Bill Kerr: Welcome to the Managing the Future of Work podcast from Harvard Business School. I’m Bill Kerr. The following is a guest appearance. From time to time, we’ll be presenting podcast episodes produced elsewhere that highlight research and expertise from the Managing the Future of Work Project. It’s September 2020, and K–12 students and their families are launching into an uncertain and challenging school year—virtually and in person. We’re roughly half a year into the new normal of Covid-19, and millions of workers are struggling to achieve a sustainable work-life balance. The normal non-work demands of caring for children, as well as elderly and ill family members, have been vastly complicated by the pandemic and the resulting economic crisis. My Managing the Future of Work Project co-chair—and also podcast co-host—Joe Fuller recently joined Kayla Lebovits for a discussion of the care economy. Founder and CEO of the employee benefit company Bundle, Kayla launched the startup while a student at Harvard Business School. In this episode of the Behind Bundle podcast, Joe and Kayla talk about what employers can do to help their employees juggle remote work and caregiving and how HR will need to adapt to the new realities. They also talk about the increased demand for high-skilled gig workers and the impact on companies’ ability to find skilled talent.

Kayla Lebovits: So thank you for joining us as we get Behind Bundle to see how they are breaking down barriers. I am very excited that joining us today we have Professor Joseph Fuller, who is a Professor of Management Practice in General Management at Harvard Business School. But Professor Fuller has not always been an academic. After graduating from Harvard Business School, he went on to found and lead Monitor Group, which was acquired by Deloitte, where he specialized in consulting with and advising executives for 30 years. Professor Fuller is currently the co-director of the Managing the Future of Work Initiative at Harvard Business School, which provides actionable research and strategies on how businesses can successfully navigate the rapidly evolving landscape of a modern workplace, so that it can continue to attract and retain and engage a productive workforce. Welcome, Professor.

Joe Fuller: Thank you, Kayla. Delighted to join you.

Lebovits: Thank you. Today, we are going to talk about one of the research areas that the Managing the Future of Work Project is focused on—which is workforce demographics in the care economy—in the context of the current state of our country. Professor Fuller, this has been an extremely challenging and unique time for companies and employees. Can you share with us your thoughts on how you think workplaces will respond once the pandemic is over? What workplace trends that we are seeing now do you think will run their course, and which will last?

Fuller: Kayla, I think that it’s still early to predict what will happen, but I think we know several of the truths that are going to influence what does happen. We can see that in a lot of data, both in companies I consult to and some surveys, that now that the sense of urgency about the move to remote working is passed, both employees and employers are reevaluating what to do. I don’t think we’ll see companies with major metro downtown skyscrapers calling back a significant percentage of their workforce to those sites for the indefinite future. By that, I mean probably not until we have some kind of vaccine in place. That doesn’t mean they won’t call back some of their workforce. So we’re going to have an extended period operating under ad hoc rules, if you will. I think one of the things that’s quite interesting in the data is that executives, senior executives, who usually have a surround that’s more salubrious for work-at-home, are now understanding the impact of working from home for people who live in more modest places, and very much for employees with caregiving responsibilities. The combination of those burdens and the fact that it looks like a lot of schools will be practicing social distancing well into next year suggests that there’s going to be, in some ways, a new understanding reached between employers and employees. Historically, employers have basically offered terms to employees. “Here’s your benefits package. Here’s your pay. Here’s your bonus potential. Here’s your title. Here’s the job description. You show up for work, and I, the employer, decide if you’re satisfied.” And essentially, except on the margin, the employees didn’t really get to vote, other than by accepting the job and continuing to work for the company. There wasn’t a lot of negotiation about, “Well, am I comfortable going back to work, even though you say you’re abiding by all the public-health rules put in place by the local government?” Or “You’re saying that you need me to come back to work, but let’s say I’m in a traditional household, where both the adults work, and there are children present.” What if the partner is an essential worker, whether that’s a physician or a sanitation worker? It doesn’t matter. So I think we’re going to get to something where employers are going to have to get used to the idea that employees now are going to have a certain degree of say-so about, are they willing to do what the employer expects? And that’s very, very much going to be influenced by the care agenda, because, for example, in multiple cities and towns in Massachusetts where I live, they’re already going forward with choices like, going to parents of elementary school kids, saying, “Two choices: sign up for online for the entirety of next year, and there’s no going back on it, unless we, the school district, say that; or your kid can come every other week for in-person and then online the other week.” Well, if you’ve got the adults in the household who both have demanding full-time jobs, even if they can be done remotely, something’s got to give. People have been making due for two or three months, knowing that this is an extraordinary crisis. But now that it looks like it may be more than a year or two in duration, it’s going to reset the dialogue between employers and employees.

