Why a 4-Day Work Week is Completely Unnecessary

Economist and Boston College sociology professor Juliet Schor gave a TEDx talk in 2022 about the four-day work week, presenting compelling evidence for how it’d “address burnout and job fatigue” and “also could help with depression, inequalities of race and income, and the climate crisis.” In February 2023, the Wall Street Journal published an article detailing the results of one the largest-ever trials of a four-day work week: Of the 61 businesses — “ranging from banks to fast-food restaurants to marketing agencies” — that gave their employees a paid day off per week, more than 90% said they’d continue testing the shorter week and nearly a third planned to implement it permanently. Yet, it’s completely unnecessary.

That is, if your HR strategy doesn’t suck. (If it does, and you’re already struggling with waning employee engagement, a four-day work week could actually stop the proverbial bleeding, for a time.)

With a post-pandemic employee-centric, DEI-oriented HR strategy, your employees don’t need a four-day work week because they already have the flexibility to work where, when and how they want — as long as they’re efficient, productive, effective, and healthfully managing their work/life balance.

Here’s what I mean:

When Your HR Strategy Means Your Employees Don’t Need a 4-Day Work Week

According to John Storey, professor of human resource management at The Open University, strategic HR is an employee management approach designed to gain a competitive advantage by integrating cultural, structural and personnel techniques to develop a more highly committed and capable workforce. While there is no one universal definition of strategic HR management (HRM), the primary goal is to connect the HR function to the brand’s business objectives and improve performance by facilitating and maintaining a work culture that inspires innovation. Today, that means recruitment and benefits, as well as facilitating employee engagement and strengthening culture.

10 Essential Characteristics of Effective Strategic HRM Strategies

To provide a strategic human resources plan, your HR leaders must prioritize the behaviors, culture and competencies needed to achieve your larger organizational goals. The most effective strategic HRM strategies:

1. Are based on an analysis of the organization and the external environment
2. Guide the direction of the HR department
3. Adhere to brand values
4. Shape the company culture
5. Address employee needs, goals and pain points
6. Prioritize diversity, equity and inclusion
7. Take advantage of new and emerging tech
8. Dictate the allocation and deployment of organizational resources
9. Target and measure performance against quantitative key performance indicators
10. Are revised on a yearly basis, and whenever necessary

7 Steps to Developing an Employee-Centric HR Strategy

Want to retain and recruit top talent? Follow these steps in developing your strategic HRM strategy:

1. Conduct a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis of your organization
2. Analyze competitors’ recruitment and retention practices
3. Envision and articulate a desired future, and create a vision statement that is inspirational, aspirational, compelling and concise
4. Provide clear objectives that recognize your organization’s strengths and weaknesses; can be achieved and measured; reflect the organization’s overall strategy; and can be effectively communicated and supported firmwide
5. Identify the steps required to achieve your objectives, and set milestones, plan contingencies and determine necessary resources
6. Establish a process for evaluating progress and identifying opportunities to adapt, streamline and/or optimize
7. Survey your employees

The Employee Survey: Employee Experience and the Importance of Listening

Even the best HR strategy cannot overcome a lack of quality data. And employee data is about much more than numbers — hours worked, sick days used, words typed per minute. The most critical employee data isn’t even quantitative. To run a successful organization, you need to know how your employees — and prospects — feel, during recruitment, hiring and onboarding, and throughout their career. What’s most important isn’t which benefits or perks you provide, but that you listen to, respect and value your employees and reward hard work.

How’s this done? By listening, first, repeatedly, and methodically. So, instruct your HR director to lead their team in:

• Conducting research on industry standards and competitors’ benefits offerings 
• Developing an employee survey using AskNicely, Qualaroo, Qualtrics, SurveyMonkey or Zoho Survey 
• Gamifying the exercise and offering incentives for completion
• Promoting through your HR or internal comms team the importance of the survey to ‘their’ employee experience and future benefits
• Disseminating and tracking the survey through your HR portal (see below)
• Leveraging the survey data to ascertain what your employees most appreciate — and would most appreciate
• Identifying creative incentives and other workplace solutions you could offer beyond the traditional benefits
• Proposing your updated benefits package to senior management, including legal and finance
• Researching and partnering with the best providers
• Continually monitoring employee wellness, morale, engagement, efficiency and productivity, iterating and optimizing benefits and perks as necessary

The 2 Most Important Components of Your HR Strategy: Benefits & DEI

HR Strategy Component 1: 9 Must-Offer Employee Benefits and Perks

1. Covered Abortion Services

Following the June 2022 Supreme Court vote to overturn the Court’s prior Roe v. Wade decision to legalize abortion, employees and employers scrambled to determine what would and wouldn’t be covered henceforth. Immediately, this became HR hot topic number one. 

