our personal lives, as well as those happening within politics and culture. Again, this process required creative thinking at every levelfrom identifying the patterns within the data that would lead to the funniest trends, to choosing the most valuable locations to place the billboards. I write all of this not because I believe that all digital advertisingwhere these decisions are outsourced, particularly to third-partiesis bad, but because I believe that the most effective and memorable campaigns are thoughtful ones. The reason why I believe digital advertising is the enemy to advertising is because, by design, it strips us of the ability to use that creativity across all stages of the advertising process, from conceptualization to creating the final product. Battling the Black Boxes Last year was the 30th birthday of digital advertising. Its interesting to see how, as the internet grew and an adtech ecosystem emerged, the very nature of how this segment actually works changed. Whereas at one point advertising deals were inked between companies, with money changing hands in exchange for prime placement for a set number of days, those manual transactions are now a thing of the past. Todays digital advertising mechanics are based on systems which the advertiser doesnt control or even understandand in the case of those which heavily rely on AI, even the developers dont have full insight into the factors behind each targeting and placement decision. This opacity also allows the adtech provider or advertising network to act in ways that are contrary to the interests of the advertisereither by obfuscating data that could allow them to make more effective decisions, or by failing to protect said advertiser from, for example, click fraud. Although digital ads allow a company to target and market at scaleand, arguably, with the economies of scale that wouldnt be otherwise possiblethe downside is, arguably, a degradation of the online experience for end users, profound concerns about user privacy, and an absence of transparency for those actually purchasing the ads. Arguably, the biggest downsidefrom someone who cares profoundly about the intellectual and creative brilliance of the ads industryis that digital ads havent really produced something thats memorable, or has had any meaningful cultural impact. Coca-Cola gave us Santa Clauss red outfit and the iconic flashing delivery trucks. Decades after tey commercials first aired, we still remember the Budweiser frogs croaking bud-wise-er, or its later ads that turned wazzup into a legitimate pop culture phenomenon (albeit a really irritating one). And thats because creativity is like a muscle, and if you dont exercise itor dont have to exercise ititll wither away.
Category:
E-Commerce
To announce its entrance into 5G home internet service, Mint Mobile found the real-life version of a new AI-generated actress, even if only in (nick)name. Tilly Norwood is the name of a so-called AI actress launched by AI talent studio Xicoia. It also happens to be the name of a woman who stars alongside Ryan Reynolds in Mint Mobile’s new ad for its home internet service, which its branding “Minternet.” “It’s hard to believe that Mint is launching 5G home internet. It’s also hard to believe that a real version of an AI actress is out there,” a Maximum Effort representative tells Fast Company. “And thanks to the incredible and somewhat disturbing stalking detective abilities of our team, we found her. Just outside of Dallas, Texas, just one day before filming the commercial. Luckily she responded to our random DMs and was happy to assure the world that both she and the internet are very real.” The fake Norwood has inspired backlash and a Wikipedia page, and the labor union SAG-AFTRA refused to say in a statement that the AI character is an actual actor, instead stating its “a character generated by a computer program that was trained on the work of countless professional performerswithout permission or compensation.” As it happens, the real NorwoodNatalie “Tilly” Norwoodis a real Mint Mobile customer. In the commercial, Reynolds, a former Mint Mobile co-owner who still makes ads for the wireless service provider through Maximum Effort, a production company he cofounded, asks if Norwood is real and “not an AI-generated combination of actors.” “I’m a combination of my parents,” the real Norwood says. Mint Mobile’s parent company was acquired by T-Mobile in 2023 in a deal worth up to $1.35 billion, and its 5G home internet service shows the brand is broadening its ambitions beyond mobile. The brand says its home internet service will use T-Mobile’s 5G network, and Mint Mobile is offering it for as low as $30 a month for customers with a Mint Mobile phone plan who prepay for three months. In an advertising landscape that could increasingly see more AI-generated ads, sticking to real people is a smart strategy. A 2024 YouGov poll of respondents from 17 markets around the world found 51% were uncomfortable with a brand creating a virtual ambassador (34% were comfortable with it; 15% didn’t know how they felt about it). In other words, using a fake Tilly Norwood in your ad could turn away half your audience. Meanwhile, the real living, breathing Tilly Norwood appears to be anything but polarizing.
Category:
E-Commerce
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