Microsoft introduced its first industry-specific cloud this week — Microsoft Cloud for Healthcare — and the company's recent hires suggest that the financial services and energy industries could be next.

Tailoring products to fit specific use cases is becoming more common for cloud companies. Google announced industry-specific cloud initiatives earlier this year, including for healthcare, financial services, media and entertainment, and manufacturing. IBM also has a specific cloud for financial services, and touts Bank of America as a client. Amazon Web Services offers industry-specific products too.

In Microsoft's case, its new healthcare cloud includes versions of existing products — such as Dynamics 365 Marketing, Dynamics 365 Customer Service, and Azure IoT — with tweaks designed specifically for the healthcare industry. The face of this healthcare cloud is Greg Moore, now corporate vice president of Microsoft Health, who Microsoft hired away from Google Cloud, where he held a similar post, in 2019. The company also bulked up its healthcare expertise in September by nominating Emma Walmsley – CEO of drugmaker GlaxoSmithKline and the most powerful woman in Big Pharma – to its board. 

Reading the tea leaves around other recent hires indicates which industries Microsoft may tackle next. In the fall, Microsoft brought on experts from both the financial services and oil and gas industries.

In September, the company hired Google Cloud's former vice president of oil, gas, and energy, Darryl Willis, to oversee Microsoft's strategy for energy company customers as its VP of the energy industry. Willis previously spent nearly two decades at BP, most recently as president and general manager.

Also in September, Microsoft hired Bill Borden, a former managing director at Bank of American Merrill Lynch, as the company's new corporate vice president of financial services. Borden leads Microsoft's global financial services strategy, which includes customers in banking, capital markets, and insurance. 

Generally, Microsoft's new healthcare cloud — and other potential industry-specific offerings — is indicative of one of the biggest changes Nadella has been driving within Microsoft: He's shifting the company from a "horizontal" mindset where it produces products for general purposes, to a vertical-focused vision. That's exhibited by how the company is now finding ways to tune products for specific problems and situations in industries such as retail, manufacturing, automotive, and healthcare.

Peter Lee, the head of Microsoft Research who started Microsoft's health care business at Nadella's direction, told Business Insider earlier this year that the biggest difference between Nadella and his predecessor Steve Ballmer is the way he thinks about Microsoft as a company.

"He's thought really differently about Microsoft's business," Lee, VP of Microsoft Healthcare, said of Nadella. "He's caused Microsoft to address vertical markets with more depth and expertise, pushed all of us to really focus on the future of the cloud, and [made] dozens of those profound changes that have put Microsoft in a position of being part of defining the future of digital."

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A roughly $60 million block of stock in the struggling home-sharing giant Airbnb traded hands in recent weeks, according to two sources in the secondary market for private securities who were briefed on the trade.

The deal was handled by Zanbato, according to one of the sources, a trading platform backed by the venture capitalist Joe Lonsdale. Zanbato and a spokesman for Airbnb both declined to comment.

The deal would be typical for a multi-billion dollar company such as Airbnb on a yearslong path to a public offering. The proliferation of unicorns and lengthening runup periods to an IPO have driven dramatic growth in recent years in the trade of private securities.

That activity, however, was doused by the pandemic, which has caused share prices in an already-opaque market to tumble to uncertain depths, scaring off buyers and stymieing trades.

And Airbnb's business has been particularly hard hit by the pandemic, with revenue plunging by more than half as shelter in place orders have brought travel to a standstill. Earlier this month, the company announced plans to lay off 25% of its staff and the high-profile IPO that Airibnb was planning for this year is now on hold.

The $60 million Airbnb deal, which sources say was done between institutional investors, such as hedge funds, venture capital firms, or wealth management offices, signals a potential reboot of activity for the company's shares - as well as a wider thaw in the private securities market.

"When the coronavirus hit the US in mid-February, we saw the number of buyers drop materially to the point where we had three sellers for every buyer on the platform," said Jose Cobos, the chief revenue officer for Forge Global, a private securities trading firm that reports it has handled the sale of about $2.5 billion of shares in over 100 private companies since its founding in 2014. "But it's been amazing since April, which was one of our best ever months. The number of buyers compared to sellers shifted to two to one."

Read More: Which is safer: Airbnb or hotels? Here's what doctors say

Last month, Airbnb raised $2 billion in two rounds of funding from a group of prominent private investment firms to strengthen its financial position amid the virus crisis.

