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 Edelman CEO Richard Edelman Explains Why His Company's Trust Barometer, Now In Its 25th Year, Is More Relevant Than Ever.

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Image provided by Edelman. Graphic done by Fortune. 

Leadership

Almost five years after the COVID-19 pandemic normalized remote work, companies like Amazon are attempting to pull their employees back into the office five days a week. But despite mandates from some of the biggest companies, most CEOs we talked to prefer a different model.

We Asked CEOs About RTO Mandates—Hybrid Work Won by a Landslide

Nearly five years after the COVID-19 pandemic popularized remote work, companies like Amazon are pushing for a full return to the office. However, most CEOs we talked to prefer a different model.

The days of everyone heading into the same office to work 5 days a week came to a dramatic halt in 2020 as COVID shook the world. But this year, another shift has been happening for many organizations that continued allowing employees to work remotely beyond the pandemic. Here come the employees back to work in the city, no more working from home. Amazon is demanding its corporate employees return to the. Of 5 days a week forcing employees to come back into the office. They're being ordered back to the office. This year's slew of return to office mandates have made headlines as some of the biggest companies, including Amazon and Walmart, have announced full 5 day a week returns to office for their workforces, and Elon Musk, a CEO known for railing against remote work, has shared plans to mandate a return to office for all. US federal employees once President-elect Trump takes office through the proposed Department of Government Efficiency. But research suggests that these mandates lead to an exodus of high performing employees, and not all CEOs and business leaders agree. In fact, the vast majority of executives we spoke to at last month's Fortune Global Forum said that a version of remote work was here to stay, the hybrid work model. I'm thinking it's going to be hybrid forever. I'm thinking the all in or the all out doesn't work. I think people get motivated by being with each other. I think they also have incredibly complex lives and they need to balance. The hybrid model brings together new and old ways of working, combining the flexibility and autonomy of remote work with the culture and collaboration that comes along with face to face office environments. Workers spend their own money and time each day they head to an office, so remote days mitigate that burden while also making it easier for them to handle kids. Appointments and other responsibilities. Some companies are leaving the decision up to the employees. In our office space where people could be remote, we've allowed people to make that decision themselves. and about 70% of our workforce that's adopted to the fact that they don't have to commute, they don't have to buy work clothes, they don't have to have that chunk out of their day. They can do their Work when it fits for them. One thing we know is if our workforce likes it, they do a better job for our customers. So the hybrid way in our conclusion is the best balance between the two sides. What one has to realize is that extreme of either side is bad. This motivation to avoid extremes turned out to be a prime factor for many in finding balance through a hybrid work model. CEOs agree that there is an element of creativity and collaboration that just can't be replicated in a fully remote environment. Being in person, collaborating, learning from each other was really important to me and and important to how I grew up as a as a leader. So that is an important part of collaboration. It's an important part of leadership development, and I think we've we've sort of lost some of that over the last few years. It's not just staying in your lane and doing the work you have to do today. We can be very efficient at doing that over Zoom and remotely, but it's when we're together, we get the creativity, so it's critically important to have people together. We value the time we spend together and so we try to make those 3 days the same 3 days so that we can all work together and then understanding the realities of life outside of the office and the difficulties of commuting. And providing some flexibility on the on the edges, I think is important. It allows us to retain, attract and retain a really talented workforce. While there are benefits to working together in person, some see the return to office mandates as a thinly veiled way to reduce headcount by getting employees to resign in protest. You're seeing a whole lot of pushback from major corporations where they're trying to bring people back into the office, and they know that as a part of that. Will further reduce their workforce. Elon Musk even admitted this is a reason behind his plan to end remote work for federal employees. Requiring federal employees to come to the office 5 days a week would result in a wave of voluntary terminations that we welcome. But whether headcount reduction is the goal behind these decisions or not, it's turning out to be the result. Amazon employees began mass applying for new positions, and a survey found that 73% of these workers were considering quitting. And following Walmart's return to office announcement, Sam's Club chief technology officer resigned in protest. But despite the rise of hardline stances to in-office mandates, the leaders we spoke to praised the best of both worlds approach. We've all learned as employers that you can be really, really productive even when you're not in the same physical location. So I expect that this is a trend that is here to stay. People have different work styles. Lifestyles and approaches as long as we're in pursuit of the same mission, as long as we are keeping pace with each other, uh, it's up to them. I believe that the flexibility is probably something that needs to be there for a lot of people in order to make their everyday life work even better, so. I like the fact that they have that flexibility, but I also like when we're all together in the in the office, magic happens when people come together, so I like that we get together in the office as well.

