34. Spotify's Work from Anywhere program, w/ Alexander Westerdahl

welcome to the remote first podcast every week we invite guests from large or innovative companies to share their insights on enabling an equitable and distributed workplace experience i'm your host daphne laforet hey there today i am with alexander vestadal vphr at spotify to discuss spotify's own story in their move towards remote first as well as diving deeper in their work from anywhere program thank you for joining alexander hey thank you for having me i'm excited to talk about this it's one of my most passionate projects at the moment that's where i spend the majority of my time that's so awesome we get to work on things that we're passionate about right exactly i've been at spotify for seven plus years now i think it's the longest employment that i've ever had but i've also changed my passion projects every year almost so it's what makes me stay i have a question for you oh that's good it's so important to just stay really connected to the work you're doing and just keep the excitement i i personally really need that so i totally get it uh so talking about you know remote first and you know their experience at spotify you've been there for a long time like how does it look like at spotify to be remote first like what does it mean at spotify to be a remote first company now and if we back up a bit i can start off by providing some context maybe why we did this and i was thinking about it then the we could talk a bit about the program that we implemented of course um and we actually started this discussion already a few years back we looked into the future we talked about what's the future employment what will the agreement between employers and employees look like and um how can we stay attractive how can we tap into talent pools across the globe and those type of things and it was actually our ceo daniel eq who talked about us becoming a distributed first organization even before the pandemic and that that is the future people have a much larger need of flexibility so to stay attractive as an employer that's what you need to offer it will also allow us to tap into new talent markets and find the people that we need for the future and so on but we felt that we weren't fully ready back then the culture weren't as strong as we needed it to be to be able to operate in a distributed first environment the leadership wasn't fully there we were super successful but we kept growing so everyone basically had to reapply for their jobs meaning that we not struggle that's a negative word but we had to work hard enough to just maintain the growth that we had so adding distributed first into the mix would be too challenging that's what we feared at least so we we decided to not pursue it a few years back but when the pandemic hit we had to bring the discussions back up again and talk about what they could mean for us and start to be a bit more specific and what could such a setup look like so we started off by defining the why why would we go into this new world of course the pandemic was there reminding us but that couldn't be the why that would be very reactive so what's the opportunity that we see in this new landscape and we put down three different reasons and one it became very apparent that people working with us for us together and started to re-evaluate their lives yes this is what i want to do i relocated to a new country to work with spotify but i haven't met my family in a year because of the pandemic and traveling restrictions and so on so they flagged that if if you want to keep me you have to make sure that i can work from my home country it's time for me to move back home so i can be close with friends and family and the second reason was well i shared a bit earlier and tapping into new talent how can we find the people the skills the best of the best that we need for the future and not the best of the best but the best for us and people that thrive in our environment and while expanding into new geographies and new countries as the way to do that and the third reason is not as intuitive but the third reason is um almost the most important one and it has to do with our ways of working so how can we harmonize how we operate together how can we flip from prioritizing co-location and allowing for distributed work and flip that and say that we prioritize and optimize for distributed work and we allow for physical interaction real-time interaction and we've grown tremendously during the years that we've existed and we're 7500 people today roughly and we're in 22 different countries we have officers in 45 plus cities and so on and you start to create these subcultures and sub ways of working and people interact in offices together and they can collaborate really well but as soon as you need to collaborate between offices or even between countries or continents it's of course gets a bit more complicated so moving into distributed first mindset a cultural shift where everything we do is optimized for us being distributed will help us harmonize how we work and how we operate together because we disconnect it from the geography that you sit in and we instead talk about this is the spotify way of working and it works no matter if you're working virtually or if you're in sweden or if you're in u.s or if you're in japan um so that's the biggest shift uh but also the most important one as well so those were the three reasons for for why we wanted to embark on this journey and putting it in a i'll just continue to talk you can jump in with questions if you have any but we also put it into a historical context uh we know that how people interact and how people work changes over time right so and there's a few paradigm shift in history you have the agricultural age where people started