John Collison, co-founder of payments giant Stripe, believes everyone is feeling unnecessarily nervous about working remotely. Speaking at Sifted Summit, a European conference in London earlier this month, Collison explained how Stripe was at the forefront of distributed working before it became popular.
“Pre-COVID, we were more pro-teleworking than the consensus, and post-COVID, we’re more pro-office than the consensus,” Collison said. The shift isn’t because Stripe’s views have changed; views have changed. That’s because the broader consensus has shifted so dramatically, or “bounced back,” as he puts it.
That might be an understatement. Many companies’ stance on remote work has shifted. Abandoning the promise of flexibility in the hope of making employees more productive has been an enduring feature of the business environment. Overall, bosses have struggled to return to pre-pandemic work schemes (handing out carrots to workers who complied), while workers have generally refused to relinquish control and balance the impact of the lockdown.
But maybe some of these issues aren’t entirely new. Collison said a “significant portion” of Stripe’s employees have been working remotely, from about 20% before the pandemic to “30 or 40%” today. While he didn’t disclose specific numbers, he insisted that most Stripe employees work in the office; required this way. This key distinction makes Collison unique among CEOs who hold dissent about workplaces: He sees the merits of holding meetings in one place, but he doesn’t push the issue. Or, at least he hasn’t yet.
“Companies need to defragment because they did a lot of hiring during COVID-19 without taking[in-person working]into account, and now their jobs are returning to a more stable state,” he said. As a result, Collison began to recognize the drawbacks and benefits of working from home and in-person.
Many bosses often underestimate the forethought and legwork required to complete long-range projects, said Matt Clifford, a British entrepreneur who spoke with Collison. commented. “Of course, the whole world was forced into a great experiment.”
A great experiment in progress
Collison points out that flexible working is not a monolith. At Stripe, “We like to bring remote teams together,” he said. “It’s a funny way of saying it, but remotes should be placed with other remotes so they don’t lose a lot of the office environment.”
For example, he said, for a 14-person Stripe team, seven employees should work in the San Francisco office and seven employees should work remotely, rather than randomly scattered across several locations. “On the margin, you can’t always do it, but overall you should do it as much as possible,” Collison said. “It was very well thought out and it took a lot of work. And then we had all these remote visitors coming in during COVID-19 and the impact hasn’t completely gone away.”
A Stripe representative clarified that he was a “remote visitor.” wealth, is anyone who has transitioned from in-person to remote work during the pandemic.
This is most of them. Stripe has maintained its commitment to working as flexibly as possible during the pandemic, setting itself apart from other big tech giants like Google, Meta and Salesforce. Ensuring co-location has long been critical to company leaders.
“When only one member of (a) team is remote, they often suffer from isolation (both socially and in terms of work-related decisions) and organizational burden (because they are actually responsible for bringing the team’s processes together) Re-architecting as remote). – and being friendly on top of actually doing a good job),” Jay Shirley, Engineering Manager at Stripe, Written in 2020. “Conversely, moving multiple remote engineers into a team simultaneously can lead to better results for their productivity and happiness.” It can also better support asynchronous work, task distribution and social interaction, he adds. Chance.
The company also saw “massive adoption” of its unorthodox Pandemic-era proposals For employees: If they leave high-cost cities like New York and San Francisco and agree to give up 10 percent of their base salary, they’ll receive a $20,000 bonus.
“There’s a lot of people taking advantage of all the remote work they’ve done in the last year to be able to move closer to their families, to places that they wanted to move to before,” Collison said at the time (Stripe, which has been doing business since 2013) It recruited remote employees and opened its first “fully remote engineering center” a year before the lockdown. ) “We haven’t reached a final position or final decision on the exact mix of office versus remote, (but) everyone is working remotely.”
In early 2021, Stripe became the most valuable new startup in the United States, wealth Reportedly valued at $95 billion (current value is approx. $50 billion). This may indicate that the office is not that important for productivity.
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