Former Pinterest employees say that despite the company's upbeat product, it was a toxic and difficult place to work

Julie Bort and Taylor Nicole Rogers spoke to 11 former Pinterest employees who said that despite the company's upbeat product, it was a toxic and difficult place to work. From their story:

Multiple Black people who had worked on Pinterest's ad sales team say they were fired or "pushed out" of the company with no real explanation.

Other employees say they were publicly yelled at by managers or dealt with such severe "head games" from managers that they grew stressed and were later hospitalized.

Some employees described CEO Ben Silbermann as a kind person focused on the product and who either didn't know or didn't care how workers were treated.

You can read the story in full here:

Former Pinterest employees describe a traumatic workplace where managers humiliate employees until they cry, Black people feel alienated, and the toxic culture 'eats away at your soul'

For their story on CrossFit, Katie Warren and Gabby Landsverk spoke to more than 30 former HQ employees, and current and former affiliate gym owners and CrossFit athletes. From their story:

Insiders claim the culture of the workplace demeaned women, operated off retribution, and was ruled by a fear of getting on Glassman's bad side.

You can read that story in full here:

A 'frat party' workplace, a tweet that led to the CEO's resignation, and a culture that demeans women: Insiders say this is the reality of working for the cult-following gym CrossFit

Those two stories follow earlier reporting on a toxic culture at companies like Bon Apptit and Reformation . Meanwhile, employees at companies ranging from Adidas to Red Bull are expressing concern about their employer's response to the Black Lives Matter movement, protesting systemic racism, and demanding change. For example:

As Weng Cheong and Caroline Hroncich report, US companies spend $8 billion annually on diversity and inclusion initiatives, yet research shows that they're actually more segregated now than they were 40 years ago. From their story:

Experts told Business Insider that a major reason D&I efforts are ineffective is that companies continue to invest in one-off trainings, instead of complementing them with company-wide diversity initiatives.

To dismantle systemic racism in the office, employers need to promote people of color internally, listen to stories about discrimination, and collect workforce data, among many other things.

Read their story in full here:

'Diversity' and 'inclusion' are the emptiest words in corporate America. Here's what we really need to dismantle systemic racism in the office.

FILE PHOTO: Satya Nadella, Chief Executive Officer of Microsoft, gestures as he attends a session at the 50th World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland, January 23, 2020. REUTERS/Denis Balibouse/File Photo Reuters

100 days that changed Microsoft

"On March 6, Microsoft employees began inexplicably returning to the company's Redmond, Washington headquarters, just 48 hours after the company enacted a remote work policy in response to the coronavirus."

So starts a story from Ashley Stewart, Jeff Elder, and Patrick Coffee on how CEO Satya Nadella led $1.4 trillion tech giant Microsoft through the coronavirus pandemic. From their story:

"Why are they coming back?" Microsoft chief information security officer Brett Arsenault wondered with concern at the time, as related to Business Insider in a recent interview. "What's going on?"

The employees had left their work computers at their desks as usual after all, they didn't know when they left that it was the last time they would be at the office for many months. But Microsoft couldn't condone letting them back into their offices, which to this day are deemed unsafe.

The company needed to act fast.

You can read the story in full here:

100 days that changed Microsoft: How Satya Nadella led the $1.4 trillion tech giant through the coronavirus pandemic

Chipotle; Netflix; Snap, Inc.; Zoom; Olivia Reaney/Business Insider

Most innovative CMOs

From Tanya Dua:

Global advertising and marketing spend was poised to swell further to $612.6 billion this year until the coronavirus pandemic came along and upended the advertising business, bringing the forecast down to $563 billion.

The radical transformation of the advertising industry has only been accelerated by the novel coronavirus. Marketers have been forced not only to steer their organizations through challenges like fragmented consumer attention and data-driven marketing but also to slash their spending, tweak their campaigns , and shift their dollars to adjust to a population in crisis.

Here's Business Insider's fifth annual ranking of the CMOs who most stand out in overcoming these challenges:

The 25 most innovative CMOs in the world in 2020 right here

Below are headlines on some of the stories you might have missed from the past week.

Matt

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