JPMorganChase’s Head of Global Real Estate gives Fortune an inside look at the bank’s new 60-story headquarters in New York

Inside JPMorgan Chase's new office where employees are returning 5 days a week in person

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JPMorganChase’s Head of Global Real Estate reveals the latest inside the bank’s new 60-story headquarters in New York

Inside JPMorganChase's new office where employees are returning 5 days a week in person

We asked this question of ourselves. Where is the greatest corner, the greatest block in the greatest neighborhood in New York City? And everybody in the room said, Well, we're on it. It's right here at 270 Park Avenue. Towering 1,388 ft over Midtown East is JPMorgan Chase's new global headquarters, 270 Park Avenue. This bustling avenue is home to luxury high rises and neighboring Fortune 500 companies, a gem for real estate. But construction isn't the only thing making noise on Park Avenue. Days into the new year, the bank notified its employees about a return to the office. The mandate would be for 5 days a week starting as soon as March. The conversation has since sparked backlash from workers. JPMorgan Chase is the nation's biggest bank with $4 trillion in assets at the end of 2024. The bank ranks number 7 on the Fortune world's most admired companies list, 2 spots lower than the previous year. Could sky-high terraces and a decked out food court. To its new headquarters be enough to win over workers in New York? Why is JPMorgan Chase building this new office building? What does it give that the current one that we're in can? It's become more and more apparent to everybody that place, the physical place, is really important for folks, for their energy, for the way they feel about themselves, and the way they feel about their companies. David Arena is the head. Of global real estate at JPMorgan Chase, he says the building was designed with employee wellness, safety, and hospitality in mind. For that, the bank tapped esteemed architect Norman Foster, whose global portfolio ranges from the Hearst Tower in New York City to the Reichstag Building redesign in Berlin. 270 Park Avenue silhouette has evolved 3 times since opening in 1917. In 57, the building was demolished, becoming the site of the Union Carbide Building. This became the home of JPMorgan Chase and Co. Operations have since moved across the street to 3383 Madison, which allowed Foster to reimagine the property's facade. There was a lot of conversation about building a building that kind of felt like it was constantly moving upwards. New York City has this phrase called excelsior. It's Latin for ever upwards. Originally when we got the first set of architectural schematics, it was a typical wedding cake building, big trading box at the ground floor. The really unique thing about this building, and that I find really interesting is that it's raised 80 ft off the ground, so that's really different than a lot of the other offices around. And it's purposeful, and the executives at JPMorgan Chase told me it's because they wanted to be good neighbors to their fellow New Yorkers here. They wanted to create a sense of walkability, especially during, you know, a crowded lunch rush like today here in New York. Inside the 60-story skyscraper are renovations that arena cites as ways to elevate the office experience. This includes 3 times more fresh air, up to 30% larger. to maximize natural light and 40% more hospitality space. The building will also be fitted with lighting technology that can mimic natural circadian rhythms or even be customized to personal preferences. Talk to me about the tech in this building. Is there any new tech that's really exciting to you? Any new ways you're using AI to help with this? So I think all of the above, there is lots of new tech in a building like this. All the major systems, the elevator system, the security system, the emergency power systems, the air systems, they are all so much smarter in 2024 than they were in 2015. They'll know when you register for a conference room how you like the temperature, etc. They'll know when you show up at Starbucks in the morning or in whatever the coffee shops we have, how you like your latte. How, how does that work? Do employees have to input preferences or what it's all magic. Machine learning and AI will power these enhancements. Arena says the headquarters will also host 19 different restaurants, some of which include table service. We want people here all day. We don't want you to leave, and we do a lot of events in the morning, in the afternoon, and at night. We have our clients here all the time. We work the facility, so for us these are great investments. Arena says the bank expects to move its 1st 2000 employees into the building at the end of August. By December, the remaining staff are expected to move in. In the last 10 years, the bank says it has delivered 125,000 new or updated seats across its global markets. It also aims to provide 75,000 seats within the next five years. This new building may be the bank's boldest experiment yet, but it's just the beginning of Diamond's ambitious vision for the company. The holy grail for folks in our business is to really create something in the physical world that is a manifestation of the culture of a firm. While the bank's executives are confident that the new headquarters will encourage compliance, the weeks leading up to March will reveal just how willing employees are to commit to the 5 day mandate.