to to center themselves around locations farms and then you have the industrial era people started to center themselves around factories and they stay there and that turned into cities and then you had the technology era or the knowledge area era or the digitalization era whatever you want to call it and that's where people started to gather around knowledge hubs like london and san francisco and so on and so we've evolved how we've been working with each other and we believe that we are in front of the next big change and our assumption before the pandemic was that this wouldn't happen until maybe 10 15 years into the future but the pandemic of course accelerated everything and that new year is the distributed first year uh i don't know how long it's going to last but i think it's going to last i strongly doubt that people that can uh wants to move back to a five day in the office week where you work eight to five and and you have to commute every day i expect and i think that people will want to keep the flexibility that they have today um so i think we'll go back where people spend more time in the offices because we've been working from home fully but i don't think everyone wants to spend five days a week yes there will be a phase where employees are going to want to go to the office because they want to get a bit of the feel back of their team they missed that because it's been two years they work from home and everything but they will never give up the freedom that they gain never exactly i completely today we struggle a bit because it's forced most companies shut down their offices and everyone are forced to work from home and you might not have the right setup at home or the possibilities to work from home um as other people might have because you have kids or you live in a small place or what have you your partner is also working from home but we believe in in allowing people to be their best selves like to do their best job and we think by giving them a choice you decide how you want to work you don't really care how you work we care about the impact that you're having that's the important thing and if you want to work from home or from an office that's going to be up to you and once you give that flexibility people will be able to work from home and that's going to be a very important thing people can also take ownership of their own destiny their own setup which will allow them to be and a better version of themselves i i truly believe that do you think there is power back to the people power back to the people like definitely actually about that you know do you think that it's not just flexibility but also you know in the end it's providing autonomy to to employees to be able to work and their own rhythm as well it's not just like okay today i want to work here today i'm going to work there but now i'm about some flexibility but they want to give a bit to get a bit more autonomy and independence in the work they're doing i think so i think maybe it's more about the feeling of being free to select and that impacts us a lot when it comes to engagement we're giving you the trust why wouldn't we trust you we made an assessment when we hired you we think that you're gonna thrive environment in our environment we think that you're going to thrive you're gonna add value to our company we already approved you as an employee of ours of us and a colleague of us so why wouldn't we extend that trust into how you work and from where you work and i think the feeling of trust the feeling of someone trusting me is is a good driver for engagement i also think that that people are different like if i would ask you when are you the most efficient throughout your day like when do you do certain tasks when do you do ad I mean, when do you do your podcast recordings? When do you spend time with family? I think your answer would differ from my answer. We all have our different efficiency spikes. And by allowing you to structure your day the way you want to structure your day, I think that you can be a lot more efficient. Why slot you into structure believing that everyone works the same way? I don't think that's the case. How do you think Spotify differentiate themselves in their distributed first way of work compared to other companies who are attempting to do the same at the moment? I think, first of all, we took a lot of inspiration from others as well. We met with a bunch of different companies that have experimented with this. And we realized that there is no real blueprint. We have to build our model based on our culture, based on our setup. And we had a few things going for us. We were born in the digitalization. We were born in the digitalization era. So we were highly digitalized. We had video conferencing systems in all the conference rooms. Everyone had a laptop. Everyone was connected. We had cutting edge tooling in how we communicate and do video calls and those type of things. So that played in our favor. Another thing that played in our favor is that we made it slightly difficult for ourselves when we expanded geographically. So we registered ourselves as. an organization where we could hire people in most market that we went into. And most companies maybe don't do that. They run sales offices from one location for an entire region. We instead went into the different countries for various reasons. But that also played in our favor because it meant that from a compliance perspective, we could all of a sudden hire people in all these locations. So if you want the flexibility from a geographical standpoint and move to another country, we could offer that. And I think we're in 2020. We're in 25 countries today. We were in 25-ish states in U.S. Now we're in close to one state in U.S. where people can work and live. So that also played in