Lebovits: And so, on that note, there’s been a lot of articles about how Covid-19 is impacting primary caretakers, forcing them to choose between their careers and children. Now, most recently, there was an article in the New York Times that had a title that a lot of people really gravitated toward, which is, “In the Covid-19 Economy, You Can Have a Kid or a Job. you Can’t Have Both.” What are your thoughts on that? Do you think the future workforce will need to make these kinds of changes? How do you think employers can better support employee caregivers and prevent them from having to choose?

Fuller: Well, I think, as I said, it’s still early. I think that kind of binary choice isn’t sustainable for a lot of workers and isn’t sustainable for the economy. So we’re going to get to some new types of working arrangements. Companies are just now beginning to turn to questions like, “Well, are we going to start changing our job descriptions?” Or one thing that’s quite interesting is a number of companies are finding that their use of labor platforms for higher-skilled white-collar workers is enabling them to fill gaps and continue on with important projects that otherwise they wouldn’t be able to do. There’s an old joke that you shouldn’t make predictions, especially about the future. But let me go out on a limb here. The first thing is, I think there will be a re-visitation of both what benefits are offered—certainly by larger companies with significant white-collar workforces, high-value-added workers, and especially those workers with state-of-the-art digital skills, because one thing that’s happening is that every large company I’ve talked to—this is confirmed by surveys done by Deloitte with my friend, Alan Murray, at Fortune magazine—all companies are going to pick up the pace on their digitalization and their transformation to digital. That means those white-collar workers with state-of-the-art digital skills in AI and digital marketing and data analytics and machine learning, they’re going to be at a super premium. Supply-demand imbalance is going to get bigger. So you’re going to have, as an employer, you’re going to have to beware, with those workers, of not being responsive enough, and waking up and having those critical workers leave, so you’re left trying to backfill in the teeth of a bull market for those people. So I think that, actually, that’s going to lead to a re-visitation of what constitutes a core package of benefits. I’ve been saying in a number of fora, including a couple of podcasts, that I think within 10 years, maybe even sooner, the care benefits on offer from companies are going to start approaching the importance that health benefits are given today by job seekers, certainly in a certain class of trade. That, of course, is before you even get to the question of if, in some future government of the United States, you end up with a single-payer system for health care. I think a second thing we’re going to see is, I think we’re going to see a lot of dynamism and originality in working relationships. What do I mean by that? Right now, there’s basically a binary model for getting your work done if you’re a company. I employ somebody—it could be full time, could be part time. But I have an employee. I have a relationship with them. Or I hire a supplier to do the work, and they’ve got employees. That’s it. We’ve seen the beginning of an emergence of a new type of staffing-model way to get work done, with gig platforms for contingent workers. Obviously, we’re not talking about Uber or Handy or ones for skilled workers or lower-skilled workers. But I think we’re going to see significant, newly defined jobs. I think we’re going to see more seasonal workers—not picking strawberries, but I think we’re going to see older workers who are going to say, “I basically want it to be part of my deal that on Memorial Day, late May, I am shutting down. I’m available Monday mornings every week for the morning only, and I’m coming back after Labor Day, and that’s my job. And I’m not the only one in the company that has that. And everyone knows the deal.” It isn’t, “Oh, Kayla” or “Oh, Joe got this really super sweet deal.” That’s just fine. Or “I work four days a week, and that’s it. You can assume that I’m out of the solar system weekends and Monday,” or whatever it is. I think we’re going to see new types of part-time work in white-collar-type jobs. All of those things are going to be necessary for a couple of reasons. One is, so I can keep and get the talent I need and accommodate their lives. And the second is, because there really aren’t going to be any alternatives. Employers in ’08–’09 really learned some stuff that they could do with their workforces as a function of having to rapidly reduce costs in a demand depression, basically. Some of the things they did were exigencies, and they reversed them as soon as they could. But necessity was the mother of invention, and they learned some things. Just a quick illustration: Part-time workers became a permanently larger percentage of the workforce after ’08 –’09, right through to 2019. What that shows is employers figured out, “You know, we don’t really need all these people as much as we thought, so let’s sculpt our workforce a little more finely.” We have the exact same types of learnings from Covid. We don’t know what all of them are, but I think one of them will be proliferation of work relationships, no longer the binary model, and that care is going to be a differentiator in the market for the type of talent that everybody’s going to be clamoring for.

