Spotify, which introduced its distributed work policy in February 2021 as pandemic restrictions began to lift, is one of the companies that, as its human resources director has said, Katarina Bergin a interviewnot only maintains that policy stating that آ«Work is not a place you go, it is something you doآ«, but also says that he trusts workers to be productive and do their jobs, because آ«they are not childrenCome on.
Segأ؛n Berg, آ«You can’t spend a lot of time hiring adults, and then treat them like children.آ«. The company is confident that the decision to allow its employees to work from wherever they want has not in any way affected their productivity or efficiency, and is also very attractive to workers and at the same time reduces the company’s climate impact.
Distributed and flexible work is, according to experts, one of the great themes that they are going to define labor relations in 2025. Distributed work must stop being a privilege for a few who can be in a position to achieve it, and become a right for all those who carry out a job whose characteristics allow it. It doesn’t make any sense make your workers feel, as happens at Amazon, like children going back to school.
Airbnb, for example, allows its workers to work and live wherever they want, with a simple policy defined in just 105 words. El CEO de Dropbox, Drew Houstonstates, with great reason, that آ«Employees value flexibility much more than snacks in the officeآ«. In highly competitive environments and fight for talent such as autonomous driving, where getting good engineers requires strong competition, working from home has become commoneven for those who work directly with the vehicle.
You can argue that your workers are not responsible, that working from home is supposedly bad for them what innovation decreasesbut the reality is that it makes no sense to continue resisting a trend that technology made possible, that the pandemic made normal, and that only requires an open mind and a series of methodological changes to function as it should.
We have been following a trend for workers to return to the offices for more than three years, but there is still a gap between what most employees want (flexibility and hybrid schedules), and what some managers want (collaboration in the office and return to pre-pandemic work norms). That people with good training are not able to consider how to work efficiently and maintain innovation in remote or hybrid mode and decide that the best thing is to go back to how things were done in the past is tremendously disappointing, and leads to a lot of doubt about their abilities. . Pretending that companies like Spotify or Dropbox don’t innovate because their workers can work from wherever they want is simply stupid.
Even with the added pressure of returning to the office implemented by some companies, many companies will continue to commit to some flexible version of hybrid working. Hybrid work is the new normal, and it’s here to stay driven by the need for flexibility. Few companies will fully return to office models without risking talent losses.
Is your company one of those that treats its workers like adults, or like school children?
This article is also available in English on my Medium page,آ آ«Do you treat your employees like adults or like schoolآ children?come