What Costco And Wegmans Have In Common With Google

What could Google possibly have in common with Wegmans and Costco?

The tech giant is working on big-idea projects like self-driving cars and “smart” contact lenses, along with its core search business. The other two are focused on, essentially, selling groceries.

Still, in one critical respect the three companies are getting one thing right: They offer workers “good jobs” -- not low-paying dead-end work where employers feel like cogs in the machine.

The three companies give their employees a certain amount of freedom and a feeling of ownership over their work, Laszlo Bock, Google’s head of human resources tells the Wall Street Journal. That makes workers “act like owners,” Bock says.

All three companies frequently wind up atop lists of the best companies to work for -- or companies everyone wants to work for -- thanks to competitive pay and solid benefits and perks. All three offer some level of flexibility and, especially, training that sends a message to workers that they’re valued.

Crucially, employees don’t feel stuck in their jobs. Wegmans and Costco both promote from within -- and devote real resources to training workers to move them up the ranks. Turnover is low.

Seventy percent of warehouse managers at Costco started at the lowest rungs of the company, according to BusinessWeek. At Wegmans, 66 percent of promotions are internal.

The stores also offer rational scheduling. Workers are happier when they can plan their schedules far out in advance and swap shifts with colleagues. This isn’t common in retail, where often workers don’t know when they’re working from week to week.

Google's perks are legendary. The company offers workers sabbaticals, mindfulness training and many other coveted benefits designed to keep employees motivated and happy.

All this pay and respect and freedom may cost the companies more at the outset. But research has shown that creating “good jobs” that offer more than simply zombie-like dead-end work is actually a win for employers.

“Higher investment in people leads companies to do really well,” M.I.T. professor Zeynep Ton told The Huffington Post in February. Ton’s research has shown that employers that offer “good jobs” -- work that’s engaging and offers opportunities for workers to think -- are more profitable.

It’s a win-win.

Tesla's Self-Driving Feature Leaves Insurers Idling As States Scramble

Tesla Motors’ plan to roll out a self-driving feature on some cars this summer has regulators, especially in its home state of California, scrambling to write new rules.

Current California law allows automakers to operate autonomous vehicles -- but not regular drivers.

“We have been trying to get a handle on what they are planning to do,” Bernard Soriano, deputy director of California’s Department of Motor Vehicles, told The Wall Street Journal. “We are knee-deep in it.”

Auto insurance is regulated on a state level, so any new policies must await a ruling by the states.

That leaves auto insurers, who represent the next hurdle in the push for driverless cars, idling with the engine on.

“This is so new, there’s really no track record upon which to assess what’s the likelihood that there will be a crash or lawsuit resulting from a crash,” Michael Barry, vice president of media relations at the Insurance Information Institute, an industry-funded nonprofit, told The Huffington Post on Saturday. “It’s in its infancy.”

Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.

On the bright side, the insurance industry has nimbly adjusted to other new technologies in recent years, Barry said.

He pointed to new programs created for drivers at car-hailing services, allowing them to get a dual policy that separately covers time spent driving for personal and commercial use.

“The auto insurance industry has adapted to technological changes in the past, and will continue to do so in the future,” Barry said. “Look at what’s going on with Uber and Lyft.”

Overall, he predicted that driverless cars will eventually lead to fewer crashes. But it's still far from clear who will actually be responsible if and when a crash does occur.

“Liability is going to become an issue,” Barry said. “The burden might be on the manufacturer of the driverless vehicle to prove that it is not responsible for what happened in the event of a crash.”

Tesla’s autopilot feature will only be available on interstate highways, as CEO Elon Musk has said the technology is not yet “safe on suburban streets.”

Fully automated vehicles are still a ways off from becoming the norm. If a circumstance arises where an accident is unavoidable -- say, for instance, a child runs out into the street -- the computers that control the car do not yet have the ethical reasoning to deduce whether they should sacrifice the driver by suddenly swerving away, or run down the child. Last September, Ron Medford, Google’s safety chief on its driverless car project, said the company had not yet begun to study that issue.

Either way, even when self-driving cars do become widely available, the rate of turnover in the U.S. car market will delay their widespread adoption.

“The average car on the road is about 11 years old, so it takes decades for the U.S. fleet to turn over,” Barry said. “I think we’re far away from seeing a lot of driverless cars on the roadways.”

Microsoft To Require Its U.S. Suppliers To Offer Paid Leave

For the past several months, White House officials and Democrats in Congress have been using the bully pulpit to encourage more U.S. businesses to offer their workers paid leave. Their motto: “Lead on leave.”

On Thursday, Microsoft showed them how it’s done.

In a blog post on the company’s website, Brad Smith, a Microsoft vice president, announced that Microsoft will be taking steps to require all of its large U.S. contractors to offer their workers at least 15 days of paid leave per year. That time could come “either through 10 days of paid vacation and five days of paid sick leave or through 15 days of unrestricted paid time off,” Smith wrote.

There are certain restrictions. The new requirements will apply only to suppliers with 50 or more employees, and within those firms, they'll apply only to employees who have worked there for at least nine months and do “substantial work” for Microsoft.

While the new terms certainly won’t apply to everyone in Microsoft’s supply chain, the company said they “will apply to a great many.”

Like any modern U.S. firm of its size, Microsoft deals with all sorts of suppliers, “from building maintenance to management consulting and campus security to software localization,” as Smith noted Thursday. A lot of these companies may already offer their workers the paid time off that Microsoft will require, but plenty of them probably don’t. For example, it's not hard to imagine that the janitorial firms whose workers clean Microsoft’s offices at night don't currently provide the kind of paid time off that Smith describes.

If Microsoft stands by its pledge, then the companies that fail to meet its standard will lose Microsoft’s business. The company said it plans to work with its suppliers over the next year to help them implement the new policies.

By using its considerable contracting power to encourage more paid leave, Microsoft is taking a step that even the White House, for all its talk on the subject, has been loath to pursue.

The federal government holds more contracts than any private-sector firm -- a power that presidents going at least as far back as Franklin Roosevelt have wielded to set higher labor standards. Officials in the Obama White House have used procurement rules to raise working standards in several ways, like setting a new minimum wage for contractors and cracking down on wage theft. But as The Huffington Post has reported, White House officials have thus far declined to give contracting preference to firms that offer paid leave.

Though the standards vary, other developed countries already have laws in place that guarantee workers some amount of paid leave, be it vacation time, sick days or child leave. The U.S. doesn’t require private-sector businesses to offer such perks, and lower-income workers are less likely than their better-paid counterparts to have some kind of paid leave. Current U.S. laws on the matter are unlikely to change any time soon, with Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress.

In his blog post, Smith said that Microsoft believes offering paid leave is not only a nice thing to do but also a good business practice, leading to a “happier and more productive workforce.”

“The people who work for our suppliers are critical to our success and we want them to have the benefit of paid time off,” he wrote.

Steve Jobs Became A Better Boss When He Curbed His Narcissism

It takes a certain amount of narcissism to claw your way up the ranks of a company. But it takes as much humility to be successful once you’re there.

Executives who curb their confidence in their vision by admitting mistakes and limitations and acknowledging the contributions of others tend to command the most respect and loyalty from their teams, who thereby deliver results, according to a new study from Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Management. However, humility, like meditation or golf, may take some practice.

