In the years since the pandemic upended how we all work, many employers have returned to the office, often opting for a hybrid model that grants their employees some flexibility to work from home. But over the last few months, tech companies like Amazon and a number of big banks, including Citigroup, have taken these mandates a step further, requiring five days in the office again.
In contrast, Spotify introduced a ‘Work from Anywhere’ policy in 2021 and has embraced being a “distributed-first” company, allowing employees to work out of an office or remotely—or a mix of both.
While the decision to adopt this policy was accelerated by the pandemic, it was a long time coming. As Spotify expanded across dozens of countries and offices, it had prompted conversations among executive leadership about the company’s work culture. “As soon as you’re on more than two floors, [or] don’t fit in one office, [or] are in more than one country, you are actually distributed,” says Katarina Berg, the chief human resources officer at Spotify. “We all, together with the rest of the world, had a big trial during the pandemic, and that fast-forwarded a couple of things. But the conversation started five years before the pandemic.”
Berg says her team had a few working theories about how a more flexible policy would benefit the company. They felt like Spotify would be able to attract talent from new places—like Atlanta, where the company does not have an office—and hold onto employees who were looking for more flexibility. Even back in 2019, one thing that came up in their employee engagement surveys was that people valued flexibility. “We have very talented people internally that we look to retain and keep and grow with Spotify,” Berg says. “We’re also looking to compete with other companies for the best new talent. And how are we going to solve for that? [Offering] them flexibility.”
Three years after Spotify made this policy official, the split of people working remotely and those working out of the offices is more or less equal. But the company’s rate of attrition has been cut in half, and the average time it takes to fill an open position has gone from 48 days to 41 days. When it comes to hiring, Spotify has also drawn more diverse candidates.
“We can see that diversity is going up across multiple dimensions in the hiring pipelines, as well as the interview slates once we get further on in the interview process,” says Alexander Westerdahl, who works with Berg on the HR team. The push for returning to the office has often centered on worker productivity—or at least the appearance of it—but Spotify has found that metrics like efficiency, engagement, and wellbeing have either remained steady or increased since the company embraced its Work from Anywhere policy.
While Berg and other Spotify leaders remain bullish about a flexible model, their approach is not without its challenges. Building company culture can be especially hard when your workforce is distributed—and as many companies learned during the pandemic, hybrid collaboration can be tricky. “There’s something that happens when people meet face to face, and you look somebody in the eye,” Berg says. “It’s easier to work on things that are quite difficult and very complex.”
Many workplaces have imposed strict return to office requirements in an attempt to facilitate this kind of collaboration. Spotify has found ways to bring its employees together in an intentional way through events like Core Week; once a year, teams convene at one of the company’s offices to discuss strategy and big-picture planning—and have some fun, Berg says. Spotify hosts several company-wide events as well, like Spotifest, a music festival exclusively for its employees, and Intro Days, which brings employees to the company’s headquarters in Stockholm, Sweden. In an effort to address burnout and mental wellbeing, the company also introduced Wellness Week in 2021, an annual occurrence during which the entire company shuts down to allow employees to recharge.
Still, Berg’s team recognizes that certain groups of workers may benefit from spending more time in the office, at least initially. “There [are] two categories of individuals that struggle a bit more than others in this way of working,” Westerdahl says. “The first one is people that are new to the labor market.” With recent college graduates and other hires who are new to the workforce, Spotify does require that they spend a year working out of an office. “When a year has passed, they can move to another location, or they can work from home, if that’s what they desire,” he adds. Spotify also encourages managers to onboard new hires in person when possible, regardless of their experience in the workforce.
With this model, Spotify has also found that employees sometimes want to come into the office since it’s on their own terms—whether to meet colleagues, or to drop by a listening lounge session. In some cases, when employees who work from home have expressed feeling lonely, Berg’s team has suggested coming into the office for a change of pace. “It might seem very strange that our advice is: Why don’t you try to come into the office?” Berg says. “I think 10 [times] out of 10, they [say], ‘Oh yes, I forgot that I could go into the office and I could see people, and then I get much more energized.’”
As Spotify has acclimated to Work from Anywhere, Berg says it has been invaluable to receive regular feedback from employees about what is and isn’t working. It might have been easier for Spotify to simply return to the old model of in-person work, as so many other companies have since the pandemic receded. But Berg says this approach to work is consistent with Spotify’s culture and desire to foster trust among its employees. “The question we got most from external people when we launched was: So what [will] happen with productivity and efficiency?” she says. “And that was never an issue for us. Because again, if you dare to be a trust-based company, it’s not about that.”