Lebovits: It sounds like you think employees are going to have a much larger voice in the employer-employee relationship than before, because when I speak to companies, it sounds like they’re really starting to survey employees more often now with the pandemic.

Fuller: Yeah.

Lebovits: I’m just wondering, if that relationship continues, how employees will just have more of a voice with senior management because of Covid and the learnings that they take from it—that, if they listen to their employees, they can really make them happy and retain them going forward.

Fuller: I think that’s partially true. I think it’s, as is always the case, it’s the talent that is mobile, that always has alternatives, that will get a bigger share of voice. I think also, though, the executives are going to be listening to five or six different constituencies. Yeah, they’ll be listening to their employees, but they’re going to be listening to their head of HR, who’s going to be saying, “This is what the surveys say. And by the way, we’re monitoring social media and Glassdoor and the Vault, and that’s what these things are saying about us.” They’re going to talk to their chief counsel, and the chief counsel is going to say, “You can’t say to somebody that, in the judgment of the company, you can’t do your job remotely, and you’ve got to show up at the office because we say so, when they’re saying, ‘I’ve got a comorbidity, or I’ve got a kid or a parent that lives with me with a comorbidity,’ or they’re just saying, ‘I’m anxious, and I don’t want to.’” I think we’re going to see that those CEOs are going to be hearing from their boards. I think, actually—this may seem a little bit cynical—but I think that companies fell all over themselves, certainly large companies who, as we know, tend to set the rules of engagement for employment. They fell all over themselves to declare they’re all about their employees’ health and safety when the crisis started. And that’s absolutely appropriate, it’s exactly what they should have done. But, boy, there are an awful lot of press releases and town hall meeting transcripts and blast emails from executives that state the company’s obligation to the workforce in absolutes. Walking away from that now is going to be really hard. Now, if you’re going out of business—United Airlines can’t fly without pilots and flight attendants—and stuff like that. One other thing I’ll just say, certainly in some of the companies I’ve been in deep conversations with, we’re seeing another trend, which is, increasingly, people actually miss work. They miss being with colleagues. They feel that they’re getting often to the edge of what they can do in terms of productivities and projects, because they’re often working on things they already had in train. A large company—I’m under strict NDA with them—was talking about how they’re simultaneously seeing two events. One is, their software engineers are over 35 percent more productive than they were prior to Covid. Why? They’re not commuting. They’re not going down to the cafeteria. They’ve got business meeting after business meeting after business scheduled. The kind of hour of a coffee klatch or looking out the window or checking your personal email is just gone. It’s crowded out. But the other thing they’re seeing is more people in their performance review raising questions like, “If I took an unpaid leave, could I come back?” Or, “I’m beginning to think about doing something else, because sitting, looking at a screen all day, even if I got blue-tint [light] glasses, I’m getting sick of it, and I kind of would like to talk to another human being.” A lot of moving parts to this, where we haven’t gotten to the bottom of it.