And even so, narcissism is often a necessary tool for success -- as it was for the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, whose obsessive commitment to his vision for the iPhone maker helped shape it into the world's most valuable company.

“Humility is not meant to replace some of the quintessential aspects of leaders,” Bradley P. Owens, assistant professor of business ethics at the university, told The Huffington Post. “It’s meant to supplement and buffer them from the extremes of narcissism.”

The study, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, surveyed 876 employees at a large Fortune 100 health insurance company and asked them to rate 138 leaders in the company on their humility and effectiveness, and how motivated the employees were by their supervisors.

Researchers measured the narcissism of the leaders by asking them to describe themselves by choosing between statements such as “I am an extraordinary person,” or “I am much like everybody else.”

“The leaders that performed the best were those who had high narcissism and high humility,” Owens, the lead study author, said.

As a real-life example of how narcissism and humility can mix successfully, Owens pointed to the portrayal of Steve Jobs in the new biography Becoming Steve Jobs, penned by journalists Brent Schlender and Rick Tetzeli.

The book, released Tuesday, chronicles the tech titan’s humbling years after his first run at Apple, which ended with the board firing him. Roughly a decade later, Jobs returned to the company and led it in a stunning turnaround. Paired with the findings from Owens’ study, this telling appears to link the softening of Jobs’ initial hotheaded abrasiveness with Apple's rise to global dominance.

Until he was fired in 1985, Jobs was known for being extremely demanding on people around him, including then-CEO John Sculley.

“That was part of his greatness,” William Simon, co-author of iCon: Steve Jobs, the Greatest Second Act in the History of Business, told ABC News in 2011. “But he drove people too hard. ... Being gentle was not part of his demeanor.”

By the time Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, he had learned to balance his leadership style.

“When he came back in his second stint, people described him as someone who was still narcissistic, but had learned to temper his narcissism in important ways,” Owens said. “That’s why Steve Jobs was really a great example of what we were looking for.”

That means, too, that humility can be a learned skill.

"Even if you have a narcissistic leader, and in a sense it's causing them to be less effective in certain ways, people can proactively practice virtues like humility and develop their character," Owens said. "Over time, it will begin to stick and enhance their leadership effectiveness.

Companies Led By Moral Bosses Are Actually More Profitable

Good character also means good business, according to a new study.

Conducted by leadership consulting firm KRW International, the study found a link between a business' performance and the integrity of its CEO. Firms where employees rated the CEO's moral principles highly performed better than firms whose top executive had a lower character rating.

“I was unprepared to discover how robust the connection really is,” KRW founder Fred Kiel said, per the Harvard Business Review, which first reported on the study.

The report highlighted 10 leaders who excelled across the board. These rockstar execs -- Kiel calls them “virtuoso CEOs” -- include Dale Larson, CEO and president of Larson Manufacturing Company, Sally Jewell, a former CEO of outdoor retailer REI, and Charles Sorenson, CEO and president of Intermountain Healthcare. They were seen as standing up for the right issues, expressing concern for others, showing empathy and moving past mistakes. And they got high marks for their vision, strategy and accountability.

By contrast, the 10 individuals who scored lowest in KRW's study seemed to twist the truth for their advantage, avoid blame and be preoccupied with their personal financial gain.

The researchers compiled their data by asking employees at 84 U.S. companies and nonprofits to rate their CEOs and managers on four key moral principles: integrity, responsibility, forgiveness and compassion. They then lined up those responses with the firms’ financial results and examined whether there appeared to be an impact on profitability.

Businesses helmed by an exec with a positive character score saw an average return on assets of 9.35 percent over a two-year span. Companies with a CEO who scored lower, on the other hand, had an average ROA of just 1.93 percent.

Interestingly, the low-rated leaders gave themselves better assessments than their employees did, while virtuoso CEOs gave themselves lower scores than their employees did.

Employees aren't the only ones who recognize the importance of having an upright leader, however. Other execs have chimed in on the issue. Marillyn Hewson, president and CEO of aerospace and defense firm Lockheed Martin, wrote in a LinkedIn post that a leader can build trust by showing a commitment to integrity and values, as well as being transparent about the company's strategy.

"It’s important to communicate that the commitment to integrity, respect and excellence starts at the top -- and even more important to demonstrate that commitment through decisions and actions," Hewson wrote. "Show employees that you are embracing your values, and you’ll go a long way towards building trust."

And in fact, it's been shown that profits follow when employers treat their workers well. Companies that offer great pay and benefits and help workers reduce stress have fewer staff turnovers and can even outperform the S&P 500 stock index.

You can read more about Kiel’s study in his book Return on Character, out April 7 from the Harvard Business Review Press.

Obama Reveals What Helps Him Manage The Stress Of His Job

President Barack Obama revealed what he thinks is the most important way to manage the stress of his job in an interview with The Huffington Post last week.

Obama credited morning exercise and his Hawaiian roots for his ability to keep a calm demeanor in such a high-stress environment, but he noted family is what really keeps him grounded.

"I don't get too high, don't get too low," Obama said.

"But I think the most important -- I'm very consistent about spending time with family," he added. "And when you have dinner with your daughters -- particularly teenage daughters -- they'll keep you in your place and they'll teach you something about perspective."

Obama said it's also important to "take the long view" on issues instead of panicking about what's happening day by day.

"Everything's a crisis, everything is terrible, everything is doomsday, everything is -- if it doesn't get solved tomorrow, you know, your presidency is going off the rails. There must have been what, 15, 20 things that over the last seven years folks have said, 'This is it. It's over,'" Obama said. "You know, we had the Gulf oil spill, worst environmental disaster in history. Everybody said, 'Ah, he's handling this terribly.' A year later, nobody was talking about it, and in retrospect, it turns out that we handled that as well as any environmental crisis has been handled."

Watch a clip of Obama's interview with HuffPost above.

Antibiotic Use In Meat Is Soaring

BLT sandwiches may need to add an A to the acronym -- for antibiotics.

Soaring demand for meat across the world has caused a major uptick in the amount of antimicrobial drugs in pork, beef and poultry, according to a new study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

But as bacon sales sizzle and China -- where pork is the favored meat -- becomes wealthier, pig farmers around the world are meeting demand by using about four times as much antibiotics per pound of meat as cattle ranchers. Poultry is a close second.

This charts shows that pigs, for the most part, consume the highest density and amount of antibiotics.

The antibiotics serve two purposes. First, they help fatten up livestock at a faster rate. Second, they keep animals healthy despite being raised in overcrowded, filthy conditions where disease spreads easily.

In 2010, farmers around the world used more than 63,000 tons of antibiotics to raise livestock. By 2030, the researchers expect that number to rise to more than 105,000 tons.

“People are getting richer and want to eat more meat,” Thomas Van Boeckel, an epidemiologist at Princeton University and an author of the study, told The Huffington Post by phone. “Antibiotics help to provide a lot of meat for people who can afford it.”

Consumption of antibiotic-fed meat poses a major threat to humanity. Exposure to human antibiotics through meat has given rise to antibiotic-resistant “superbugs,” which some researchers suggest could kill up to 10 million people worldwide by 2050 if left unchecked.

As awareness of this threat grows, some companies have removed antibiotics from their meat supply. Earlier this month, McDonald’s vowed to remove human antibiotics from its chicken supply, though animal antibiotics would continue to be used and the human drugs would remain in beef and pork products. Chicken chain Chick-fil-A removed all antibiotics from its chicken last year.