In this exclusive interview with Fortune, Nike's newly appointed CEO Elliott Hill shares his vision for the iconic sportswear brand's future. From intern to chief executive, Hill's 30+ year journey at Nike has given him unique insights into the company's DNA. He discusses his plans to refocus on Nike's core strengths, emphasizing sports and athlete partnerships while addressing recent challenges in sales and market positioning. Hill outlines strategies to balance direct-to-consumer sales with wholesale partnerships, reduce promotional pricing, and drive innovation in key categories like running and basketball. With a commitment to authenticity and a deep understanding of Nike's heritage, Hill aims to lead the company back to its roots while pushing forward into a new era of growth and innovation.

‘Nike’s Back’: How Its New CEO Plans to Reassert the Brand’s Dominance

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In this exclusive interview with Fortune, Nike's newly appointed CEO Elliott Hill shares his vision for the iconic sportswear brand's future.

Is this a return to Nike's roots? No question. I think every company has a core of what makes them great, and I think sport is the core of what we are, we are about. We're about human potential and performance. Nike's back. Since started as an turn in apparel sales in 1988, Elliot Hill has spent his entire career climbing Nike's ranks. He has spearheaded some of the company's biggest sportswear launches and led headline grabbing marketing campaigns. So don't ask if your dreams are crazy. Ask if they're crazy enough. Now more than 30 years later, all eyes are on him as he steps into the company's most prominent job, CEO. It almost feels surreal like, hey, did this just happen? But Hill has taken the reins at a time when Nike is grappling with declining sales and a fall in stock price. How do you think you're performing at this point? I think we can be better. As Hill kicked off his 33rd year at Nike and 3rd month as CEO, he recounted his journey to the corner office and what's next for the sports retail giant. Nike's sprawling facilities in Beaverton, Oregon didn't exist when Hill first started as an intern. We very much wanted it to feel like a campus, and we moved here in 1990. The buildings that you can see across the way in Brown were the first buildings. At the start of 1988, the company was worth just over $700 million. Three decades later, it's valued at more than $100 billion. You are Nike's newly minted CEO. How did you get here? I took a sports marketing class and I wrote a paper around this company called Nike. I fell in love with the company and I said, you know, that's the type of company I want to work for. I can combine sport with business. And I was fortunate. There was a guy named Tim Joyce who came to speak at our university and after he finished speaking, I went up to him and said, I want to work for Nike and I bothered him for about 6 months and he finally hired me and I started at Nike June 1 of '88 as as an intern. That internship was a springboard to a lifetime career at Nike. In his early years, Hill held various sales roles selling shoes to mom and pop retailers and driving around in an old minivan. I was driving around in a used Dodge minivan, that's for sure. I drove 60,000 miles a year and I was started out in sales. I worked my way up through the sales organization, different experiences. Hill steadily moved up the ladder, never staying in the same role for more than 4 years. In 2018, he was promoted to president of Consumer and Marketplace, a role he held until 2020 when he. Hired, but his exit didn't last long. Four years later, Nike's former CEO John Donahoe was out. Nike's CEO John Donahoe is going to be leaving the company. During the pandemic. Donahoe's aggressive e-commerce and direct to consumer business approach helped drive Nike's share price to a historic high in November 2021. But as the pandemic wound down, market conditions. Changed and the strategy started to backfire. The company lost market share and strained its relationships with retail partners, all while losing sales and street cred. The board needed a replacement. Walk me through how this came to fruition, your return to Nike. I, I had stayed in touch with people at Nike at all levels of the organization. It was a series of phone calls and I, you know what, I, it was a pretty quick decision for me. Nike's share price jumped by more than 6% just a day after it announced Hill would assume the top job. Is there a part of you that felt you had something to prove? Had a great Second chapter, if you will, business career. I was doing a number of investments and projects that inspired me, motivated, kept me busy, but I have to admit there were those moments when I would walk away from a board meeting as an example where