The first funding round, a $1 billion loan from Silver Lake Partners and Sixth Street Partners, came with warrants allowing the firms to purchase up to a 1% ownership interest in Airbnb at a valuation of $18 billion. That was more than 40% less than the $31 billion price put on the firm in its most recent previous fundraising round in 2017 and a fraction of the over-$50 billion valuation some bankers had envisioned for the company's IPO.

Experts in the trade of private securities said the debt deal provided a key benchmark for value, however, allowing buyers and sellers to price shares and restart trading in Airbnb's shares.

"There's the old saying that you never want to catch a falling knife, but that's not what's happening with Airbnb," said Cris Palacios, the president of Iron Edge Venture Capital, an investor in private securities. "We're not sure where the dust settles, but the smart money believes that right now is one of the best buying opportunities in the venture capital market in a long time."

Read More: A memo from Airbnb's CEO announcing huge staff cuts is a case study in how leaders can conduct layoffs in a compassionate way

Airbnb stock on the secondary market has plunged in the wake of the virus crisis.

Private securities in a company are generally not homogenous and can come with different covenants depending on the fundraising round in which they were issued, creating varying values between shares. In general, the company's shares have careened from about $140 per share to $85, according to Jared Carmel, the founder and managing partner of Manhattan Venture Partners, a trading platform and investor in private securities, including Airbnb.

Another source in the secondary market estimated some shares have dipped even further, into the $70s. The sharp declines reflect how Airbnb's business, along with much of the rest of the hospitality industry, has been battered by the freeze on travel and tourism.

Trades of securities in private companies like Airbnb can require the company's signoff, although many investors get around the barrier by holding the shares in limited liability companies and trading the ownership of those LLCs.

While it's easy to see how buyers could be motivated to transact to seize on discounts, Carmel said the economic dislocation has also prompted selling, including among startup employees with equity whose jobs were recently cut.

"Since March 11, there have been over 450 startups that laid off nearly 60,000 employees," Carmel said. "The secondary market has never been as crucial as it is today in the venture capital ecosystem. This asset class is integral in helping the next wave of startup entrepreneurs self-fund their dreams by providing the liquidity they need."

The private securities market has been growing for years as companies pass through longer maturation periods before going public, creating larger windows for shareholders and investors to trade in and out of companies.

Nasdaq's private securities trading platform, the largest in the industry, saw trading activity balloon to $12 billion in 2018 in the run-up to Uber's IPO, and $4.8 billion in 2019, more than double the amount of dollar volume done in total on its platform in the preceding four years. In the first quarter, its platform handled $1.4 billion of activity, a record start.

"The fourth quarter of 2019 and the first quarter of 2020 were incredibly busy," said Eric Folkemer, the head of Nasdaq Private Market, the exchange's private securities arm. "But that activity all preceded the crisis."

The exchange solely handles private securities transactions that are company-sponsored, a focus that allows it to handle far larger volumes of private shares than any of its peers, but also tethers its business to the willingness of companies to sanction trades. During covid, few, if any have sought to create trading windows to allow equity holders to liquidate stock.

"Companies have said they need to focus on their business, as they should, and liquidity was put on the backburner and the market dried up," Folkemer said.

That side of the market has begun to rebound too in recent weeks.

"We are seeing the market turn a corner with deal offerings growth of 20% for transactions that are expected to close in June 2020 versus June 2019," Folkemer said. "The market appears to be opening back up."

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This week, Facebook chief Mark Zuckerberg announced that half of the company's employees could be working remotely by the end of the decade, while Twitter has said its workforce can work from home permanently.

But Google and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai isn't willing to make the same commitment — at least not yet.

In an interview with Wired, Pichai suggested Google is still working out what its remote work policies may look like once the pandemic is over, but that he believes there to still be good reason to get people together in the same space.

"I don't think we are going to come out of this and be back where we were before this all started. So I expect us to adapt but it's still too early to tell how much," he said when asked if Google might follow Facebook's lead.

"Early on, I'm excited that some of this is working well. But it is based on a foundation of all of us knowing each other and having the regular interactions we already had. I'm curious to see what happens as we get into that three-to-six-month window and we get into things where we are doing something for the first time," Pichai said. "How productive will we be when different teams who don't normally work together have to come together for brainstorming, the creative process? We are going to have research, surveys, learn from data, learn what works."

Google recently told employees that most should expect to work from home for the rest of the year, with a select few returning possibly as soon as June.