But Chipotle remains the food industry’s poster child for antibiotic-free meat. The burrito chain showed its commitment earlier this year when it suffered a pork shortage after discovering issues with its supplier.

Still, the industry seems unlikely to change unless more consumers demand antibiotic-free meat. Legislation has done little to stymie the growth of the use of antibiotics in the United States. In China, no such legislation exists.

“If things change at all, it’ll be because customers demand better products, like organic bacon,” Van Boeckel said. “But, of course, not everyone can afford that.”

Why It's A Big Deal That Google's Chairman Was Called Out For Interrupting A Woman

A powerful male executive reportedly interrupted a powerful female official while she was speaking at a panel discussion at South by Southwest, the tech and culture love-fest currently happening in Austin, Texas.

That’s not unusual. Women often get interrupted while speaking on panels and in meetings, and studies show that women are interrupted at higher rates than men.

What’s remarkable in this case is that Google Chairman Eric Schmidt actually got called out for doing it -- by an employee of Google, no less.

Schmidt had reportedly been interrupting and talking over Megan Smith, the United States' chief technology officer and a former Google executive. Along with writer Walter Isaacson, Schmidt and Smith were speaking at a panel on innovation, and their conversation actually touched on diversity issues in tech, according to reports.

During a Q&A session after the panel, audience member Judith Williams, Google’s diversity manager, asked Smith how she felt about getting interrupted. Did she feel there was some kind of unconscious gender bias at play?

In her answer, Smith didn't directly address what happened, but she did discuss the issue more generally, explaining how she sometimes goes unheard at meetings, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Schmidt didn't say anything. Neither Williams nor any of the panel participants responded to The Huffington Post's requests for additional comment.

Others, however, had a stronger response. “The crowd cheered at [Williams’] comment,” according to PopSugar, which was one of the first to report on the exchange.

Thank you to whoever respectfully asked the cut off question! Glad other people have noticed @USCTO #askwalter #SXSW2015

— Haley van Dyck (@haleyvandyck) March 16, 2015

“@haleyvandyck: @egmorant @judithmwilliams amazing. Well thank you Judith!” You're welcome!

— Judith Williams (@judithmwilliams) March 16, 2015

Williams leads Google’s unconscious bias training (yes, that’s a thing). More than 26,000 Google employees have gone through the training, she wrote in a New York Times op-ed last year. The training, Williams argued, "has created a culture where employees are comfortable with -- and held accountable for -- calling out prejudice, both blatant and subtle."

Clearly, Williams herself is pretty comfortable calling out problems. Still, who knows what all those Google employees do with that training -- the company's numbers on gender diversity aren't so great. Seventy-nine percent of Google's leaders are men, according to the company's most recent diversity report.

“Google has a very open conversation on unconscious bias,” said Joelle Emerson, co-founder of Paradigm, a strategy firm that helps companies -- such as Pinterest -- increase diversity and inclusiveness.

Emerson told HuffPost that Schmidt's interruption of Smith on the panel wasn't unusual. She often hears complaints from women in tech about getting interrupted. “It’s a big problem in meetings,” she said. “It’s hard for me to get through a meeting without getting interrupted.”

"What was an aberration is that someone spoke about it,” Emerson said, noting that Schmidt likely didn’t realize what he was doing. In studies she's looked at, researchers sat in on meetings and measured the amount of time people spoke and how often they were interrupted. Most people had no idea they were hogging the floor and not letting their colleagues finish their sentences, she said.

Emerson works with companies to improve dynamics in situations where gender roles come into play -- not just in meetings, but in hiring and performance reviews as well. She said that one solution to the problem is to have a strong meeting leader or panel moderator who can rein in the interrupters and ask the quiet participants to speak up.

“Diversity trainings aren’t effective,” Emerson said. “You have to change processes.”

What happened at SXSW is a start. “Call it out when you see it happening. That’s a good first step," she said.

Women are more likely to get cut off mid-sentence, according to several studies. Most recently, researchers at George Washington University found that women were “the more interrupted gender” -- getting interrupted even by women. When men were talking with women, they interrupted 33 percent more often than when they were talking with men, the study found. Women were even more careless about cutting off women -- they interrupted 150 percent more.

“It’s not so much who’s doing the talking,” said Dr. Adrienne Hancock, who led the research, “just that they’re talking to a woman.”

Correction: An earlier version of this story said that Emerson had conducted research on meeting participation. She did not. Emerson has studied that research.

Proof That Working From Home Is Here To Stay: Even Yahoo Still Does It

When newly hired CEO Marissa Mayer kicked off her turnaround at Yahoo, she banned employees from working from home.

When Andy Mattes kicked off his turnaround at Diebold, the first thing the new CEO did was look for employees who wanted to work remotely.

Before Mattes arrived in 2013, Diebold’s ability to recruit had been limited by its policy of only hiring folks who would live near its headquarters in Canton, Ohio. Mattes saw this was a problem.

“We wanted the brightest people on the planet,” Mattes told The Huffington Post. “We were fishing in a small fishing pond.”

With the promise of telecommuting, Diebold, which makes ATMs, was able to lure workers away from places like Oracle, HP and Intel, Mattes said. “We got talent from a ‘who’s who’ of the tech industry,” he said. Of the 75 top leaders at Diebold, about half are based outside of Canton, in places like Silicon Valley, Chicago, Boston, Dallas and Atlanta.

Diebold CEO Andy Mattes

When Yahoo called remote workers back to the office in 2013 in order to improve worker collaboration and communication, there was a lot of hand-wringing about the future of the workplace. Was it in the office? At home?

Now, two years later, it’s clear: Telecommuting has won. Even Yahoo seems to have softened its stance. Workers inside the company told HuffPost that some employees still do occasionally work from home, depending on their job, and some do not have a desk in the office. Yahoo declined to comment for this article.

This appears to be a step away from the company's original prohibition. In a leaked memo from 2013, Yahoo's HR head even seemed to caution workers away from telework while waiting for the cable guy. “Please use your best judgment in the spirit of collaboration,” the memo said.

But many companies seem to have figured out how to collaborate remotely, and are embracing working outside the office as a way to lure top talent, boost productivity and offer a work-life benefit to employees who are increasingly stretched thin in their jobs -- and in life.

For all its benefits, working from home -- or WFH, as it’s known in modern shorthand -- is creating new challenges for workers and managers. While studies have shown that remote workers are more productive, often that’s because they’re working more hours than their in-office counterparts. Socializing and communicating remotely take a deft touch.

Workers and managers need to figure it all out soon: The virtual work world is growing rapidly. The number of people working remotely grew by about 6 percent per year between 2000 and 2010, according to Nicholas Bloom, an economics professor at Stanford who has a study of WFH and productivity due out this month in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Pure WFH is still a relatively small share of the workforce -- 2.4 percent in 2010, according to Bloom’s research. Yet the proportion of employees who work at home at least sometimes is astonishingly large: Sixty-seven percent of employers were allowed occasional remote work in 2014, according to a study released that year by the nonprofit Families and Work Institute. That’s up from 50 percent in 2008, the study found.

In the U.S., remote work is more common for workers at the lowest and highest ends of the pay scale, according to Bloom's research.