Levi Strauss, for instance, reported that its 15,000 employees are eligible for reimbursement of healthcare-related travel expenses for services not available in their home state, including those related to reproductive health and abortion. “As the pandemic has shown so clearly, public health issues are workplace issues,” read a company press release in May 2022. “Business leaders are responsible for protecting the health and wellbeing of our employees, and that includes protecting reproductive rights and abortion access.” More than half of Levi Strauss’s employees identify as women. 

Big Tech companies like Amazon, Apple and Yelp, as well as Citigroup and Starbucks, also quickly announced they’d reimburse employees for travel expenses. In fact, according to an International Foundation of Employee Benefits Plan study: 

• 1 in 4 employers overall is exploring expanding their covered abortion services
• Another 1 in 4 employers is considering expanding abortion coverage

Which, as HR Executive put it, “indicat[es] the number of employers looking to expand their services may jump considerably in the future.”

On the other hand, though, multiple reports have shown that at least half (if not a large majority) of HR leaders have not adjusted their healthcare plans to accommodate out-of-state medical procedures — and have not been vocal about their stance on the issue. One from May 2022 showed 60% of HR executives did not plan to offer any new healthcare benefits in response to the Court decision. A study the following month by the Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) found that more than half of businesses had not made a statement about Roe v. Wade, and only 15% intended to if the law were overturned. 

This is shortsighted, to say the least, especially with two thirds of American consumers now actively choosing to buy from brands whose values reflect their own.

As Gartner research principal Crystal Styron said, “What a trucking firm in Arkansas needs will look very different from what a startup in Silicon Valley needs.” Of course, the organizations that prioritize diversity, equity and inclusion will act on behalf of all their female-identifying workers. Women, after all, make up only 8% of Fortune 500 CEOs and 20% of all C-suite roles — and without access to the health coverage they need, they’re not being included or treated equitably, are they?

No. So when developing your updated benefits package to ensure inclusion of female health-specific care, consider the following options:

• Travel benefits, as part group health plan
• Through an employee assistance program (EAP)
• Reimbursements through account-based plans, such as health savings accounts (HSAs), health care flexible savings account (FSAs) or health reimbursement arrangements (HRAs)
• Reimbursements through taxable compensation
• Contracts with third-party administrators
• Contracts directly with a reproductive health services provider

2. Mental and Behavioral Health Care

Even before the COVID-era quarantines, job losses and deaths or the sudden stripping of abortion rights, the vast majority of workers (including about nine in 10 Gen-Zers and millennials) believed their employers should have a mental health policy.

The pandemic had short- and long-term psychosocial and behavioral health implications, as have more recent national and world headlines. In November 2020, the National Center for Health Statistics found that 36.3% of adults admitted having anxiety disorder symptoms, up from only 8.2% the year before, and a more recent report from Mental Health America indicates that high rates of anxiety, as well as depression, are expected to continue or even worsen. 

Fortunately, nine out of 10 employers are investing more in mental health benefits, and nine out of 10 said they’d be offering virtual counseling to all employees. Smart thinking, considering depression alone costs employers about $50 billion a year, while mental health programs can generate a return on investment of up to 1,000%!

3. Digital Health, Telehealth and Virtual Care

Telehealth, or the delivery of health-care, health education and health information services via remote technologies, was already growing before the pandemic, and during the first quarter of 2020 alone it increased 50%; some doctor’s offices were even forced to close to better prepare for this new model of care delivery. 

Employers, meanwhile, have been steadily expanding their use of telehealth for years, and the pandemic accelerated the pace. In a conversation with HealthLeaders, UnitedHealth Group’s chief medical officer Donna O'Shea reported 28-million telemedicine visits in 2021, representing a 2,500% increase from the pre-pandemic baseline. (In addition, virtual behavioral health appointments accounted for 63% of all behavioral health visits, up from barely more than 1% before COVID.)