Over at Facebook, Zuckerberg said the company would ramp up its remote-hiring and allow a large number of its employees work permanently at home. If other companies such as Google follow its lead and move to a more remote-heavy workforce, there could be significant ramifications for the San Francisco Bay Area.

Pichai was also asked if the pandemic and changing thoughts around remote work would impact its plans for major office developments in both the Bay Area and New York.

"In all scenarios I expect us to need physical spaces to get people together, absolutely," he said. "We have a lot of growth planned ahead. So even if there is some course correction I don't think our existing footprint is going to be the issue. I am positive we will put it to good use and I'm anxious to see some of those projects get done."

However, these expansions could be slowed by the pandemic. During Google's latest earnings call, CFO Ruth Porat said the company's capital expenditures for 2020 would see "a modest decrease" as the company paused or slowed various expansion projects.

Hiring is another area that Google is pulling back on right now. In the Wired interview, Pichai reiterated that the company is still hiring, but less aggressively in certain areas.

"We are moderating our hiring plans but we are still bringing in people," he said. "That doesn't mean we aren't looking for efficiencies. We are looking at areas where we can course correct, where we can be more efficient, where we can streamline."

The pandemic has left hundreds of thousands of tech workers in the San Francisco Bay Area unable to leave their overpriced homes — and some are now reconsidering their commitment to the region.

Nick Donahue keenly wants to encourage this.

He's the CEO of Atmos, a young housebuilding startup backed by former Y Combinator President Sam Altman that is trying to capitalize on the coronavirus crisis and get folks in Silicon Valley and other big cities to consider moving elsewhere in the US, where they can build their own home and enjoy a lower cost of living while working remotely.

"A lot of people are already thinking, 'Why am I here? I live in a shoebox for $3,000,'" Donahue said in an interview with Business Insider. "People start to see the massive difference and start getting jaded ... people are realizing most of our meetings don't need to be in person."

The tech industry has long had a fraught relationship with the Bay Area. Over the past few decades, the picturesque region has grown ever more crowded by tech workers, contributing to soaring costs of living, the worst housing crisis in the nation, heavy traffic, and myriad other issues.

There have been predictions and calls for the industry to geographically decentralize for years — but the pandemic has the potential to make that a reality. Tech workers blocked from visiting their luxurious offices or enjoying the region's bars, parks, and other amenities are talking about finally ditching the area. High-profile companies like Twitter, Square, and Coinbase have announced shifts to permanent remote-first workplaces. And perhaps most consequentially, Facebook on Thursday announced it was ramping up remote hiring aggressively and expected that by 2030 or sooner half of all its employees (about 50,000-strong) would be remote.

Atmos is trying to simplify the housebuilding process, providing an all-in-one service to make it easier for people to build homes to their exact specifications in emerging cities where demand often outstrips the supply. It's early days for the business — it's been going for a little more than six months and breaking ground on its first four homes.

Financial backers include Dropbox executive Adam Nash and Altman, a high-profile Bay Area investor who is now the CEO of OpenAI. Altman and Donahue met at a laser-tag event on Angel Island in the middle of the San Francisco Bay.

Its focus thus far has been in North Carolina, where the four-person cofounder team is from — in particular Raleigh, Durham, and Charlotte.

On Monday, Atmos launched a calculator to show workers in the Bay Area, New York, and other metropolitan hubs what their rents could get them elsewhere in the country if they built there and to encourage them to take the plunge.

A techie paying $2,400 a month on a 390-square-foot one-bed apartment in San Francisco could buy a 2,500-square-foot three-bedroom house in Baltimore, Maryland, for example. A New Yorker paying $1,800 for a one-bedroom apartment could splash out on a three-bedroom place with more than twice the square footage in Kansas City, Missouri.

Since the tool's launch, it's been visited 40,000 times, Donahue said. One in 10 of those visitors were from the Bay Area, and of those, their top picks were Raleigh, North Carolina (42%); Austin, Texas (15%); Seattle (8%); Boulder, Colorado (8%); Chicago (4.5%); and Portland, Oregon (4%).

(Note: Raleigh seems to be No. 1 at least in part because it's the default selection in the calculator tool.)

Part of the appeal of relocating to somewhere like Raleigh, of course, is the understanding that workers could transfer their California tech-industry salaries to live large in a region with a much lower cost of living. But there's one potential wrinkle in this idea: Employers could decide to adjust salaries to reflect where remote workers are living. Facebook has said it will start doing this in 2021; it's not yet clear if others will follow.