Along with researchers at Stanford and Peking University, Bloom studied a group of 500 workers at Ctrip, a publicly listed Chinese travel agency. Half were assigned to WFH and the rest to work in the office.

The results were striking. Ctrip workers who telecommuted were much more productive than their in-office counterparts -- in part because remote workers put in more hours and took less time off, with fewer breaks and sick days. “Ctrip got almost an extra workday a week out of them,” Bloom told The Harvard Business Review.

The “quit rates” of remote workers were also much lower -- half the rate of the group that worked in an office. Bloom also said that the company saved $1,900 per remote worker -- money not spent on space and furniture.

Diebold, for its part, views its remote worker initiative as a success because it was able to up its game around hiring. "Many who we have hired outside of Canton would not have joined the company had we required relocation," said Sheila Rutt, Diebold's chief human resource officer. "The proof will ultimately be in our results. It's a virtual world with a 24/7 global workday -- work is what we do, not where we are."

Still, the company has a ways to go -- Mattes came on board around the same time that several company executives left the firm in a bribery scandal. Sales were up a little in 2014, to $3.1 billion from $2.8 billion the prior year, but the company's stock hasn't really budged since Mattes arrived. It's still too early to call this a slam-dunk turnaround.

Bloom told HuffPost that remote work helps the environment because workers travel less. It is an economic boost as well, he said, because it helps parents and older workers who might want to cut back on commute times and be closer to family.

While the flexibility to work from home has clear and obvious benefits for workers, workers lose if this flexibility is ineffectively managed, said Kenneth Matos, senior director of research at the Families and Work Institute.

“Working from home removes certain time pressures, but creates ambiguity around start and stop time,” he said. There needs to be a clear conversation between workers and managers about when the day begins and ends.

That’s not often happening, according to many experts and remote workers HuffPost spoke with. For higher-level executives, clear stop times might not be particularly realistic.

“It’s hard to shut it off,” said Diebold Vice President Rachel McClary, who works out of her home in Boston. “I’m constantly on. I might be cooking dinner at 7 p.m., and I’m checking an email.”

McClary has spent most of her career as a remote worker, and most of it managing teams. She has a tested system in place to ensure clear communication with employees. For example, she tells her team upfront that she won’t be sending them “thank you” emails because they’re a waste of time to send and a distraction to receive. She also tells them not to leave her voicemails and that if an email thread gets longer than three responses, pick up the phone.

McClary said she spends a lot of time on the phone talking to her workers -- something of a lost art in 2015. “There could be two people who sit in the same office space sending emails to each other,” she said.

Might as well stay at home, then.

Starbucks Wants Employees To Start Conversations About Race With Customers

An internal meeting with Starbucks employees held three months ago stirred a powerful discussion on race in America. It has since prompted the company’s CEO Howard Schultz to officially extended the invitation to join the conversation to customers across the country.

On Monday, the coffee giant launched a new campaign called “Race Together,” which aims to tackle the polarizing topic through a series of steps built to stimulate action and encourage customers to engage in conversations on race with Starbucks baristas.

“[‘Race Together’] is an opportunity to re-examine how we can create a more empathetic and inclusive society -- one conversation at a time,” Schultz said in a statement on the company’s website.

Starbucks has sparked and sustained a growing discussion on race among its employees after Schultz held an internal meeting at the company’s headquarters in Seattle, following the deaths of unarmed black men in Ferguson, Missouri, and Staten Island, New York.

More than 400 employees attended the impromptu meeting in December 2014 and were given an open forum to candidly discuss race among their colleagues and share ideas and solutions on how to address the topic through a collective, company-wide mission.

“This was not about demanding change, but demonstrating a willingness to embrace change and begin to bridge the divide to empathy,” Linda Mills, a Starbucks spokeswoman, told The Huffington Post in an email.

“As these events came to an end, we realized that this is the beginning of a conversation and one we intend to continue as a company into the future.”

As part of the campaign, baristas are encouraged to engage in conversations on race with customers and distribute branded cups with the words “Race Together” handwritten on them.

"If a customer asks you what this is, try to engage in a discussion that we have problems in this country in regards to race and racial inequality,” Schultz said in a video shared by the company this week.

The company has also partnered with USA Today to release a special newspaper supplement on March 20th, which will include “conversation starters” that also urge customers to carry the discussion online using the hashtag #RaceTogether.

According to newspaper, readers will also be asked to fill in a blank in one question: “In the past year, I have been to the home of someone of a different race ___ times.”

Schultz -- who has involved the company in several previous political discussions including a petition urging the end of the federal government shutdown as well as a pledge to hire more veterans, has been vocal on national debates but perhaps none as sensitive as the topic of race.

"The enduring success of Starbucks has been made possible because we as an organization, collectively and individually, have taken our company personal -- who might be different from you but doesn't have the same chance, the same opportunity and for that manner, may feel a sense of helplessness because of the unconscious bias people have towards that person," Schultz said.

CORRECTION: A previous version of this article misstated the location of Seattle.

'Managers Told Me To Put Mustard On It': Fast-Food Workers Say Burns Are Rampant, File OSHA Complaints

More than two dozen low-wage McDonald's workers filed health and safety complaints against the fast-food chain on Monday, alleging that understaffing and time pressures in stores have led to burns, falls and other injuries, according to the worker group representing them.

The 28 complaints, involving stores in 18 cities, were filed with the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the relevant state agencies tasked with ensuring safe workplaces. The workers submitted them with the support of Fight for $15, the union-backed labor coalition that's been agitating for a $15 minimum wage and union recognition in the industry. OSHA confirmed to The Huffington Post that it received the federal complaints Monday.

One Chicago worker, Brittney Berry, alleged that she was so harried one day she slipped and caught her arm on the grill, leading her to be hospitalized and suffer nerve damage. She said she was advised by managers to treat the burn with a condiment.

"My managers kept pushing me to work faster," Berry, who was arrested last year in an act of civil disobedience against McDonald's, said in a statement. "The managers told me to put mustard on it, but I ended up having to get rushed to the hospital in an ambulance. This is exactly why workers at McDonald’s need union rights."

The vast majority of McDonald's stores are operated by franchisees rather than the fast-food company, but in a Monday statement, Fight for $15 argued that the responsibility to keep workers safe ultimately falls on McDonald's.

"McDonald’s sets minimal health and safety standards for all franchisees, but even these modest measures are not properly enforced," the group said. "The company watches like a hawk nearly every aspect of its franchisees’ business operations via regular inspections, but it too often ignores health and safety problems."

"McDonald’s and its independent franchisees are committed to providing safe working conditions for employees in the 14,000 McDonald’s Brand U.S. restaurants," McDonald's spokeswoman Heidi Barker Sa Shekhe said in a statement. "We will review these allegations. It is important to note that these complaints are part of a larger strategy orchestrated by activists targeting our brand and designed to generate media coverage."

The safety complaints are indeed part of a broader shaming campaign that's brought unprecedented scrutiny to the working conditions in fast food. For more than two years, Fight for $15, which is funded by the Service Employees International Union, has organized a highly successful series of strikes by workers at McDonald's, KFC, Taco Bell and other restaurants in cities across the country. Much of that attention has been focused on McDonald's.

Workers and their allies are now fighting the company on multiple legal fronts. They've brought wage theft lawsuits against franchisees and named McDonald's itself as a defendant. They've filed reams of unfair labor practices charges with the National Labor Relations Board, succeeding in having the fast-food company named as a joint employer alongside its franchisees. And in January they filed a civil rights lawsuit alleging discrimination against African-American workers in McDonald's stores.