Lebovits: That’s super interesting. And then you said something earlier that I thought was interesting, how you thought that there was going to be high demand for very highly skilled workers with experience in digital, AI, engineers, et cetera.

Fuller: Mm-hmm (affirmative).

Lebovits: How do you think we can get more of the workforce there? Is this a real opportunity to have more training, to have more companies offering education, and trying to use their existing workforce and skill them up, or pull up others from the economy?

Fuller: Yup.

Lebovits: How do you see that evolving? And it sounds like we have to do it very quickly. And there’s not a lot of time that we can waste.

Fuller: Yeah. Well, I think, Kayla, that the companies have in the last several years begun to show a lot more sense of ownership and a lot more innovation and effort to fill the skills gaps as they see them. A not-very-nice way to put it is, they’ve just given up waiting for the education establishment to figure it out. Now, I think there’s a lot of—I don’t really want to say blame—but I think the reasons that the education establishment isn’t well aligned generally with private-sector employers and vice versa, there’s plenty of blame to go around. Employers have not historically wanted to engage the education sector. They get frustrated with the education sector. They have, because of technology, fallen into the lazy habit of playing the spot market for employees. They never want to hire until the last minute. They’re very cautious about doing work-based learning or apprenticeship models for lots of different reasons. And then they curse the fates when the economy is strong or there’s asymmetric growth and demand for something like cyber engineers. And then, “Well, the system’s letting me down.” So that’s the employer version. The educator version is, “We’re not pre-career system. We’re about educating people.” The metrics and incentives in education don’t match at all well with employers’ definitions of success. A highly politicized environment, a highly unionized environment. So very difficult to get them to accommodate. And, you know, a community college or university can’t create customized programs to create 10 graduates a year. All their economics are designed for scale. I think we’re going to see a couple of things in this. We’re really on the cusp of a remote-learning revolution. It was very interesting, but edX—which is the online consortium that Harvard and MIT founded, competes with Coursera that was founded by Stanford University—their enrollments in online learning went up—as a comparison in March 2019, March 2020—by a factor of 30. Not 30 percent, 30X, spread pretty evenly across their portfolio. It wasn’t just people saying, “Oh my gosh, I better learn how to program in SQL,” or “Gosh, I want to learn more project management.” There were massive enrollment spikes in courses on justice and literature. It shows that not everyone was Netflix binging. Now, that’s all oriented toward people that already have degrees. Unfortunately, what Covid is going to do is accelerate what’s been called a “barbell-ization” of the workforce, where you’ve got at the upper end of the workforce cognitive workers who do non-routine work, who are highly credentialed. A very high percentage have at least an undergraduate degree. The other end of the distribution, less than high school, high school, some college, no degree, low-wage service workers, low educational attainment. And there’s a collinearity between lower levels of educational attainment and race in the United States. On an educational-attainment basis, the demographic with the lowest average of educational attainment are Hispanics, followed by African Americans. Unfortunately, that population is heavily weighted toward sectors that are going to be the late recoverers from Covid—hospitality, food service, retailing, basic jobs like that. So states are going to face a very big dilemma here, where on the one hand they’re going to be under intense budget pressure. Some of that budget pressure is going to come from increases in benefits claims—whether it’s unemployment insurance or other forms of public support for unemployed workers. But they’re going to have—my estimate is around 8 million—workers whose jobs are never going to … because that restaurant is closed, because the Marriott is only going to open odd-number floors indefinitely, not the even-number floors, so I need to have the housekeeping staff, whatever else. So states are going to, I hope, become little pockets of innovation to try to find things that work for training to get people back in the workforce. Whether or not—they’re obviously not going to be trying to lead people into being AI experts. But companies are going to be rapidly accelerating the deployment of digital technologies at all pay grades and all job descriptions to make as many processes touchless as possible, to reduce the amount of human-to-human interaction, to reduce the density of headcount. So even if you’re going to be a shift manager at a fast-food restaurant—a QSR, a quick-service restaurant—you’re going to have to be more comfortable and more literate with digital technologies interfacing with smart devices and terminals in 2022 than you ever were in February 2020.

