To some business leaders, remote work feels like an employee perk that’s gone too far. While work-from-home arrangements had to be accepted during the pandemic, those days are long gone and employees should be working in the office most if not all days of the week.
But among the companies sticking with remote work, it’s viewed a bit differently. Take real-estate marketplace Zillow. It allows employees to work wherever they want, whether that’s remote, in the office, or in the office sometimes. The key is that all its employees are working in the cloud—its headquarters is online.
“We call it CloudHQ because we wanted to take the politics of proximity out of the equation and start from a place that remote work isn’t a perk, it’s a business strategy,” Dan Spaulding, Zillow’s chief people officer, said during Fortune’s Workplace Innovation Summit on Tuesday.
Remote-work transformation
“It’s an intentional strategy of everything we do starts in the cloud,” he continued. “It’s going to be documented, it’s going to be written down, it’s going to be clear for our employees to follow.”
He said having to document everything so that employees “know the rules of the road” wherever they work from has been “really transformative on our culture.”
Of course, this kind of arrangement won’t fly at every business. Capitolis, a financial technology company, decided a few years ago that employees should return to working full-time in its New York and London offices. CEO Gil Mandelzis admitted to a downside of the RTO mandate, but said he’s happy to live with it: “We lose many candidates because of our policy, and we are okay with that,” he wrote in a recent Fortune essay. “The smartest superstar in the world working remote is less valuable to me than someone I can talk to on my way to the office kitchen.”
The need for face-to-face interactions isn’t lost on Zillow. It has a team that schedules gatherings where groups can bond and collaborate. The company shares the details of these “Z-retreats” on a “cruise calendar,” which shows all employees when, where, and why every group is gathering.
“Making that transparent to the company really gives our employees the ability to understand what’s happening outside of the virtual world that they work in on a daily basis,” said Spaulding.
With less need for office space, the company has been steadily lowering its real-estate costs in recent years, shrinking its headquarters in Seattle as well as offices in New York, Atlanta, and elsewhere. At the same time, the company has enjoyed access to a much bigger talent pool since going remote-first, with job applications quadrupling.
Seeing the benefits
Other business leaders who were once staunchly in favor of in-office work have come around to remote work.
Chris O’Neill, formerly managing director of Google Canada, inherited a remote-first company when he became CEO of GrowthLoop, a marketing-technology platform. While he’s occasionally nostalgic for the old office environment, “remote work has surprised me in ways I didn’t anticipate,” he wrote in a Fortune essay earlier this year. He cited a results-oriented company culture—with outcomes being what matters, not hours logged in the office—and access to a global talent pool as key benefits.
Of course, whichever policy a company picks—fully remote, hybrid, or old-school office hours—there are better and worse ways to implement it.
“Setting a policy is not a strategy,” said Brooke Weddle, senior partner at McKinsey, who shared the stage with Spaulding on Tuesday. “The next step is creating a set of guardrails around how you want to implement that policy.”
She noted that many companies have implemented return-to-office policies poorly, with employees thinking “this is terrible” while “walking the halls of people on their different Zoom calls.” That, she noted, “is not fostering any kind of connectivity or collaboration.”