Coinciding with the filing of OSHA complaints, the National Council for Occupational Safety and Health, a federation of worker safety groups, commissioned a poll of fast-food workers by Hart Research Associates, a firm that often polls for labor and progressive groups. Hart's Guy Molyneux confirmed to HuffPost that the poll was done online, via Facebook, in a manner in which some respondents were eligible to win gift cards -- a method the firm has been criticized for using in the past. Molyneux defended the method Monday.

"I have not seen any plausible or persuasive reason to think that compromises people's response in any way," he said.

According to Hart's survey of 1,426 adults in the industry, 87 percent reported having at least one injury in the past year, and 79 percent said they had been burned at some point during that time. Two-thirds said they had been cut, and one-third said they had hurt themselves while lifting or carrying items in their store. Twenty-three percent said they fell on a wet or oily floor.

Hart said its most shocking finding related to how burns are handled.

"Incredibly, one-third (33%) of all burn victims say that their manager suggested wholly inappropriate treatments for burns, including condiments such as mustard, mayonnaise, butter, or ketchup, instead of burn cream," the firm wrote.

Correction: The original post incorrectly stated that the poll was commissioned by Fight for $15; in fact, it was commissioned by NCOSH. This post has also been updated to explain Hart's polling method.

Here's How Long It'll Take To Close The Gender Wage Gap In Each State

The gender pay gap is alive and well everywhere in America, but it's more alive in some states than in others.

It will take 144 years before Wyoming women working full time and year-round make the same as their male counterparts on average, according to an analysis from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a think tank focused on women’s economic issues. By contrast, women living in Florida should see the gender pay gap close there in 23 years.

This chart from IWPR shows when the gender pay gap is projected to close in each state:

The researchers’ projections are based on each state’s rate of progress at closing the gap since 1959. American women overall shouldn’t expect to see pay equity until 2058 if progress continues at its current rate, according to the analysis. Progress on closing the pay gap actually stalled in recent years because the earnings of both women and men have stagnated.

Right now, American women working full time and year-round make just 78 cents for every dollar their male counterparts make on average, but that gap varies by state. In Florida, women make 85 percent of what men make on average. In Wyoming, women make just 67.9 percent of their male colleagues’ earnings, the IWPR analysis found.

New York has the nation's narrowest gender wage gap, with women earning 87.6 percent of what men make. Louisiana's women see the widest gap, earning just 66.7 percent of their male counterparts.

There are a variety of reasons why the gap persists. For one, the jobs that are more likely to be female-dominated -- think education, social work and child care -- also tend to pay less. It’s possible that’s precisely because these jobs are female-dominated. As Hanna Rosin, author of The End of Men: And the Rise of Women, wrote in an August 2012 Slate piece, "Is it that women are choosing lower-paying professions or that our country values women's professions less?"

Women’s careers are also more likely to be interrupted when they have kids, which can derail their job trajectory and earnings growth.

But even when you control for things like education, career and number of hours worked, women still earn about 5 percent less than their male colleagues, according to a 2011 analysis from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

That’s likely due in part to subtle forms of bias. When women act assertive or decisive, qualities that are often necessary to succeed in the workplace, they’re judged more harshly than their male colleagues, research shows.

Why We Should Match Our Work Schedules To Our Biological Clocks

It's not uncommon for shift workers to struggle with the quality of their sleep, often logging less than six hours of shut-eye each night. However, a new study shows that such sleep quality is affected by more than just the timing of your job -- your "early bird" or "night owl" tendencies play a substantial role, too.

A team of researchers from the Institute of Medical Psychology at Ludwig-Maximilian-University in Munich, Germany, recently found that both workers' sleep and general well-being can be improved by employees abiding by work schedules that naturally coincide with their biological clocks. Using a factory as their real-life laboratory and the employees that work there as their subjects, the researchers set out to uncover potential changes that would benefit their sleep, stress levels and overall health. The results of their study were published in the journal Current Biology.

After determining the chronotype of each employee as early, intermediate or late in regards to their natural sleeping patterns, the researchers created a shift scheduling system that took such information into account, pairing workers with shift times at which they felt most awake and alert. The result? They were able to sleep longer and better after their work, and felt less of a need to make up for lost sleep during their time off.

"A 'simple' re-organization of shifts according to chronotype allowed workers to sleep more on workday nights," Till Roenneberg, one of the study's authors, said in a statement. "As a consequence, they were also able to sleep less on their free days due to a decreased need for compensating an accumulating sleep loss. This is a double-win situation."

Employees not only felt more satisfied with their sleep quantity and quality, but also noticed that their "social jetlag," the difference between their desired sleep time and the time actually allowed by their social constructs, decreased by an hour on average. Shift workers tend to be particularly susceptible to the effects of social jetlag, with its effects leading to health problems beyond sleep like obesity and unhealthy habits, such as cigarette smoking and excessive alcohol consumption. Allowing employees to take over shifts that pair with the times of the day they naturally feel most awake and alert could not just help them sleep better, but improve their long-term health as well.

Despite these improvements, the study did document one main drawback: those who prefer to stay up later did not benefit as much from the new shift work schedule as the early or intermediate chronotypes. Roenneberg attributed this lack of change to the fact that just because a person prefers to stay up later doesn't make them truly nocturnal; at the end of day, night work is more demanding on every employee, regardless of sleeping habits.

David Gelles's Book 'Mindful Work' Reveals How Meditation Can Revolutionize Your Workplace Happiness

The following is an excerpt from David Gelles's Mindful Work. In the book, Gelles discusses how meditation could be the key to happiness in the workplace. Exploring examples of effective mindfulness employed by businesses large and small, he shows how lower stress levels lead not only to employee satisfaction, but to productive workflow.

Right around the time I began hearing about mindfulness at work, and plotting my trip to visit Janice Marturano at General Mills, I got a promotion. This was back when I worked at the Financial Times; after I had been covering media for a few years, my editor asked me to become the paper’s sole mergers and acquisitions reporter in the United States. It was a big offer, but I was reluctant to accept it at first. I enjoyed covering media and felt as if I was just hitting my stride. There was also the reality that covering M&A is notoriously competitive. Reporters on that beat are expected to be on call 24/7 and often work Sundays, chasing the deals that might break on so-called Merger Mondays. And in the United States, the FT was outmatched, competing against large teams of reporters at the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg. Nonetheless, it was a great opportunity to take on a prominent beat, and I accepted the job, even as I expected that the stress would be immense. I was right.

The job, instantly, was overwhelming. For the first three months I had breakfast meetings, lunches, and after-work drinks on top of long days at the office. Anytime a deal broke, or was even rumored, I was expected to match the story or take it forward. It was exhausting, and I noticed my stress levels ratcheting up. Luckily, I knew what to do. Though mindfulness works best as a preventive medicine, it can also prove an effective remedy. And after a few intense weeks of M&A reporting, I sensed it was time to recommit to meditation.