Lebovits: That’s super interesting. No, I think that, while there’s a lot of negatives that have come from the pandemic, I think there’s a ton of opportunity to come as well. And just shifting gears a little bit back to care … so there’s been a lot of focus on parents and the struggles of working parents during this time. And I find that many forget that there’s also a lot of people taking care of elderly, whether it’s their parents or someone else. And they also have a day job, and this has very much impacted them. So why do you think there’s been so much of a focus on the parent caretaker side, but not the caretaker of others? And what do you think will drive employers to evolve care benefits beyond those that are just for parents, and it will be for all caretakers?

Fuller: Yeah. Well, I think one is obviously the shutdown of the K–12 system, basically, nationwide. That’s a huge employer that touches virtually every street in every neighborhood. And even if you go to a retirement community in Florida or Arizona, their kids, their grandkids, are being affected by this. So it becomes front and center. Also, my research at the Managing the Future Work Project at Harvard, on care it says that caregivers for seniors, parents, other family members, members of a chosen community, are much less forthcoming about that obligation. And so it’s a little bit just in the background all the time. Now, it becomes profoundly more important in Covid, starting with the fact that seniors are less likely to be digitally competent. But, obviously, the most important thing is that seniors are particularly at risk from Covid. Something like, [just] 4 percent of the [Covid] deaths in the United States are people below the age of 55. So this is a senior epidemic. And it’s a particular epidemic in nursing homes. So now you’ve got a caregiver for parents, who their default, maybe last chance, maybe preferred outcome, is assisted living or a nursing home facility. All of a sudden that looks like a very unattractive option to people. The nursing home population has declined by over 10 percent over the course of this. Unfortunately, some of that is mortality, but some of that is, both, spiking because of Covid, but it’s also people coming and saying, “I’m taking mom home,” or “I’m taking my folks, or my dad home.” The likelihood that seniors can do what they have been doing for themselves has gone down. Are they going to do their own shopping? Are they going to go to the bank? Are they going to go to the dry cleaner? Burden on a famous sandwich generation. And even those whose kids are grown but are taking care of seniors has changed markedly. And it doesn’t matter why you’re distracted at work. You’re worried about your parents who have an early-onset cognitive disorder. They may live in a different state. But you’re worried about who’s looking in on them. Are they going to be okay? You’re being absent, being late, being unable to go to meetings or, historically would say, do business travel because of that. It doesn’t matter if it’s because of your kid or your 75-year-old mom. So this is going to be a whole new horizon. And companies—outside of making accommodations, usually at the level of the supervisor or the organizational hierarchy, and not by policy—basically limited the flexibility they’re prepared to offer someone to pretty visible exceptions. You know, I have a mortally ill spouse, or I have a special needs child. All human beings are empathetic with situations like that, and companies are no different. But the “Gee, my mom is getting older. My dad’s dead. I’m concerned about her.” That hasn’t been on the radar screen for companies to think that they have any responsibility for it. In an intellectual sense, they really don’t have any responsibility for it. But if you want a productive mobile worker who’s not constantly checking LinkedIn to see if they’ve got a headhunter email, and who’s going to be engaged and ready to work, you better start worrying about it. I think companies are beginning to get it. They seem to be getting it more in slices. “Oh, maybe we need to look forward to having an on-site childcare facility at the hospital where all the workers are essential.” Or “Maybe we need to be stipulating a short-term emergency—not in terms of a 911 emergency, but emergency childcare backup. We’re going to get a corporate relationship with a Bright Horizons, with a Care.com, with their care-at-work offers. And we’re going to do that, but they’re not thinking about it holistically that we’re going to have to think about workers. While they’ll have common needs almost on a case-by-case basis, especially those that we absolutely have to retain and allow to be productive.

