Spotify’s HR chief says the company won’t be following Amazon and others in return-to-office trend

• Spotify’s HR chief told Raconteur that the company will maintain its work-from-anywhere policy.
• Spotify saw a 15% lower attrition rate and increased workplace diversity in 2022 after implementing its policy.
• Many major companies are enforcing office returns, citing productivity and collaboration benefits.

Amazon might be ordering employees back to the office 5 days a week, but don’t expect Spotify to follow suit.

Spotify’s chief human resources officer, Katarina Berg, reaffirmed the company’s work-from-anywhere (WFA) policy in a recent interview with Raconteur on Monday, saying that “work is not a place you come to, it’s something you do” — echoing the company’s past sentiment.

“You can’t spend a lot of time hiring grown-ups and then treat them like children,” Berg said.

The digital music platform first introduced its WFA policy in February 2021, which allowed employees to work full-time from home, in the office, or create a hybrid schedule with their manager.

Spotify also expanded its flexibility regarding the countries and cities employees can work from, even for locations that are not near a physical office.

Berg said some employees prefer office work, and the company will continue to have physical offices and a “core week” where teams are encouraged to meet up in person.

And employees seem to have responded well. Just a year after the new WFA initiative, the company saw a 15% lower attrition rate in the second quarter of 2022 compared to the same period in 2019, a six-day drop in its time to hire, and increased workplace diversity, Fortune reported at the time.

But the remote-first approach does introduce challenges, Berg acknowledged, saying that it is “harder” to collaborate virtually. Those concerns have led Spotify to work with the Stockholm School of Economics to further research the effects of remote work on innovation and participation.

“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,” Berg told Raconteur.

Spotify’s latest reaffirmation of its WFA policy bucks the current trend of companies pushing to get employees in the office more days a week. As COVID-19 restrictions have eased, several major companies have started backpedaling on the hybrid schedule policies they embraced during the pandemic.

Workplace attendance has increased to an average of 3 days a week, according to a study published in September by water cooler company Bevi. In addition to Amazon’s announcement that it expected employees back in the office starting in January, companies like Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan have enforced a fully in-person schedule. Other companies with hybrid schedules, including Meta, have cracked down on enforcing the change by threatening to track office attendance.

Many executives and leaders have attributed their RTO mandates to increased productivity and collaboration when employees work together in the office.

Mark Zuckerberg, for example, said that performance data from Meta showed that “people who work from home are not efficient and engineers who come to the office get more work done.”

In an April 2023 memo to employees, JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said that most professionals use an apprenticeship model to learn their job, “which is almost impossible to replicate in the Zoom world.”

“Over time, this drawback could dramatically undermine the character and culture you want to promote in your company,” Dimon added.

The RTO mandates have caused heated pushback from many employees, including at Amazon. Workers at other companies, including Disney, have even signed petitions in an attempt to get companies to reconsider.

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy said in September that, “we continue to believe that the advantages of being together in the office are significant.”