Though I had practiced mindfulness on and off for almost fifteen years, I had gone all that time without ever trying out what is probably the most popular form of meditation training today: Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction. MBSR, more than any other class, curriculum, or teacher in the last thirty years, has helped mindfulness go mainstream. As a reporter, I had to figure out what it was all about. And at a personal level, reducing my stress level sounded pretty good, too. My job was more intense than ever, and I was trying to write a book on the side. With this kind of a schedule, I figured I could use all the mindfulness I could get. So with stresses at work mounting, I signed up for my inaugural training in MBSR. I even managed to convince my wife, Alison (never much of a meditator herself but often the most considerate person in the family), to join as well.

It was a difficult time for us. In addition to our busy work lives, we had just suffered a personal blow: Alison had had a miscarriage, and we were reeling, trying to process a complex flood of emotions. Like Marturano when she went off to the desert and learned from Jon Kabat-Zinn, we were personally and professionally depleted. And yet I knew I needed to renew my practice, and Alison intuited that mindfulness would help her heal. Which is how it came to be that at 8:30 p.m. on a Thursday evening, after a long day at work, while our friends were dining out or going to a show, we were at our first MBSR class, staring at a raisin.

We were at the Open Center, a New Age mecca in the shadow of the Empire State Building. We had entered through the gift shop, an incense-scented store hawking biodynamic brown rice wraps and crystals. We hustled through and made our way upstairs to a large classroom, where we took our seats in a big circle, along with twenty-eight other professionals from across Manhattan.

My butt was planted on an uncomfortable metal folding chair. The room we were in, a large space with double-high ceilings and big windows facing north onto the bustling streets, had seen better days. The mauve carpet was stained, and a fluorescent ceiling light flickered. It wasn’t the most soothing environment, but then, mindfulness asks that we be at peace even in uncomfortable situations. From down the hall, squawks from a Native American flute class pierced the air. And while my classmates were all there of their own volition, there was definitely some trepidation in the air. An introduction to mindfulness, it turned out, can be a cause for stress.

Our teacher for the eight-week course was Amy Gross, the former editor of O magazine, the print arm of Oprah Winfrey’s media empire. A compact woman with smooth features, a bushel of dark hair, and warm eyes, Amy did her best to make the group feel welcome in an admittedly awkward environment. Everyone seemed to know things were going to get intense, but no one knew quite what to expect. But I figured we were in good hands. Because she had worked with Oprah for years, I suspected Amy knew a thing or two about stress at work. And after dispensing with some formalities and doing a round of introductions, she got down to business.

Eager as I was to learn MBSR, it was a challenge to be fully present. I’d just had an intense day at the office, full of rolling deadlines, screaming editors, anxious colleagues, and evasive sources. I was still thinking about the story I’d just filed, which would be posted online any minute. The turmoil from the miscarriage continued to demand my emotional attention. Even though I was sitting down, I could feel the momentum of the day still trying to carry me along, as if I had just stepped onto solid ground after hours on a train. And now, a half-hour into the first class, we were staring at a raisin, which was supposed to be the object of our attention for the next ten minutes or so.

Amy told us to examine the raisin in our palm as if we’d never seen such a thing before, as if it were an alien object that magically appeared from another planet. Consider it anew, she said, with all five senses. We began with sight. What did it resemble? A rock? A piece of bark from a tree? The skin of an elephant? I examined the small pebble of dried fruit, noting the contradictions in its form. It had sharp ridges covering its globular body. Between its creases were flecks of a dried white substance, the sugar from its evaporated juices, clinging to its shriveled flesh.

Next: sound. What noise does a raisin make? None, I figured. Bringing it close to my ear, I squeezed gently. In fact, I could hear a small crackling. Turns out raisins have a voice, after all. It was a delightful little surprise that brought a smile to my face. Now touch. It was tough yet supple, sticky yet dry. Its nib, once connected to a small stem, was almost sharp, capable of leaving a small scratch on my skin. It weighed almost nothing, yet had a distinct volume between my index finger and thumb.

Smell. These weren’t the freshest raisins, and there wasn’t much fragrance coming from their small bodies. Nonetheless, when I brought it very close to my nose, nearly shoving it up my nostril, I caught a faint whiff of sweetness. And that little smell was enough to set my mouth salivating.

Finally: taste. I bit off a third of the raisin. Immediately my taste buds lit up, more saliva flooding around my gums. Though small, the little piece released enough flavor to dominate all my other senses. All the while, Amy asked us to also monitor what thoughts or feelings, likes and dislikes, the raisin elicited. Was I disappointed by its lack of freshness? Annoyed by the stickiness? Left salivating after smelling food? Did I notice the impulse to eat the raisin? Could I be aware of the intention to place it in my mouth before I actually made the motion to do so? Finally, when it was time to swallow the piece I’d chewed, could I feel the muscles in my throat impulsively moving before I followed through with the action?

The purpose of the exercise was twofold. Bringing our full attention to the raisin made it clear how much richer even mundane experiences can be when we are fully present. This is true of everything, from brushing our teeth to walking down the street. Every moment of our lives, there is a lot going on that we fail to notice.

The second intention was subtler. By encouraging us to examine our impulses, emotions, and desires, Amy was, with a few baby steps, helping us cultivate self-awareness. Instead of simply eating the raisin on autopilot, we were putting just a little space between our preconceptions about eating the raisin and the act itself. We were not just noticing the sensations of the experience, but also becoming aware that we were having an experience in the first place.

Though I ate that raisin a long time ago, I still remember each detail of it vividly. That’s the power of mindfulness. For those few minutes I was so engrossed in the totality of the raisin, no other thoughts were distracting me from the present moment. As a result, the shriveled grape remains among the most memorable meals of my life. And the lesson from MBSR is simple: we can bring that same clarity, purpose, and self-awareness to all our experiences.

Excerpt from MINDFUL WORK by David Gelles. Copyright © 2015 by David Gelles. Used by permission of Eamon Dolan Books, an imprint of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.

One Small Hope For The Future Of Maternity Leave In The U.S.

The U.S. is woefully behind the rest of the industrialized world on maternity leave policies, and the country’s top politicians can’t seem to do much about it.

Yet progress could be on the way from a pretty unlikely source: The world’s biggest corporations.

Vodafone announced late last week that it would offer a minimum of 16 weeks of paid leave to new mothers in all 30 countries in which the telecommunications giant operates. Even more groundbreaking: The company will let returning mothers work 30-hour weeks and still get full-time pay and benefits for the first six months they’re back at work.

This benefit is particularly generous in the United States. It's also a sign that Europe's more progressive family leave policies are making their way across the pond, offering hope that we’re slowly raising the bar on worker benefits. The U.S. is the only industrialized country in the world that doesn’t require businesses to give new mothers paid time off, though most big companies do offer some paid leave.

Like most big multinationals, Vodafone tailors its leave policies to local law. That means in Europe, where paid leave is the norm, the company is already offering very generous leave benefits for mothers. On its home turf in the U.K., Vodafone workers get six months off at full pay -- local laws provide for 280 days of leave, with the first six weeks at 90 percent of pay. (See the chart below.) The company's new 16-week policy won’t change that, but will benefit more than 1,000 Vodafone workers in places -- the U.S., Africa, India and the Middle East -- that offer very little or no paid leave, the company said in a statement.

Vodafone employs about 93,000 people, more than 500 of whom work in the U.S.

Corporations with workers in different parts of the world can’t offer generous leave policies in one place and terrible leave policies in the U.S., Kenneth Matos, senior direct of research at the nonprofit Families and Work Institute, told HuffPost. “Logic eventually wins,” he said.