Lebovits: How do you think we can get employee caretakers—whether they’re parents taking care of their children, or parents taking care of their own parents, or another family member—how do you think companies can enable them to speak out and voice their concerns, instead of being stressed out and not being happy in their job, and then just leaving? Like how do we prevent them from leaving the company?

Fuller: It’s really an interesting question, Kayla, because the Puritan work ethic is alive and well in the United States. It’s not the typical worker’s reflex to say, “Gee, I’ve got a problem, and I need your help with it.” And those workers, whether they’re my age or your age, or just coming out of school now, they didn’t grow up in households where that happened. In their previous work experience, that didn’t happen very much. Our data is that the best things companies can do is to very deliberately make the topic, discuss it. And the easiest way to do that is for leaders to role-model it. So let’s talk about the human groups—whether it’s countries or sports teams or companies—they live on stories. You know, the story of how we got the great deal, the story about how that great product got invented, the story about how we fended off the activist, or whatever else. And so what are the stories of leaders and businesses? It’s not about how they all have dinner with his kids every night. It’s not she was really meticulous about taking all of her vacation time and ensuring all her subordinates did it. We walked through walls, we charged the enemy, passed the palace, or something. We took the hill. We stayed up all night, three straight nights, and we launched the product successfully. So when a C-suite executive, a high-profile business leader, is showing up at the 6:00 PM, we’re going to have this support group for special needs kids, not to say, “Oh, I’m so glad we have this group. We want to help you,” but because they’ve got a special needs kid. When they’re saying, “Gee, I know how distracted I was when I found out my parents got a diagnosis, or when somebody fell and broke their hip,” or something, they cause that to be also within the purview of supervisors to make accommodations. This gets me back to what I was saying about the emergence of new working relationships. I think in the next five years, you’re going to see people are going to sign up for different durations of the workweek. People are going to sign up for different durations of when their workday is—and not just traders on the West Coast who have to always get 4 o’clock in the morning. The people are going to say, “I work four days a week, and I work 6:00 AM to 4:00 PM, four days a week, and that’s what I do.” And that’s going to be fine—not, this is the one-year or one-week or Covid exception. Some of that kind of flexibility will accommodate some of the issues we’re talking about. But it’s going to take more than that. It’s going to take the ability of employees to take advantage of the scale and vetting that big employers can provide. It’s going to take big employers to get more serious about buying these services with a clear-eyed economic logic—not because they’re becoming social-welfare agencies—with a clear-eyed economic logic to retain people and sustain their productivity. Because when big companies start buying services, then the unit call for those services falls due to the scale effect. And all of a sudden, the $100 million company that wouldn’t think about having an on-site daycare facility is able to send its 20 workers’ kids to an on-site daycare facility, because Bank of America has opened one in the Boston area to serve 50 branches, not just their headquarters. But to get utilization right, they’ve gone to a Bright Horizons, they’ve gone to a KinderCare, and say, “We’ll give you the base-load capacity to justify a facility, to make it profitable. You go sign up some other customers.” Then, all of a sudden, you’re getting that expansion of capacity, which creates competition, creates differentiated products. And very importantly, in the care domain, it will create a higher professionalization of the work, so that you’ve got qualified people that are getting trained, not just in the very basics, for example, of being a home health aide, but have certificates or degrees in that, and they have the ability to do some early diagnosis on their own, as well as understand nutrition, understand physical therapy basics, not having degrees. So that the entire experience is self-reinforcing, has a higher impact, and is better for society.