Donahue is expecting a second wave of the coronavirus in the fall after lockdown restrictions are relaxed and predicts it may spur further companies to allowing remote work. "With the second wave — we've already gotten these initial companies like Twitter say you can stay remote indefinitely — I think you'll see more and more companies doing that, especially startups."

It's a trend that has the potential to radically reshape the Bay Area and the broader American economy — reducing pressure on workers to relocate to California to work in the technology industry and relaxing the strain on the region's economy and housing market.

There is already notable appetite among residents to move: A recent poll by the anonymous work social network Blind of thousands of tech workers in the San Francisco Bay Area found that two-thirds would consider moving away if given the option to permanently work remotely.

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IBM is laying off employees, joining other tech giants that have cut jobs amid the COVID-19 crisis.

IBM is eliminating "several thousand" jobs, mainly in the company's technology-services division, a source familiar with the company's plans told Business Insider.

Ed Barbini, IBM's vice president for corporate communications, confirmed the job cuts, which were first reported by Bloomberg.

"Our workforce decisions are made in the long-term interests of our business," he told Business Insider in a statement. "Recognizing the unique current conditions, IBM is offering subsidized medical coverage to all affected U.S. employees through June 2021."

The company is also offering affected employees three months' pay and health coverage for a year, the source said.

IBM's global technology-services division, which offers support to clients that run their networks on on-premise data centers or the cloud, is the company's biggest business segment. The company had said in recent earnings reports that it planned to make changes to improve that business section's financials.

CEO Arvind Krishna announced last month, when he took over, that IBM was withdrawing its outlook amid the economic uncertainty caused by the pandemic.

"These are unprecedented times, and this quarter is not the time to declare that we have clarity," Krishna told analysts during the company's first-quarter earnings call.

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BLODGET & PLOTZ

Facebook's remote-working plan is doomed

Silicon Valley, which adopts fads like it's a tween, has found a new one. The day before pandemic, the Valley was salivating over the Apple campus, goggle-eyed at Airbnb's conference rooms, passionately arguing whether the kombucha was better on the marketing floor or the engineering floor.

But now? Now let's all work from home, forever!

Twitter and Square recently announced that everyone could keep working from home when the pandemic ends. Facebook, right in character, has decided to move fast and break leases.

Mark Zuckerberg announced on Thursday that he expected up to half of Facebook's employees to work remotely in the next five to 10 years.

"We're going to be the most forward-leaning company on remote work at our scale," Zuckerberg jargoned.

The pivot to home offices is easy to explain. Pandemic uncertainty will make crowded workspaces feel unsafe for a while, and scare workers off public transportation. Companies can slash their real-estate costs with a remote workforce, and maybe even salaries. Zuckerberg advised that Facebook would cut wages for employees who live in places that are cheaper than the Bay Area.

I'm writing this from my bed, but I'm skeptical that remote work will remain so enthralling for big companies once COVID-19 recedes.

Yes, a surprising number of white-collar workers are finding lockdown life enjoyable — no commuting, no travel, no dressing up.

And it's tempting to think that if a little bit of working from home is good, a lot of working from home will be great. The history of human civilization, however, suggests this would be a mistaken conclusion.

Working from home is fine now because everyone is doing it. We've all been forced into it. You're not missing any important meetings or gossip around the water cooler or happy hours — because everyone is missing them.

Humans have a glorious capacity to adapt, especially when they feel what they're going through is fair, and this feels fair, because everyone is suffering the same way.

But once the possibility of office life returns, the career fortunes and experiences of people who repopulate the Silicon Valley headquarters and people who stay home are going to rapidly diverge.

Ask anyone who's ever worked at a partially remote company (say, me): The insiders and the outsiders have vastly different experiences.

Insiders build the small, socially lubricating connections that humans thrive on. They create stronger networks. They develop better reputations, more friendships. They know more about what's happening at the company. And that makes them more valuable employees.

Companies are deluding themselves if they think they can crush the human desire for that kind of knowledge, jockeying, and connecting. Office workers will become the elite overclass. Remote workers will be outsiders, sometimes confused, excluded from the in-jokes and cliques that develop in any real-world group.

Silicon Valley fantasizes that technology can fix this. Facebook, above all, is built on the notion that electronic relationships are the equal of in-person ones. But 15,000 years of human civilization says technology doesn't fix it. Slack, texting, Zoom happy hours — they're better than nothing. But anyone who's ever been remote at a meeting where everyone else is in person knows how much physical presence matters.