If enough workers start getting better leave benefits, eventually cultural expectations will shift and U.S. policy will improve, Matos said.

The inspiration for Vodafone's new policy came from Italy, where workers already enjoy a flexible return-to-work policy that lets them put in 30 hours a week and still receive full pay for up to the first year back.

The benefit, Vodafone believes, translates into fewer new mothers quitting the company. Globally, 65 percent of new mothers who quit Vodafone leave within the first year of returning, the company's human resources director, Sharon Doherty, told The Huffington Post. It's a sign that the transition back to work was too challenging, she said. But in Italy, fewer new mothers quit their jobs during the crucial first year.

Doherty had been looking across the company to see how it could increase its percentage of women. Women make up 35 percent of Vodafone workers, but only 21 percent of the senior leadership team.

A light bulb went off.

“The government-enforced policy [in Italy] was changing the dynamics. That got us to think about it a little differently,” said Doherty. She has a 2-year-old at home and had taken six months of paid leave from Vodafone in the U.K.

One thing Vodafone didn’t import from Italy, however: the country's very long maternity leave benefit. Italian Vodafone workers get 9 and 1/2 months of paid leave.

The company isn’t saying much about how it landed on 16 weeks as its minimum standard for leave, and paternity leave will still be country by country.

Indeed, there’s no consensus on how much maternity leave time is ideal, but there is plenty of research that offers some clear guidance. Numerous studies show that offering less than six weeks of leave harms both mothers and infants, said Sharon Lerner, a senior fellow at Demos and the author of The War On Moms. One well-regarded study, which looked at infant mortality rates and leave among European woman, suggested that 40 weeks of leave offers the most benefits to a child’s health.

Vodafone's Doherty sold the enhanced benefits package to senior leadership by making a strong business case for it -- better leave policy translates to fewer women leaving the company. That saves Vodafone the cost of recruiting and re-training new employees. Senior management, already tasked with bringing on more women, was sold.

Not all companies can make that case. Smaller employers, particularly ones with more female workers, wouldn’t financially benefit from these generous policies, said Eileen Appelbaum, a senior economist at the Center for Economic Policy Research, a progressive think tank.

Large companies can afford to offer paid leave because the cost of losing one worker can be shared by many employees -- and is lower than the cost of replacing a worker who doesn’t return after having a baby, she said. The calculus is very different for an employer with a higher percentage of female workers and a smaller workforce.

“It’s great that Vodafone is doing this, but this isn’t the way to go in general,” she said.

Instead, Appelbaum said, the government should step up. In an ideal scenario, all workers would share the costs of mandated family leave via a payroll tax. For example, in New Jersey, workers contribute one-tenth of 1 percent out of their weekly pay to fund paid leave, Appelbaum said. Other states could copy this type of strategy.

“Paid leave is cheap. It’s ridiculous that every state doesn’t have it," she said.

Clarification: Language has been changed to clarify that U.K. workers get 90 percent of their pay for the first six weeks of their maternity leave.

Everything You Need To Know About The Apple Watch

You can put the Apple Watch on your wrist April 10.

That's according to Apple CEO Tim Cook, who stepped on stage Monday at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco to unveil the final details about the wearable device, which was first announced back in September. April 10 is the preorder date and the first day you'll be able to try the Watch on in an Apple Store. The product will be available to own April 24.

The most basic version of the watch, Apple Watch Sport, will start at $349 for the 38mm watch face. The 42mm face is priced at $399. Upgrading to the stainless steel version takes the starting price to $549. Finally, the 18-karat gold Apple Watch Edition starts at $10,000.

"It's not just with you, it's on you," Cook said of the new gadget.

The Apple Watch's basic features haven't changed since it was first announced in September, but Kevin Lynch, Apple's vice president of technology, went through highlights Monday. We've got the details here.

Keep in mind that for many of the features to work, the Apple Watch needs to be paired with an iPhone 5 (or later) running the latest version of iOS 8.

Here's a recap of the Apple Watch's features:

Fitness

A big draw for the Apple Watch is its suite of health and activity trackers. The built-in Activity app shows you how many calories you've burned in a day, how much exercise you've gotten, and how much you've stood up. It offers goal-tracking for each.

Credit: Apple

The device will also show you a weekly summary of your activity every Monday, and it will offer suggestions to improve your fitness in those reports. Its built-in heart sensor helps keep track of your exercise during workouts. It's water-resistant (not waterproof), so you don't have to worry about destroying it with all of your technology-enabled sweating.

Finally, outside of the basic information in the Activity app, there's a Workout app that will keep tabs on the nitty-gritty: total distance when running, average pace and so on. When you achieve personal milestones, the Fitness app will display an achievement badge on the screen, perhaps in a bid to make rigorous physical activity feel more like an Xbox game.

Glances

Important information is just a glance away on the Apple Watch. Use your finger to swipe up from the bottom of the watch face and you can check the weather, look at your calendar, control your music or check your heart rate.

Apps

It's always been clear that Apple Watch would support apps made by third-party developers. On Monday, Apple showcased a few examples and announced that they can be downloaded via a connected iPhone. Apple Watch supports WeChat, a popular Chinese messaging app, and Uber, which now lets you summon a ride straight from your wrist. An app from the W hotel will allow users to unlock their hotel room using the Apple Watch by holding it up to a "lock pad near the door handle."

Siri

Everyone's favorite digital assistant is on the watch, because of course it is. Apple Watch owners will be able to say, "Hey, Siri" into their devices and then ask for turn-by-turn directions or information about upcoming events. Siri will also allow you to dictate text messages to contacts simply by speaking into your Apple Watch.

The "Taptic Engine"

Apple Watch will tap you on the wrist when you receive a notification. Cook said Monday that any notification you get on your iPhone will be viewable on the Apple Watch.

If you want walking directions, for example, it will tap you when it's time to turn. Apple says it will provide a different "tactile sensation" depending on the alert.

It will also allow you to tap other Apple Watch wearers or share your heartbeat with them, which Apple characterizes as "simple and intimate," rather than a sobering example of mankind's inexorable march toward technological singularity.

Credit: Apple

A Screen You Can Draw On

Texting is great and all, but Apple Watch owners will be able to communicate with one another by drawing on the device's screen. The doodles will be animated, illustrating how they were drawn, and then they'll vanish from the display.

That may seem a bit inconsequential, but you might have said the same thing about Snapchat's short, self-destructing messages -- and that company is valued at $19 billion now.

Credit: Apple

Instant Messages

When you get a text message on your iPhone, the Apple Watch will be able to display it on your wrist and offer you quick ways to respond based on "the context of your message," like if someone is asking you to meet for coffee at 2 p.m. Those responses can be along the lines of, "Leaving now," or they could simply be an animated emoji.

The Apple Watch also lets you see new email messages, of course.

Phone Calls On Your Wrist

Unlike certain competitors -- like the Moto 360 smartwatch for Android -- Apple Watch allows you to answer incoming calls and have a conversation straight from your wrist, using the device's speaker and microphone. (The Moto 360 allows you to answer calls with the watch, but you have to speak into your actual phone.)

Different Watch Faces

Mickey Mouse watches are classic, and now you can have a modern version on your wrist, thanks to Apple's different watch faces.

The wide array of face options includes an astronomy-themed faceh showing the planets, a minimalistic analog display and many more.