Today, organizations like Citigroup and Bank of America are leveraging established telemedicine providers as well as offering access to local brick-and-mortar practices that were forced to switch to and later maintain their virtual offerings since the COVID outbreak.

Why? Because it makes for healthier, happier employees. And happier, healthier employees are more efficient, more productive, and more engaged — whether they’re working from home, the office, or both. 

When you offer virtual care to your employees, they have 24/7 access to everything they need to stay informed about their health and can make virtual appointments with a variety of doctors and other providers at times that best suit their busy lives. 

Plus, in addition to what has traditionally qualified as telemedicine or virtual care, employers are now also offering stipends to employees to invest in other forms of digital self-care. This can include apps for meditation, sleep tracking, meal planning, physical fitness, and even maternity. The annual fee for most mobile apps is relatively low, and some even offer bulk discounts to businesses, allowing HR departments to deliver significant ROI by demonstrating care for their employees at little financial cost.

Some of the most highly rated wellness apps include:

• Calm
• Headspace 
• Lifesum
• MyFitnessPal
• Nike Training Club
• Sleep Cycle
• Strava
• WHOOP

4. Financial Wellness and Generational Wealth

It’s well known that the majority of workers live paycheck to paycheck, and approximately 40% of US households would struggle to cover a $400 emergency expense. Needless to say, this produces great financial stress — and financial stress causes a 34% increase in work absenteeism and tardiness. Meanwhile, more than two thirds of all investors — and more than eight in 10 millennials and seven in 10 Gen-Xers — are focused on generational wealth. 

To provide financial incentives and assistance, beyond salary and bonuses, offer: 

• Traditional benefits like life insurance, disability insurance, family and medical leave, and 401(k) retirement plans
• Higher education investment plans for dependants, such as 529 plans
• Payroll-deduction emergency savings accounts
• Student loan debt contributions
• Tuition fee reimbursements  
• Complimentary meetings with financial advisors
• Workshops on topics like reducing debt, budget planning, or investing for retirement
• Stipends for digital financial tools that provide on-demand financial advice or customized training and e-learning

5. Family Wellness

A simple concept designed to address an immediate and long-term need, family wellness means extending wellness benefits to employees’ families; offering financial assistance and other benefits to the entire family would not only demonstrate your commitment and appreciation to your workers, it might directly impact your workers’ physical and emotional health, as well as their productivity. As part of your family wellness program, you could offer access to: 

• Family health coaching
• Family-friendly fitness classes, meditation, yoga or massage
• Family-friendly events
• Family challenges with prizes
• Summer camp and afterschool program stipends

6. Learning & Development, and Upward Mobility

As LinkedIn explains in How Learning Programs Attract and Retain Top Talent, “to attract top talent, your organization needs to be a place where people advance their career. It needs to be a place where people are given opportunities to learn new skills and take on new challenges. And job candidates need to know about it.”

LinkedIn surveyed more than 10,500 recent job changers and found that lack of advancement opportunity was the number-one driver of job change — and this is particularly true of millennials, the fastest growing segment of the workforce

Take a look at your learning and development approach, and ask yourself:

• When was our L&D strategy created?
• Did our HR team survey our employees or make assumptions about what works? 
• When was our strategy last reviewed and updated? 
• What percentage of our employees have engaged in our corporate training program?
• What have the results of these trainings told us about the skills and knowledge of our existing employees, the skills and knowledge gaps in our workforce, and the effectiveness of our program?
• What gaps and opportunities have our managers and employees identified in our trainings?

Armed with the answers to these questions, you should know with certainty whether a new strategy is warranted; chances are, it is. Because unless you’re adhering to the principles of adaptive learning, you’re probably wasting everyone’s time.

So, what is adaptive learning? Adaptive learning is designed to:

• Satisfy the need for providing continuing education anytime and anywhere
• Improve learner engagement

In contrast to the typical one-size-fits-all approach, envision, for instance, an online continuing education course that adjusts to each of your employees’ unique skills, interests and learning styles. The employee who needs more context, extended explanation or additional practice receives it; the employee who doesn’t simply skips past. And the training lasts only as long as necessary for each individual.

