One such company is Robinhood. Vlad Tenev, cofounder and CEO of the financial services firm, explained in a new interview how he brought employees back to the office after initially telling them they were working at a remote-first company.
“In January of 2022, we were like alright let’s just make a decision here and announce we’re a remote-first company and I think as soon as that blog post went out I was like, ‘Oh God, I made a terrible mistake here, this is not good’ — I felt bad about it,” Tenev said in an episode of the podcast “The Logan Bartlett Show” published Friday.
“The feedback I heard when we decided to go back into the office was not only has no other company managed to get their people back into the office successfully while hedging and saying that we’re not remote-first, but it was much, much harder that we announced we were remote-first and then we wanted to change our minds.”
Tenev said “explaining the why of things” was important in getting employees on board with the policy reversal.
“I think we very directly said, ‘I’d like people to come in person, I think it’s better for collaboration, I think that we do a lot of important work across functions,'” he said.
He added that “you have to have answers for all the concerns that people have that, I think, are reasonable.”
“I mean, some people are going to say, ‘Well we’ve got people all around the world, they’ve moved, nobody that I work with, nobody from my team is in my office, so why would I come in?’ And I think the answer to that is everyone in this company is on your team,” he said. “You shouldn’t just engage with people on your team because what happens if you need to talk to someone from compliance or legal and you’re an engineer? Having those relationships are extremely important. Having some awareness for what people are doing is important, and I think that’s something that’s very difficult to manufacture in the remote world.”
Tenev said Robinhood drew a radius in calling employees back, meaning those who lived too far away from an office didn’t have to return, though he added “most people actually clustered around locations where we have offices anyway.”
“Up until January of 2022, we were hiring people within radius of offices so very little hiring happened outside of those in the first place and that was the good part about it,” he said. “We weren’t remote-first for very long, the period where we were remote-first and we were hiring aggressively was pretty short.”
Robinhood in 2022 declared itself a remote-first company and said it would be “staying primarily remote.”
A year later, the company told staff to expect to return to the office at least four days a week on average.
“I’ve seen it firsthand — there is value in us being together,” Tenev wrote to employees in a leaked Slack message at the time. “While the adjustment period may not be easy, I am confident that in the long run we will all benefit as coworkers and owners of Robinhood.”
Many companies began issuing return-to-office mandates in 2022 and into 2023, including Apple, Amazon, Meta, Google, and more. The latest large company to jump on the bandwagon is Walmart, which said earlier this month it’s also laying off several hundred workers and relocating others to one of three main campuses, in a reversal of its remote work policy during the pandemic.