Battery

The Apple Watch powers up via a magnetic charger on its back, and Cook said it will last for 18 hours.

***

Cook's announcement capped off weeks of speculation that turned the invitation to the event into a news item itself. Anticipation for the gadget, and its success or failure, reached a fever pitch following a new 12-page advertisement in Vogue, a cover image for Self magazine and rumors about how it could shift the company's strategy for its Apple Stores.

The Apple Watch is the company's first foray into a new product category under Tim Cook, who became Apple's CEO when Steve Jobs stepped down in 2011. It follows a record-setting, $18 billion quarter for the Cupertino tech giant.

Apple now faces the challenge of getting people to buy the wearable, which could be perceived as little more than a luxury item complementing the technology one already owns. The $10,000 gold variation of the Apple Watch, also announced Monday, does little to dispel that notion. Industry experts seem split on whether anyone will want it, though some have reminded readers that the iPhone was met with similar skepticism upon its announcement.

The Consumer Electronics Association has estimated that 10.8 million smartwatches will be sold in 2015 -- about 14 percent of the number of iPhones Apple sold in the last three months of 2014 alone.

Germany's New Boardroom Gender Quota Could Be A Model For Other Countries

Germany on Friday approved a new quota that will force some of Europe’s largest companies to increase the number of women in their boardrooms to 30 percent by next year.

Women claim just 15.5 percent of boardroom seats on companies listed on the S&P 1500 -- an index of U.S. stocks -- fewer than the combined number of positions held by men named John, Robert, William or James, according to a report from Ernst & Young.

Germany fares slightly better, with women in 22 percent of boardroom seats.

“You have to be sparing with the word ‘historic,’” Justice Minister Heiko Maas said of the decision, according to the New York Times. “But I think today we can apply it.”

He called it the “greatest contribution to gender equality” since German women won the right to vote in 1918.

The Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs did not respond to a request for comment on Saturday.

The move marks the latest in a string of such quotas. In 2008, Norway became the first country to enact a quota of 40 percent, threatening to dissolve publicly traded companies who did not comply. France, Iceland and Spain soon followed. The Netherlands and Malaysia set non-binding targets of 30 percent. Australia, Britain and Sweden have threatened to enforce quotas if companies not voluntarily give more corporate supervisory seats to women.

Some say such quotas fail to empower women in management positions. None of Norway’s 32 biggest companies has a woman as chief executive and just 5.8 percent of general managers at its public companies are women, according to the Wall Street Journal. Other critics say it does little to close the gender wage gap and empowers less experienced women who amount to little more than "window dressing" in a room full of seasoned businessmen.

"Board quotas may seem like a convenient shortcut to workplace equality, but they are not -- nor are they a long-term solution," Carrie Lukas, managing director of the nonprofit Independent Women's Forum, wrote in an op-ed published last December. "A distraction at best, they may undo women’s historic gains by suggesting that we cannot succeed on our own."

Still, Germany is Europe’s largest and most powerful economy, with companies such as BMW, Deutsche Bank, Siemens and Volkswagen. Some of the country's workplace policies could serve as models for other countries.

Wolfsburg-based Volkswagen, the world’s second-largest automaker, has begun offering apprenticeships at its plant in Tennessee -- similar to the vocational training many German students receive -- in hopes of cultivating more highly skilled factory workers, of which there is a shortage in the U.S. Last August, Germany's labor ministry began work on potential legislation that would bar employers from emailing workers after hours.

Germany’s workplace protections for women are particularly strong.

Women are guaranteed six weeks of maternity leave, and it’s illegal to fire a female worker for becoming pregnant. It’s also illegal to require a worker to perform tasks that could endanger her pregnancy, such as lifting and carrying heavy objects or handling toxic or radioactive material.

It probably helps that Germany is led by Chancellor Angela Merkel, the most powerful woman in the world.

Warren Buffett On Elizabeth Warren: 'She Would Do Better If She Were Less Angry'

Warren Buffett thinks Elizabeth Warren should dial down the anger.

“She would do better if she was less angry and demonized less,” said the Berkshire Hathaway chairman and CEO on Monday when CNBC anchor Joe Kernen asked for his thoughts on the Democratic senator from Massachusetts.

“I believe in 'hate the sin, love the sinner,' and I also believe in praising by name and criticizing by category,” he added.

Buffett, who put out his annual letter to shareholders this weekend, explained that he believes senators on both sides of the aisle need to work together on legislation.

“It does not help when you demonize the people you’re talking to,” he said.

In his CNBC interview, the folksy billionaire reiterated his support for Hillary Clinton’s presumed run for president in 2016. Warren has repeatedly denied that she would run in 2016 -- though her name keeps coming up as a potential Clinton opponent.

Warren’s passionate defense of Main Street and the middle class, particularly during the financial crisis, helped make her name and arguably launched her into the Senate. It also made her a load of enemies on Wall Street. This quote, from a 2011 Vanity Fair piece, sort of sums up the sentiment: "On Wall Street, Warren was regarded, says one bank vice-chairman, as 'the Devil incarnate,' and, according to another executive, a 'showboater,' who didn’t really know what she was talking about."

Of course, as the story points out, Warren does very much know what she’s talking about, and her dogged pursuit of openness and fairness in the finance industry led to the founding of the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau and has earned her Wall Street’s enmity.

More recently, Warren told ABC's "This Week":

I'm worried a lot about power in the financial services industry and I'm worried about the fact that basically, starting in the '80s, you know, the cops were taken off the beat in financial services. These guys were allowed to just paint a bull's-eye on the backside of American families," Warren said. "They loaded up on risk. They crushed the economy. They got bailed out. What bothers me now, they still strut around Washington, they block regulations that they don't want, they roll over agencies whenever they can.

Still, Buffett isn't your typical Wall Streeter. Again and again, he's advocated for more taxes on the rich.

Airbnb Gained A Very Powerful Friend In Warren Buffett

Warren Buffett is a fan of Airbnb.

The billionaire business magnate, who serves as chairman and chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway, endorsed the room-sharing startup in a Saturday morning letter to shareholders.

The so-called Oracle of Omaha suggested the 7-year-old service, which allows users to rent lodging to each other for short periods of time, as an alternative to hotel rooms for attendees of his annual conference in Nebraska’s largest city.

Expecting record attendance, Buffett said he enlisted Airbnb to help obtain extra listings in Omaha around the time of the May conference.

“Airbnb’s services may be especially helpful to shareholders who expect to spend only a single night in Omaha and are aware that last year a few hotels required guests to pay for a minimum of three nights,” he wrote. “That gets expensive. Those people on a tight budget should check the Airbnb website.”

Airbnb said it was thankful for the support.

"Once again, we are thrilled to gain the support of Warren Buffett as we help the residents of Omaha open their homes to travelers for the annual shareholder's meeting," Maria Parra Rodriguez, an Airbnb spokeswoman, told The Huffington Post. "Not only does hosting provide guests with a unique, local experience, it also generates supplemental income for hosts that can help in many ways.”

The company has faced challenges in recent months. In October, New York’s attorney general released a report claiming that three-quarters of Airbnb’s listings in New York City were illegal.

Still, Airbnb has ponied onward. The company is raising an enormous round of funding that would value it at $20 billion, according to a report published on Friday by TechCrunch.

This story has been updated with a comment from Airbnb.