A prediction: Facebook and other tech companies will extend remote work, and for a certain class of employee it will be a godsend. Folks who generally work alone, who are temperamentally introverted, and who aren't ambitious will love it, and will thrive.

But everyone who wants to manage, to run things, to influence, to jockey, to make friends, to build a network — they will clamor to work in the office. Almost every single ambitious person in a company will be demanding a desk at HQ. Within a very short time, Silicon Valley will largely revert back to status quo, with centralized, crowded hub campuses where all the action happens, and smattering of happy introverts working remotely elsewhere. —DP

Come on, Plotz, some people will be stoked to work remotely forever!

My partner, Mr. Plotz, makes some excellent points in his argument above that the new remote-work-for-everyone-forever trend is just a fad.

Cities are amazing places, and, once it's safe to ride subways and buses again, most people will want to continue living in them.

Office life can be fantastic, especially at fun, tech-ish companies that offer food and fabulously smart and charismatic colleagues. Climbing the management career ladder will indeed still be easier to do in person: Relationships still matter, and in-person relationships are stronger than Zoom ones.

So, yes, once we finally vanquish the coronavirus, enthusiasm for cities, offices, events, business travel, and in-person work will rise again.

But!

A significant percentage of people, especially "individual producers" — writers, engineers, designers, and others who really do not need to interact with others to do amazing work — will take advantage of our collective epiphany to leave "the office" forever.

There are so many amazing places to live in this world. So many places that are cheaper, more beautiful, healthier, easier, and more fun than the "big cities." So many places where it's better and easier to raise kids; have dogs, cats, and farm animals; exercise and be outdoors.

For many of us, the benefit of being able to live in these places — while still enjoying the vibrancy, stability, compensation (even at lower levels), benefits, support systems, colleagues, and opportunities of working for larger companies and organizations — will make the trade-off worthwhile.

Well done, Facebook, Twitter, and others, for welcoming this new age! You'll now be able to hire and employ talented people all over the country and world who would have been miserable living amid the Silicon Valley and New York City rat race.

And well done, remote workers and tech providers, for showing hidebound managers that we all can now be amazingly productive from anywhere! You've helped create a better world! —HB

Brazil's coronavirus disaster confirms that the tough-guy approach doesn't work

Thanks to the various approaches to the coronavirus tried by different countries, humanity is getting real-time evidence about what works and what doesn't.

What doesn't work, it seems, is ignoring or playing down the virus and acting as though there's nothing that can be done about it.

This approach, flirted with by President Trump in the US, has been taken to its extreme by President Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil, as Insider's Sarah Al-Arshani reports. And Brazilians are paying the price.

The unfolding disaster in Brazil may soon give the US some competition for the worst outbreak in the world.

Confirmed deaths are nearing 20,000 and accelerating.

Confirmed cases are also soaring.

Even on a per-capita basis, Brazil's accelerating epidemic will soon make it a card-carrying member of the coronavirus Hall of Shame. And unlike most of these countries — Spain, Italy, France, the UK — Brazil is getting worse, not better.

Countries that nipped the coronavirus in the bud — South Korea, Taiwan, Australia, Denmark, Austria, Germany, among others — show that it can be done.

Countries that were initially blindsided, meanwhile — Italy, Spain, France — show that, with a coordinated, comprehensive, and overwhelming response, the virus can be brought under control.

Countries that denied the threat of the virus and then rinsed their hands of national responsibility, meanwhile — the US, Brazil — are still struggling. —HB

 

NEWS

As firms in virtually every industry get accustomed to working from home, remote hiring presents a unique challenge for recruiters and job-seekers, alike.

Payments giant PayPal has continued to search for talent and hire remotely. It currently has over 900 job postings on its website. While many of the listings are for software engineers, the payments giant is also hiring for roles in compliance, data science, and risk management.

"We're focused on hiring in multiple areas," Tracy Brown, global head of talent at PayPal, told Business Insider. "What I would highlight is the need for software engineers and risk analysts as key components of our evolving platform."

And while many of these roles are highly technical, Brown says that PayPal is still looking for candidates with soft skills like collaboration, innovation, and problem solving.

"As we move forward and continue to build out and add to our teams, in addition to those two core skill sets, we'll increasingly see the value of soft skills as well," Brown said.

