Amid a raft of return-to-office mandates from tech giants, together with Amazon and iPhone challenger Nothing, Spotify sees no have to deal with its employees like “children” and finish its fashionable work-from-home coverage.
Spotify went by means of an overhaul in 2023, shedding 17% of its employees in December in a transfer CEO Daniel Ek acknowledged had a bigger affect on operations than the corporate had anticipated.
The choice helped greater than double Spotify’s market worth in 2024, because the group notched file quarterly revenues whereas reducing prices. Nonetheless, inside Spotify, the layoffs have shaken morale.
For individuals who survived the cull, there isn’t more likely to be an extra morale-sapping plan to interrupt with Spotify’s fashionable “work from anywhere” coverage.
“You can’t spend a lot of time hiring grownups and then treat them like children,” Spotify’s chief human assets officer Katarina Berg advised Raconteur, explaining the group’s continued versatile work location coverage.
“We’re a enterprise that’s been digital from start, so why shouldn’t we give our individuals flexibility and freedom?
“Work is not a place you come to, it’s something you do.”
In February 2021, Spotify joined a number of different tech teams in permitting its workers to “work from anywhere.” This enabled workers to decide on the place and the way they labored, supplied the corporate had an workplace in that jurisdiction.
Not like different firms which have trickled workers again in on a hybrid foundation, like Meta, or gone all out and demanded a full return to the workplace, like Amazon, Spotify hasn’t chosen to renege on this coverage.
A giant cause is probably going the impact it has had on retention. Spotify mentioned attrition charges have been 15% decrease within the second quarter of 2022 in contrast with the identical interval in 2019. The corporate additionally mentioned it had improved the range of its expertise.
Whereas Spotify doesn’t intend to scrap its remote-working coverage anytime quickly, Berg acknowledged it wasn’t a super setup.
“It is harder, and we all struggle to collaborate in a virtual environment,” Berg mentioned. “But does that mean that we will start forcing people to come into the office as soon as there is a trend for it? No.”
The corporate remains to be utilizing modern methods to encourage its music-loving employees to come back into the workplace, together with internet hosting “listening lounge” classes that includes pop stars together with Olivia Dean and Rag ’n’ Bone Man. Employees are additionally strongly inspired to come back into the workplace throughout Spotify’s “core week” to reconnect and focus on technique.
Spotify’s biggest-ever spherical of layoffs in December 2023, when it mentioned goodbye to 1,500 employees, got here as CEO Ek mentioned the corporate was doing an excessive amount of “work around the work.”
The affect of these layoffs on operations was larger than Ek anticipated, with Berg explaining to Raconteur that remaining staffers have been left in a “state of shock” by the cull.
“Spotify had been in hypergrowth, and this was the only thing people knew,” she mentioned. “A lot of people at Spotify had never seen a recession, and it was a lot to absorb and digest.”
Editor’s word: A model of this text first appeared on Fortune.com on Oct. 8, 2024.
This story was initially featured on Fortune.com