Lebovits: I think there’s a lot of opportunity to come from this crisis, especially in the care space. I’ll finish with this question. Beyond partnerships and having a higher-qualified workforce, what other areas or trends in the future of work, specifically related to care, do you think have the most opportunity to innovate and evolve going forward?

Fuller: I think, for a long time we’ve been talking about intelligent devices. I think we’re going to see a significant surge there, whether it’s … take any one of the digital assistants, like an Alexa or Siri. I believe that basic technology is going to start drifting into this space, using AI. We already … for example, in customer service settings, there are a number of software programs used to analyze your voice and actually originated in the intelligence community, those technologies. But now they can tell if you’re on the phone and you’re showing the vocal attributes of somebody that’s angry or somebody that’s confused. So if you want to talk to a live person, if you’ve got a platinum card, get on and start just play-acting like you’re angry. It’ll default to a rep right away. I think that will having the same type of thing with remote care that will lead maybe to automated dispatch of work or automated notifications, that imagine that my parents’ daily medication tray has got a sensor in it, and it alerts me if this morning’s drug has not been taken. I think we’re going to find lots of technologies that are helpful in lengthening people’s ability to engage cognitively, maybe at high level, whether it’s learning or gamification, things like that. I think we’re going to get—something I’m very keen on, and if I were a younger person, I might quit being a school teacher and be an entrepreneur like you are, Kayla—but I think that we’re going to start seeing much more, what I’m going to talk about, group buying. I’m not talking about Groupon. I mean by that, the most popular street name in the United States, Park Street. So Park Street, Park Ave.—that’s number one across all American communities. On Park Streets all around the country, in certain zip codes that skew older, I think you’ll see that 10 of the 14 houses on Park Street will collectively buy a highly qualified home health aide. That might be reimbursed by their health plan, because the health plan doesn’t want you to go to the hospital, they don’t want you to fall and break your hip. So a well-trained home health aide walks in, first time she’s serving or he’s serving the “Park Street in Anywhere, USA, Purchasing Group,” and walks in and says, “Gee, we going to get rid of this throw rug, or we’re going to put a rubberized mat under it. We think maybe getting a tub installed with a door, as opposed to stepping over, is appropriate, and we can arrange that to be installed, and we can arrange financing for it. Or your insurer will reimburse the firm’s $500 if you do that.” And everybody wins. Better quality of life for the people. But the trick is being able to do a collectively, because the way insurance is issued in the United States is so fragmented that a health insurance company can’t ... It’s why home health-care workers make so little now, in part because if you could only get to three sites in a day because you don’t have a car and you’re taking buses and you’re walking and whatnot, your value-added is constrained and, therefore, you make a very low wage. If I can cover 24 lives every day, all of a sudden I’m worth $70,000 a year. If I can only cover six lives every day, I’m worth $31,000 a year. So I think we’re going to see, with a growing population, with work from home, with Covid, with the epidemiology we see in all sorts of chronic illnesses, it’s going to be great period to be an entrepreneur in this space, and I hope we can get some more energy behind it and get more liquidity in the market, because if that liquidity shows up, I think, great things are going to happen and the quality of life for a lot of people is going to improve.

Lebovits: Well, I hope so, because this is what I’m dedicating every day to. So I hope that there’s other people doing it as well, because I actually think that there’s a lot of hope and a lot of opportunity that’s going to come, that’s already come, and going to come more from the pandemic. So I appreciate your time. Thank you so much. I found your insights extremely helpful as I navigate forward with Bundle, and just for everyone in general. So thank you for sharing your thoughts on all these very interesting situations going on right now.

Fuller: Kayla, my pleasure, and stick with it. I think you’re in the right place at the right time.

Lebovits: Thank you.

Kerr: We hope you enjoy the Managing the Future of Work podcasts. If you haven’t already, please subscribe and rate the show wherever you get your podcasts. You can find out more about the Managing the Future of Work Project at our website hbs.edu/managingthefutureofwork. While you’re there, sign up for our newsletter.