Your adaptive learning system enables this by:

• Analyzing performance in real time
• Modifying teaching methods based on the data
• Adapting to the learner

The goal, according to eLearning Industry, is always the same — “whether we use algorithms, nonlinear narrative (branching), personal info, clever interfaces, human intervention, or more likely a combination, to achieve it.” The result is “effective and time-efficient pathways to mastery that are unique to every individual, while improving business-based outcomes.”

To incorporate adaptive learning at your organization, also consider:

• CanopyLAB
• Easygenerator
• Knewton
• Smart Sparrow via Pearson
• SparkLearn

Then, to ensure employees and job candidates know about the training and advancement opportunities within your organization: 

1. Include stipends or paid time off for learning and development in your benefits package
2. Ensure your HR software includes adaptive learning capabilities or integrates with one of the aforementioned adaptive learning systems 
3. Clearly define your commitment to learning and development in the careers section of your website, stating the mission and goals of your learning program and highlighting specific programs and technologies your employees have leveraged to enhance their skills and advance their careers
4. Explain in your job descriptions how a new hire can learn, grow and advance at your organization (or wherever they take their talents next)

7. Personalized Wellness and Tailored Benefits

As is true of digital marketing, personalization is everything. Survey your employees, conduct competitive research, develop your slate of offerings, and promote your most innovative, employee-centric benefits. Some examples include: 

• Student loan repayment programs
• College tuition reimbursement
• Pet insurance
• Higher education investments (like 529 plans) for dependents
• Self-care subscription services and fitness stipends
• In-office massages and shoe shines
• Meal plans and snacks
• Laundry and dry-cleaning services
• Travel stipends and car services
• Concierge services
• Household management and care for caregivers resources
• Happy hours, half-days and mental health days
• Workday and weekend team volunteering opportunities
• Corporate retreats
• Additional holidays like Election Day, Juneteenth and Super Bowl Monday

8. Work Flexibility

Remote workers typically spend 10 minutes less a day being unproductive and are 47% more productive overall. Historically, 25% fewer employees quit their jobs with companies that allow remote employment. And seven out of 10 millennials, who already account for more than one third of the workforce, would give up other benefits to work remotely. Before COVID, 97% of all employees were seeking flexible work in the long term and more than three quarters said they’d be more loyal to their employers if they offered flexible work options. Post-pandemic, 94% of employees who began working remotely as a result of the pandemic said they wanted to continue working from home at least part of the time for the rest of their career, and 99% of those working remotely before COVID said the same. 

Why? Because remote work helps workers maintain a proper work/life balance (or blend), which improves employee morale. And since happy and healthy employees are better employees, this balance translates into more and better work, improving ROI for the business.

• Companies with remote staff experience 41% lower day-to-day absenteeism and significantly less ‘executed’ vacation time
• Employees who work remotely half of the time save the equivalent of 11 workdays not commuting, and full-time remote workers save the equivalent of 33 or more
• The work completed by remote workers has 40% fewer quality defects
• Companies that offer work flexibility experience more than 20% higher profitability

I, for one, left my digital marketing job at the world’s leading independent news-gathering organization to take a new position with a small business that allowed me to work from home. 

So, create a companywide work-from-home policy, and offer it to all of your employees. Then, train your managers to be flexible in extenuating circumstances and accommodate their employees in need. And if the nature of the work performed by your organization does not allow for full-time remote work, create an employee incentive program with additional remote work days — and days off — as a reward.

9. Kindness and Appreciation

While good managers help their direct reports, their departments and their organizations achieve excellence, bad managers cost the US economy nearly $400 billion each year. In fact, half of all workers have left their job “to get away” from their manager at some point in their career, while a gratitude survey of 2,000 Americans showed:

• 81% would work harder for an appreciative boss 
• 70% would feel better about themselves and their efforts if their boss thanked them more

So, ensure your managers:

• Remain consistent with their vision, policies and job requirements
• Accept and address feedback
• Get to know their employees — beyond the work duties they perform
• Recognize achievements
• Motivate and monitor, without micromanaging
• Are inclusive of all team members and perspectives
• Provide opportunities equitably
• Stay flexible and adaptable

HR Strategy Component 2: 5 Steps to Implementing a Successful DEI Program

While DEI in corporate speak typically refers to an organization’s HR policy or program to standardize processes and procedures related to diversity, equity and inclusion, what DEI really means is an entire organization actively not only hiring but welcoming, valuing, respecting, supporting and promoting all workers — and especially those from underrepresented populations. It also includes making the necessary investments to determine exactly what all your employees truly need and want. 