your responsibility is to steer, guide, suggest. You know, provide thoughts, perspectives, and then you leave and you don't have the responsibility for continuing the execution. There was a moment when I started to think to myself, is this really what the rest of my life's going to be like? And then I get the phone call. And so and then here we are and my whole world turns upside down and uh and uh and it's just been a crazy 75 days. What's one of mind for you? The next 30 days, the next year, the next 5 years, well, the 1st 60 days were a sprint. I'll tell you that. What I wanted to do first and foremost was to re-engage with the team. So I spent the 1st 60 days and my first day in the office. I did an all employee meeting, brought everybody together, had a fireside chat so they could get to know me. We get to work in schools. We do. That we do, that we do. What are they telling you? What are you hearing? Where we're headed, which is around celebrating the passion and emotions sport that excites them that that gets them motivated. That's what we have to do more of. That's when we're at our finest is when we put athletes at the center of everything we do. We take the insights from those athletes. That's what drives our product innovation pipeline. That's what drives those emotional and inspiring stories that we tell. Those athletes' stories have become synonymous with Nike's brand. 26 times I've been trusted to take the game winning shot. And missed. From Michael Jordan and LeBron James to Serena Williams. And Ronaldo Nazario. This is the Ronaldo pitch as we call it the Ronaldo Field, and so to, to celebrate him and all that he means to Nike, we, we dedicated the the pitch and his name and then of course we have the the statue here and. And we've been fortunate to continue our relationship with him even beyond his playing days. Hill sees those athlete partnerships as a crucial element of Nike's past and future success. As Nike's vice president of North America, Hill forged a strong partnership with Michael Jordan and was instrumental in encouraging the basketball legend to expand his brand globally. The strategy has paid off with sales growing to over $7 billion annually in 2024. Now Nike is looking ahead. We had Caitlyn Clark here I saw that she was in yesterday on her signature shoe that we launch and we're working on her logo and design of her logo. She signed an 8 year $28 million endorsement deal with Nike in April of. Last year, making it the largest sponsorship contract for a women's basketball player, what was the motivation behind that and and what impact do you think it will have on, on women's sports certainly on the WNBA? When we were running just basketball, we never got to the women's opportunity, but by having this small team. That's focused on women's basketball. It unlocked, we believe, opportunities for the game of basketball, but also in product. It becomes an opportunity to grow the overall marketplace by inviting more and more girls into the world of sport. It is in an area that we'll continue to invest in, and we see tremendous tremendous momentum right now. Hill's new role comes at a critical time for Nike. Sales dropped in the last three quarters of 2024, and shares have slumped to more than 43% since 2023. In an effort to clear out inventory, the company began offering massive discounts throughout the year, slashing prices by as much as 30%. Hill says that approach has hurt the brand. You said in the December earnings call, uh, your first as Nike CEO that Nike has become too promotional offering too many discounts. I'm certainly not complaining, but what what's your vision for how Nike should approach pricing and discounts and still uphold its brand value and market position? There are moments in the traditional retail cycle where it makes sense to be promotional Black Friday, Cyber Monday. But we had become too promotional in between those moments we were even leveraging promotions to drive revenue, and frankly that's not great for margin. It's not great for the brand. It's not great for our wholesale partners because they end up competing against us and profitability matters for them. And so starting this spring we're moving to a position where Nike Direct both digital. Physical is going to actually lead the marketplace and be less not only less promotional but elevate the experience that the consumer has with our brand. Nike also faced backlash over its direct to consumer sales strategy. Before the pandemic, it started to pull back from large wholesalers like Foot Locker and Dick Sporting Goods to focus on its own brick and mortar stores and e-commerce. Now that strategy is changing. Pre-pandemic, Nike severed ties with retailers wanted to focus more on direct to consumer. What are your plans to evolve to rebuild, you know, your partnership