Facebook — specifically Brynn Harrington, vice-president of its human resources team — publicly recommitted in an interview with the BBC on Sunday to support work-from-home policies (with some caveats).
Facebook first announced that “long-term remote work” was an option for staff in a post from Mark Zuckerberg’s profile in May 2020, in which he said he expects about 50% of the workforce to be entirely remote within the next decade.
Arguably it was Twitter’s Jack Dorsey who took the extended (beyond Covid-19) work-from-home conversation into overdrive last year, when he said — in an e-mail to staff and on a blog — that if “employees are in a role and situation that enables them to work from home and they want to continue to do so forever, we will make that happen”.
Other companies that then promised to embrace remote work as the norm for knowledge workers include Microsoft, IBM, Fujitsu, Square (of which Dorsey is also CEO), and loads more. Now, on about the year mark, some are reiterating their 2020 promises and others walking them back considerably. Clearly, the remote work revolution isn’t “job done” just yet.
In February 2021, Spotify decided to formalise this as a kind of worker status that it is calling “My Work Mode”. An employee’s work mode is set between them and their manager, negotiating not just how often (if ever) they come in to the office, but also which city or country they base themselves in. It sounds like a mix-’n-match model, meaning you can choose to work “in office” even if you choose to live where that isn’t feasible: “if someone chooses a location that is not near a Spotify office, we will support them with a co-working space membership if they want to work from an office,” reads the HR blog.
There are some limits, of course, “to address time zone difficulties, and regional entity laws”. Spotify acknowledges it is an experiment that may require adjusting, but the tone of the piece is interesting because it isn’t just positioning this as an employee benefit (“look how great we are to you”) but something the company benefits from too, a “jewel in our talent attraction crown” and “enabl[ing] diversity and inclusion”.
What if I paid the person in India the same as I pay someone in the US? … Like, why do I care where you live? I just care about how productive you are
— Phil Libin, founder of Evernote
Phil Libin, who founded Evernote and now runs start-up studio All Turtles, is another work-from-home believer. He has done a one-eighty on the idea, from being an outspoken critic to now leading a company with an entirely “distributed” workforce. As he recently told CNBC, not only is he excited about the two hours commute time this model reclaims, but also — as with Spotify — the promise of a whole globe of talent to recruit from.
Libin doubled down on this last week in conversation with Rory Cellan-Jones of BBC Tech Tent, saying: “a hundred percent of our job listings now say global”, and “What if I paid the person in India the same as I pay someone in the US? ... Like, why do I care where you live? I just care about how productive you are.” If you’re looking for real game-changers, that would be a big one.
Libin recently left San Francisco for Arkansas himself, and shuttered the three All Turtles offices with no plans to reopen. It’s not slowing them down as they’ve managed to launch a video tool (now a new stand-alone company), Mmhmm, and raise $30m in funding.
Let’s unpack some implications: if you can work anywhere and still earn the same wage why would you fork out for Silicon Valley (or Sandton) rents? That is a question that should be keeping real estate people up at night. More broadly we’ve seen the influence the tech titans have on the culture of workplaces before.
Yes, Google was and is a search giant, but in the early noughties it was its office spaces that seemed to capture the imagination. This was part of its reputation for taking a maverick approach to business, and is why beanbag chairs and double-storey slides became virtually synonymous with Google HQ. Google set the standard and many tech start-ups — and later media agencies and others — followed with subsidised meals, pool tables, fun décor and walking meetings.
It wasn’t just about public relations or staff retention for them. On a fundamental level Google (and others) saw this kind of workplace culture break down silos between teams and tiers, promote collaboration and, frankly, keep people at the office longer. The latter is particularly effective if you employ legions of young single tech bros who love to get their laundry done at work while pumping out code. Conversely, a culture based on “face time” made life harder for women, who still shoulder most of child care and family responsibilities worldwide. In a work-from-home world, productivity takes centre stage again.
If Spotify and Libin are captains of the work-from-home team, the opposition is chaired by people such as Goldman Sachs CEO David Solomon, who called work-from-home an “aberration” to its “collaborative apprenticeship culture” — or as 13 first-year analysts called it in their scene-stealing presentation last month, “inhumane/abuse”. I wonder if beanbags would soften the blow for them?
• Thompson Davy, a freelance journalist, is an impactAFRICA fellow and WanaData member.
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