As Harvard Business School professor Robin J. Ely and Morehouse College president David A. Thomas explain:

Being genuinely valued and respected involves more than just feeling included. It involves having the power to help set the agenda, influence what — and how — work is done, have one’s needs and interests taken into account, and have one’s contributions recognized and rewarded with further opportunities to contribute and advance.

This works for the business, too; organizations that follow a DEI framework benefit not only from better branding but:

• Amplified engagement
• Quicker, smarter decision making
• Enhanced imagination and innovation
• Boosted productivity
• Increased profitability 

Indeed, companies devoted to DEI earn 140% more revenue, have 230% more cash per employee, and are 70% more likely to capture a new market and 35% more likely to outperform their competitors.

So, be sure to follow these steps to effectively implement DEI principles, policies and practices across your organization.

Step 1: Do your DEI research 

1. Survey your staff (there are free templates on the internet) on issues of fairness, discrimination, personal belonging, trust, respect and purpose, decision making, hiring and onboarding, diversity and inclusion, and opportunities and resources (equity). Then, analyze for gaps and opportunities in your employee recruitment, hiring, development and advancement efforts. 
2. Ensure you’re measuring your DEI efforts against the right KPIs, including (a) percentage of representation on your organization’s board, (b) percentage of representation by employee category, and (c) pay equality, or the ratio of compensation by employee category (i.e., equal pay for equal work), along with promotion and turnover rates, percentage of participation in ERGs, and supplier diversity. Develop an internal dashboard for tracking, analysis and reporting. And continually analyze and adjust for gaps and opportunities in your employee recruitment, hiring, development and advancement efforts. 

Step 2: Hire a DEI director

As Mita Mallick, a LinkedIn Top Voice, suggests: 

Instead of looking for direct senior DEI leadership experience, consider people with broader backgrounds but all the right skills: the ability to influence and be a change agent, to design strategy and deliver results, to create metrics and drive accountability, and to communicate effectively across all levels of the hierarchy. Those with marketing, sales, or communications backgrounds might be a great fit. Also consider people who have been informal D&I champions or, more specifically, have served as an executive sponsor for an employee resource group. You don’t have to be a career HR professional to do this work.

My advice:

1. Start with the LinkedIn Top Voices in disability and advocacy, company culture, leadership, social impact and “next gen,” as well as mental health, racial equity, gender equity and LGBTQ+
2. Reach out, schedule meetings, and solicit advice
3. Be willing to pay a consultancy fee
4. Be flexible and open minded
5. Take copious notes on the individuals whose experience, expertise, values and mission most closely align with yours
6. Hire from outside your organization, and outside your traditional networking bases and talent pools

Once onboarded, this new hire should lead your DEI efforts.

Step 3: Ensure DEI alignment

For your DEI initiative to work, it must be supported by your people — and the only way to earn their buy-in is to demonstrate the need and the value, or the problem and the solution. The problem for most organizations is insufficient diversity (a recruiting and hiring issue), equity (a hiring, training, development and advancement issue) and inclusion (a company culture issue); the need is improvement in all three areas. 

1. Kick off the program and initiate the discussion with a town hall on the interests, challenges and biases identified in the companywide survey
2. Ask participants to contribute ideas to the development of the program, and provide perks for participation
3. Develop the program and distribute details internally, requesting feedback online
4. Finalize the program
5. Celebrate your alignment and new commitment through public relations, marketing and advertising campaigns aimed at potential new employees and customers 
6. Ensure your management team never forgets the why behind it all

Step 4: Build an equitable, inclusive culture and safe, comfortable working environment from the ground up

