Challenging assumptions has been a cornerstone of Jeremy Wacksman’s first 90 days as new CEO of Zillow Group. The longtime company veteran joined 15 years ago and has worn numerous hats over his time at the real estate marketplace firm. Now as its chief executive, he’s laser-focused on what works, both for the customer and the employee. For recruiting and retaining the latter, nothing has proven quite as useful as distributed work.
Much like fellow Seattle-based company CEO Brian Niccol, now at Starbucks, Wacksman leads Zillow entirely from home. Aside from convenience, the decision—which applies to every Zillow worker, from entry level to C-suite—stems from data.
“I work from home every day from a home office,” Wacksman said, though the company hosts regular retreats, company meetings, and town halls that are purposefully in-person. “Sometimes they’re with the entire org; sometimes they’re cross-functional,” he said. “I find that those are what I go in for.”
But for the day-to-day grind, “I’m on a bunch of meetings and would prefer to be at home.”
While Seattle, Zillow’s HQ city, is a “fantastic” place to be both for the company and for its CEO, Zillow’s flexible approach has vastly widened the talent pool; it now has employees in all 50 states. Wacksman’s primary line of thinking is, “How can people stay connected and find times to come together, and [when they do], how do we create that in-person interaction you don’t get every day?”
Some companies that have rolled out return-to-office mandates to spark those in-person connections on a daily basis (though it may not be all that valuable or appreciated—which Wacksman also acknowledges). But the array of RTO mandates out there “makes recruiting easier for us,” he said. “We’re a more diverse workforce for sure: more representative, and our attrition numbers have gone down.”
Critically, hybrid work—which mandates some set number of in-person days per week or month—is a different beast than remote-first, which is the Zillow model. Annie Dean, head of Team Anywhere at Atlassian, a distributed-work software firm, explained the crucial difference to Fortune last summer.
“Hybrid is an illusion of choice,” Dean said. “The crux” of hybrid plans is mandatory office attendance, which is more sinister than it appears. By mandating office attendance, no matter how little, firms nix many potential benefits for the employee “and much of the benefit for the company.” Plus, mandating even one office day a week “requires people to organize their life around the office, and companies have to pay the highest cost of real estate,” she said. “It means you’re carrying all the costs of the old model, and can’t have any efficiencies of the new model.”
Head in the cloud
Since mid-2020, Zillow has embraced a remote-first model it’s dubbed CloudHQ—indicating its headquarters is in the cloud, not in a midtown office. Though Zillow retains a handful of offices around the country, it has significantly reduced its real estate footprint, culling its lease commitment to just one-third of what it was pre-COVID.
Naturally, the transition wasn’t perfectly seamless, particularly when it came to alignment across time zones and shifting an in-person onboarding program to be fully remote. “There’s a ton to do on training and development—how do we onboard?” Zillow’s CEO said. “We’re still piloting and trying new things every six to 12 months.”
Predictably, there were challenges with [the move to] cloud-based, the same way there are challenges with office-based [work],” Wacksman said. “But we’re clear-eyed that that’s who we are: We iterate and try things, and we listen to our people. To me, that creates an environment for people to do their best work.”
It doesn’t hurt that the approach is widely and consistently popular, with other remote-first and flexible offices running laps around their pro-office peers when it comes to the talent race.
Zillow was staunchly pro-office before the pandemic, and while many similarly appointed firms scrambled to strong-arm that culture into the modern age, Wacksman recognized the need for a reinvention. “Very early on, we declared we’d challenge our own assumptions and shift to being cloud-focused,” Wacksman told Fortune.
Clearly, the prospect is attractive. The new CEO says he believes the CloudHQ model is behind Zillow’s ballooning popularity among job seekers. According to Wacksman, the firm now gets four times as many applicants per job listing as it did pre-pandemic. “For sure, there’s a strong demand for flexible work,” he said.
Flexible work is not so much a concession as an enablement tool. The best work often results from workers feeling respected and empowered, rather than cajoled into an arrangement that fails to consider their preferences and needs. Wacksman’s ethos—and advice for peers? “Treat adults responsibly, and set them up to do their best work.”
