Daniel Barber is the CEO of DataGrail. Expert on privacy and security, featured in CNBC, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, Fast Company and Fortune.
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Snap CEO Evan Spiegel recently called employees back to the office. A leaked memo unveiled Snap’s “default together” policy. In it, Spiegel urged employees to sacrifice “individual convenience” for the sake of “collective success.”
Elon Musk is famously known for his views on remote work, asserting that away from campus, employees just “phone it in” and don’t put in the hard work necessary to help companies achieve their potential.
Evan and Elon are not alone. JPMorgan Chase, Apple, Google and many others announced plans to bring their workers back to base. But not all employees agree. New possibilities emerged during Covid, and a lot of people don’t want to give up what they perceive as a better situation. The pressure is on for companies to find the right mix, and the answers are not clear-cut.
What The Data Says
In economist Nicholas Bloom’s work with his team at Stanford, he’s found that about a quarter of workers don’t have any desire to continue remote work at all—they opt for the office full stop. These workers trend towards young and single or empty nesters, implying that the office is a primary social outlet. Then there is the other extreme—one-third of workers want to be totally remote due to factors like kids and long commutes, with a long, thin line through the middle where everyone else falls. This distribution is not normal. Bloom thinks that in the long run, there “could be a bifurcation of the labor market...some firms will that say our thing is in-person, we are going to be a firm where people come in five days a week. One-quarter of the labor market will love that, and they’ll flock to that firm, and the other three-quarters will slowly drift away.”
Imagine the chaos such a reshuffling could create!
Prioritizing Talent
For your company to be successful in today’s market, you must adopt a “people first” approach. You have to come up with structures and scenarios that serve talent.
Suppose you have a cluster of workers who really love being in-person, but the majority of the company functions better remotely. It doesn’t mean you have to make the one group choose between staying in an environment they don’t like or leaving the company. Think differently. Negotiate a lower lease while the market allows it, or release the big fancy office and opt for a co-working space. Showing commitment to satisfy employee needs attests to their value within your organization.
Now, consider that you need developers or sales team members to ensure your app is ready on schedule or that your software sales meet projections. You likely don’t care if employees live in Silicon Valley or Yuma, Arizona. You want to hire the best people for the job. But to hire them, you need to respect their talent, which means paying market rate vs. figuring out a salary based on zip code.
A skill is a skill—you should be willing to pay the market rate regardless of location. During the pandemic, there were massive brain drains from city centers as people sought to be closer to family or to lower their cost of living, maybe buy a bigger house with a nice yard. They shouldn’t be penalized for making a quality-of-life decision, nor should they be insulted by a job offer that pays them a fraction of their actual worth.
You might be thinking; I’ll just stick with a hybrid model where workers come in a few days a week and work from home a day or two, then I’ll snap up workers laid off from Amazon, Meta, Google, Salesforce, Twitter and others. I don’t see it this way. I want the best people, regardless of where they are from, the people who believe in our mission and want to be around for the long term.
While I can’t speak to the latest industry averages, I can share that since my company reversed course from being nearly all in-person pre-pandemic to a model that prioritizes talent, we’ve been able to attract the top 1% in a wide variety of geographies. By paying the market rate, our offer acceptance rate has climbed to 89.7%, and our retention has never been higher.
Survival Of The Fittest Relies On Adaptation
Large companies with storied histories and expensive office campuses must be uncomfortable considering new models for work. No one wants to waste what took so much time, money and care to build. Yet, just as technologies evolve, so must paradigms of work. It doesn’t mean corporate culture has to die or that productivity will suffer.
Employees are ingenious when it comes to connecting with colleagues. Even co-workers who once relished their in-person office find ways to get together while continuing to work from home. Benefits are also changing to map to new environments—from personal wellness days to stipends that make work easier, like office equipment, extra money for food or paid trips to headquarters once a month.
Although most productivity data on remote work is anecdotal post-pandemic, economists largely agree that productivity doesn’t decrease just because someone is remote. In fact, in many cases, it increases because they’re spending less time commuting or sitting in unnecessary meetings—or even because they are happier and more fulfilled by having a better work/life balance. But remote work is not the end-all, be-all either.
There is no one-size-fits-all environment. Instead of blanket investing in the workplace resources of the past, consider investments that make employees happy so that they will want to push their hardest for you and stay with you, even when they have plenty of other options. Be flexible. That’s how you win.
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