with wholesale retailers like Foot Locker and so on? I think it all starts with the consumer. There are consumers that want to shop choice wholesale, either digital or physical, and the good news is the space that I spent a big part of my career. I have great relationships with our retailers, made it. Very, very clear to our team first and foremost that we were going to run a balanced. Marketplace and I've had countless numbers of phone calls and meetings already with them making certain that they understand the importance uh that they play to our brand and the development of our brand that's been a great reception by the way, from our retailers are saying OK. Nike's back. Gone are the days of going wide. Hill wants to go deep, and he says Nike will be zeroed in on 5 main categories moving forward running, basketball, training, football, and sportswear. I live in Manhattan. I run in Central Park. I see a lot of people wearing Nike. And but I also see on run. I see hook, right? A lot of these brands that I've eaten into Nike's market share. So what are your thoughts on how you go back to reestablishing yourself as the premium athletic brand and what do you see as the number one driver for growth for Nike as we move forward? It does always come back to have new, different innovative coveted beautiful product. The lineup that we have in running. Uh, is the strongest lineup that I've seen since I've been here top to bottom across the board, and we have to have those retail partners to help us take shelf space, open to buy and market share from our competitors because frankly that's we left it open ultimately. We have to earn our way back onto the shelves. It's that simple. You've repeatedly made this reference where you say we're going back to sports. Sport is at the heart of our brand. When I think of Nike, I think sports apparel. So what do you mean by that? We were running at what we call the gender offense, so men's, women's, and kids, we lost the sharpness around sport. And so we're reorienting the organization to focus sport first, so think running, think basketball, think football or soccer. And then gender second by lining up by gender, it also helps us find opportunities specifically for that gender, whether it's color and material that's different for a man versus a woman. Another big focus for Hill is product innovation. This is the LeBron James Center, and it's all about advanced R&D and innovation, and it's without question we believe one of the foremost centers of innovation of athletic and human performance. Hill still recalls the 1988 unveiling of Nike's now famous Just Do It campaign. I'm thinking of being a lawyer. He also led launches of footwear for elite athletes, but in recent years, critics, including investors, say Nike has fallen behind in the innovation race. What does product innovation look like for Nike as you move forward? We have a team of people that are already working on product in 28, 29. What's that look like? So long term, very futuristic innovation. The best innovation does come from an athlete, how to make you run faster, jump higher. Uh be safer, move quicker. For Nike, many of those insights came from athlete partnerships. Nike's at its best when we have an athlete, and we have a great relationship with that athlete, and we're able to partner with that athlete to take insights from their game and This case obviously basketball and to build the product around that individual's game in this case it happens to be LeBron James. He's very involved in the footwear that he wears and how it looks, how it fits, how it performs. He's just a representation of some of the. The great executions that we've done with him. Few are as familiar as Hill with the history, people, and inner workings of Nike. Despite three decades of experience and a clear enthusiasm for the CEO role, he has his work cut out for him. In your 60 days as a CEO, what have you learned about yourself? What have you learned about leadership? I have to be who I was always. I have to remain authentic. Just because I have a title and a new responsibility, it can't change how I show up because I think if I do, people will see it, smell it, sniff it, and I've done some just real tactical things to try to do that. I it sounds so simple, but I go get my own coffee in the morning and I go get my own coffee in the afternoon. I work out in our gyms here every morning and I move around the gyms and the coffee places so that I can interact with more and more of our teammates. You can't let a A title or new responsibility to change who you are to your core, you have to show up as authentic authentically yourself as you possibly can.

Asia - Fortune Asia

Cambodia’s largest bank credits a unique investment for its ‘exponential’ growth

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