PayPal saw a record number of transactions on its payments network and its peer-to-peer app Venmo on May 1st. Its stock price surged to an all-time high following the news, and has since continued to climb.

Read more: PayPal is hiring for hundreds of jobs amid the coronavirus slowdown. A hiring executive there lays out the exact skills you need to nail an interview.

PayPal is still hiring, albeit remotely

At PayPal, the recruiting process always started remotely, typically through phone interviews early in the process.

The challenge now is that PayPal can't invite candidates on-campus for in-person interviews, a key part of its recruiting process.

"In this new environment now, not being able to provide these in-person experiences has been a little bit of a lost opportunity for us and for many of our candidates throughout the process," said Brown.

The in-person phase of the interview process is also an opportunity for PayPal to sell itself to prospective hires. Without visiting the campus, it can be hard for candidates to get a sense of the company's culture and what it would be like to come in to work every day.

So until offices reopen, PayPal has focused on increasing communication with its job candidates. For candidates who may ultimately move to work at a PayPal office, recruiters have been able to connect them with employees that have had similar experiences.

"What we've tried to do is double down and make up for that with much more frequent and consistent communication with our candidates," said Brown.

PayPal's interns will join the firm virtually this summer

Some firms have canceled their internship programs given the circumstances, but for many, internships are a key pipeline for full-time hiring. So in mid-March, PayPal decided to shift its internship program fully virtual instead of forgoing it, Brown said.

"The need to have a pipeline and invest in that junior talent sector is also important for us," said Brown.

And while working remotely may come easy to many of PayPal's full-time employees, it poses unique challenges to the company's 350 interns, who typically spend their summers learning and networking with each other and their teams.

"There will definitely be some challenges that accompany this for interns," said Brown. "One of the key components that our interns take away from the experience is being able to interact and build a network with other interns."

In lieu of the usual in-person networking events, PayPal plans to host a series of virtual 'social hours' with ice breakers and trivia. Every intern will be assigned a buddy and mentor to help guide them through the program, in addition to cohorts within the intern class.

And PayPal's annual intern expo where interns present the projects they've worked on, will still happen, albeit virtually.

Read more: The ultimate guide to Wall Street's summer internships: Here's how they'll go virtual, and how to impress remotely

Some new norms are here to stay

While shelter-in-place orders won't last forever, there are some new norms to come out of today's work from home environment that are likely to stick around, Brown said.

From more frequent updates from senior leaders to daily check-ins with teams, there are some new norms that may be here to stay, Brown said.

"The access to leadership here at PayPal has really been phenomenal," said Brown. "I think it's going to change the way that we communicate and what our communication protocols will be post the crisis."

PayPal's CEO Dan Schulman has increased the frequency of global all-hands meetings and check-ins with his senior leadership team. And other leaders at PayPal have started hosting group check-ins to ensure employees feel connected and supported.

"There have been a number of new routines that have been introduced that I think employees really have appreciated given the physical distance," said Brown. "They feel much more connected."

And as PayPal looks toward a post-COVID world where offices reopen, Brown is expecting that the company's approach to remote work will change.

"We'll continue to evaluate the best path forward, but we're going to certainly take these learnings from this experience and no doubt we'll adjust some of our policies going forward around working from home," Brown said.

Read more: Facebook is eyeing offices in cities like Dallas, Atlanta, and Denver to act as 'hubs' to support 50% of its workers staying remote — and it's a move that could upend Silicon Valley and NYC real estate

Working remotely is different, but manageable 

PayPal, like most firms, has been working remotely amid shelter-in-place orders. But before the coronavirus pandemic, PayPal already had employees with flexible work arrangements, as not all its employees were going into its 50 global offices.

"Although now we are physically separated, and that presents a challenge, it was pretty easy for us to make that transition to have a completely virtual workforce [now] ," said Brown.

In addition to making sure employees had the tech and infrastructure needed to work remotely, PayPal started conducting a weekly wellness survey as a way to check in with its 23,200 employees.

"That was really done to make sure that we had a quick, easy way to get a pulse on how people were doing and managing in the midst of the current circumstances," said Brown. 

And the survey helped PayPal pinpoint what its employees were looking for in terms of assistance and support during the pandemic.

"The survey helped us understand very quickly that employees what they desire most was mental health and emotional wellness support," said Brown.

PayPal has also focused on continuing to offer professional development resources while working remotely. In March and April, PayPal saw a 43% increase in employee usage of LinkedIn Learning.

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