Good morning, Broadsheet readers! EY’s U.S. leader is at the center of a ‘civil war,’ the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation invests in three female cofounders, and United Airlines CCO filters her job through the lens of frontline workers. Have a terrific Monday.
-‘It takes a village’ As United Airlines’ chief customer officer, Linda Jojo is focused on serving the airline’s passengers. But to do that well, she focuses much of her work on another stakeholder: the frontline United employee.
Jojo joined United as chief information officer in 2014 and stepped into the CCO role last July. Earlier in her career, she held multiple CIO roles in the machinery, telecommunications, and utility industries. The CCO position was new to her—and it’s a role at the center of the airline industry’s overhaul since the onset of the pandemic.
“We’re coming out of COVID a very different airline than when we went into COVID,” Jojo says.
An early experience that demonstrated to Jojo the importance of building for the frontline employee was the rollout of United’s Travel-Ready Center, a platform for passengers to upload their COVID documents. While executives expected the tool to ease congestion at the airport, the check-in desks remained as crowded as ever because employees on site were rechecking travel documents, unsure they could trust that the app had verified them. “It was the a-ha moment that said, ‘It’s great to have that tool. But if we don’t make sure our employees know it’s going to work, we’re going to regenerate some of that work,’” she says. The platform was used by 55 million passengers in 2022.
Jojo has applied that insight to additional products, including United’s “connection saver” feature that relies on real-time data to decide whether to hold a flight for connecting passengers and a new “family seating” option that displays additional seating options for families that are booking with young children.
“It takes a village to make sure the process works,” she says. “The more we can enable our frontline to make great decisions in the moment, the better we’re going to be. You can’t edict a whole bunch of stuff from headquarters and think it’s going to roll all the way through.”
Her goal moving forward is to provide transparency to the customer; when things go wrong, to at least show them why and what the solutions are. “Just like customers want transparency, you have to give that transparency to employees that are serving the customers,” she says.
Emma Hinchliffe
emma.hinchliffe@fortune.com
@_emmahinchliffe
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ALSO IN THE HEADLINES
- Inside EY’s ‘civil war.’ Julie Boland was supposed to usher in a peaceful era last year when she became head of EY U.S. But instead of moving the accounting firm beyond its past infighting, she’s at the center of an especially acrimonious period that resulted in EY scuttling its plans to spin off its consulting business last week. Financial Times
- The loudest voice. Vice President Kamala Harris has become the Biden administration's spokesperson on the battle over the abortion pill mifepristone. "When you attack the rights of women in America, you are attacking America," Harris told pro-choice protestors in L.A. this weekend. The Supreme Court temporarily lifted a lower court's restrictions on the pill on Friday. NPR
- Smart money. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has made an unusual investment of $5 million in Smart Immune, a French cell therapy company headed by three female cofounders. The foundation typically focuses on fighting infectious diseases but hopes Smart Immune’s technology will help HIV patients totally rebuild their immune systems. Financial Times
IN CASE YOU MISSED IT
- In the running. Six female directors are in contention to win the Cannes Film Festival’s top prize, the Palme d’Or, this year, a record for the event five years after it signed a gender parity pledge. Hollywood Reporter
- Wage gap. Japanese women have doubled their income in the last 20 years, but they still earn only a quarter of what their male peers make. Japan’s government has championed women as a solution to the nation’s dwindling labor force, but nearly three-fourths of women are employed in part-time or temporary jobs; 63% of men have full-time work. Bloomberg
- Fuzzy math. The $11 million fundraising haul touted by Nikki Haley's presidential campaign isn't adding up. The campaign said it had collected $11 million between the mid-February launch of her White House bid and March 31, but Federal Election Commission filings show she actually raised $8.3 million; the discrepancy appears to be a case of double counting. Politico
ON MY RADAR
Why Molly Ringwald translated an infamous story of film exploitation Washington Post
Why more female executives don’t play golf—and why that’s a problem WSJ
Blackpink, once a novelty, returns to Coachella as a headliner Bloomberg
Her heart stopped in the Boston Marathon. Now she’s returning to help save others. Washington Post
PARTING WORDS
“Maybe that’s what I’m doing: I’m saying things that you’re not supposed to say. [But] to be honest, sometimes I think it’s just because I’m tired.”
—Actor Jennifer Coolidge on her authentic, sometimes messy appeal
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