1. Create DEI task forces with employees of all ability levels, from all levels of the organization
2. Create employee resource groups (ERGs) for employees who share a common characteristic, such as disability, race, ethnicity, gender, generation or religious affiliation, to provide support and expand professional networking and career development opportunities
3. Create a public-facing, accessible digital scorecard measuring and showcasing your DEI metrics over time, with particular focus on the least-recognized protected classes, like people with disabilities
4. Develop DEI policies for managers and staff, including a code of conduct policy, outlining the company’s policy on diversity, equity inclusion; a communication plan, outlining non-discriminatory communication practices; a non-discrimination policy, outlining discrimination laws and what is not allowed in the workplace; a zero-tolerance policy, outlining how instances of discrimination, harassment, bullying and stereotyping will be addressed by the organization; and a grievance policy, outlining how employees can use the company alternative complaint system
5. Develop DEI workshops from the inside out, leveraging your lead learners in the creation of each workshop and training, encouraging the hard conversations; collecting all perspectives, prioritizing members of historically disenfranchised groups; promoting intersectionality, or the interconnected nature of social categorizations such as race, class, gender and sexuality in overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage; focusing on intervention and not just bias reduction; and facilitating ongoing engagement through lead learner-led one-on-one meetings, workshops and town halls, as well as diversity-related outreach programs and informal information sharing
6. Create safe spaces in your workplace, such as quiet workspaces for workers who may be distracted or overstimulated by open-floor-plan seating, gender-neutral restrooms for non-binary and genderqueer individuals, or lactation rooms for new mothers; if you’re fully remote or have some staff working from home, you can create safe ‘spaces’ digitally by encouraging employees to add pronouns to their email signatures and usernames, inviting employees to reserve time for personal needs by blocking it out on the calendar, honoring introverts by making digital culture events optional, and always providing the tools and support necessary to ensure all communications and experiences are accessible
7. Deploy an alternative, accessible complaint system (without one, half of all discrimination and harassment complaints lead to retaliation), providing an employee assistance plan (EAP) for anonymous, free support, as well as implementing transformative mediation, designed to empower all parties and ensure each party recognizes the other’s needs, interests, values and points of view

Step 5: Start recruiting, interviewing, hiring, onboarding and developing talent with a focus on equity and inclusion

1. Audit and update your website, social media accounts, content marketing and advertising to prominently highlight your commitment to DEI
2. Write more inclusive job descriptions, avoiding stigmatizing language
3. Limit employee referrals
4. Diversify your talent pipeline by hosting online and in-person events targeting diverse populations; leveraging your ERGs for help better understanding biases and barriers; and continually collecting and analyzing data, pivoting as necessary
5. Incorporate a diverse interview panel to ensure candidates are chosen solely based on suitability
6. Train interview panelists not to ask questions about disability or age, race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, religion, country of origin, birthplace, address, arrest record, citizenship, credit rating, financial status, height or weight, marital status, family status, or pregnancy
7. Evaluate and update welcome packages to ensure they are accessible and non-discriminatory
8. Prioritize diversity, equity and inclusion throughout the onboarding process, and leverage the adaptive learning model to ensure everyone receives only the training that makes the most sense for them
9. Train managers and HR staff on how to provide equitable access to resources and opportunities to all employees
10. Coach teams on how to be inclusive to new hires

Still Think You Need a 4-Day Work Week?

Then you might want to take the easier route, which isn’t what breeds success. So, let that sink in, talk this over with the C-Suite, and consider making true, meaningful, long-lasting commitments to your employees. The positive impact will last a lot longer than the PR you get for creating a three-day weekend.

Image Credits (in order of appearance)

1. Photo by Helena Lopes on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/RgPQNvoIcdg
2. Photo by charlesdeluvio on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/wt3iFNxMSE0
3. Photo by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/hrhjn6ZTgrM
4. Photo by CDC on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/vt7iAyiwpf0
5. Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/aPa843frIzI
6. Photo by Tyson on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/gorbBYbo6KM
7. Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/vGgn0xLdy8s
8. Photo by Veronika Jorjobert on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/27w3ULIIJfI
9. Photo by Matheus Viana on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/sl5o9vDtDbI
10. Photo by Mikaala Shackelford on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/ZJICAkYEtBA
11. Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/jzonFmreWok
12. Photo by Unsplash+ in collaboration with UK Black Tech on Unsplash: https://unsplash.com/photos/QTq2quKvQHo