our favor. So I think we had a few things that defined how we could structure our setup. And we also went fairly quick from having this as a direction, this is where we want to go, into a ready-to-go program. And once we launched it. Once we launched our program, we also got a lot of pings from all the companies that wanted to learn about our program. Because I think most companies understood that this is the direction that we're going in. But many weren't able to put the practical solution in place because we got stuck in so many debates. And so did we. There were so many problems. There were so many issues that arose in all this journey. And we were a bit naive and we kept looking at the end goal, the why we're doing this and where we want to go. And we were a bit naive and we kept looking at the end goal, the why we want to go. Tell me more about this. And we managed to get there. Tell me more about these challenges. About the problems or. Because in the end, I think it makes so much sense what you're saying, because this is what I also see in the patterns. That there's a lot of like, this is what we want and then we're hoping to get there. You know, it's still a work in progress. We're kind of like figuring it out. They don't have an all of it in one program that they actually really thought through. And this is usually, you know, what's missing. It's always a bit of like a work in progress. But then I was quite impressed when I discovered. The Work From Anywhere program, where I was like, and listening to other content that you've been part of, of how ready and like how much answer you had to these questions. Like you actually went through all of these problems. So tell me a bit more about these problems that you've encountered and you were like, okay, we need a solution for that. Yeah, of course. So where to start? There were so many of them, but I can, I can share one problem that we encountered fairly early. We took this on, we heard the words from our CEO, I want us to go fully distributed. Everyone should be able to work from wherever they want, whenever they want, basically. Wherever they want. So that was the starting, that was the starting point and he sets very high and ambitious goals. And then we have to figure out how to get there and what's actually practically doable. And then the first problem arose, of course, that we can't hire people everywhere in the world. They're all. There are companies that sets up payrolls for us if we want to in countries where we're not registered, but we didn't want to go down that path. We truly believe in hiring people to our organization. You want that Spotify agreement. You want to be a true Spotify employee. So we didn't want to pursue that path. So we had to limit the program a bit to countries where we've registered and where we're legally allowed to hire people. Then the next problem that many companies. have asked us about is, well, we might not be able to hire all people or all skills in certain countries. It depends on what type of entity you've registered. So we've worked very closely with our corporate tax team and our payroll team. And the good thing about Spotify is that people are brave and our corporate tax teams were more of the mindset of being enablers versus blocking them. You cannot do that. It's not possible. Exactly. So they took on this challenge from the perspective, we understand what you want to do. Let us flag risks that we see, and then we can make a decision together. So they took on this challenge with a very open mindset. And other companies that reached out to us have said that that's usually a blocker. We can't do this because of X, Y, and Z. While our corporate tax team, for instance, took on the challenge from the perspective, let's flag the risks, and then we can talk them through and decide on what to do about them. So that helped a lot as well. Everyone was super constructive. This is the problem that comes everywhere. I think in all organizations that they've been receiving tons of requests from employees wanting to relocate to their home country, as you said, or just asking, can I go live now? In France, where I'm from, instead of like relocating to London or something like this. And companies being like, oh, it's too complicated. There's like liability issues. You know, we cannot accept that. Like, it's not possible. And it's just like, it just stops there. Where in the end, there might be a solution, but it's an extra step to be able to get there. And it's an extra effort that not every company necessarily are wanting to do this, certainly for their teams. I think so as well. Yeah. When you look at individual cases, that's usually when the clear no happens. Because as soon as you start to open the door and say that, well, Daphne can move to country X, then someone else will want to move to country Y. And if you allow one person to move, then you'll have to allow the other person to move. So then it's a lot easier to just say no. And it's a blanket no across the organization. Now, we created this vision that we got people to buy into. Yeah, this makes sense. This is where the future is going. Yeah. And then the different impacted teams were a lot more constructive about it. Okay, so let's talk about the problems that we foresee so we can start to work them through. We had a bunch of different work streams going on in parallel. And we took it on as a program for Spotify, where we wanted to reach the vision that we had versus an individual case where it's a lot easier to say no. So that helped us a bit. How is the, how does it look like? How does it work if someone is actually wanting to relocate? Or, you know, wanting to really, like, use the work from anywhere program to its word? Like, how does it look like for an employee at Spotify? I'll share that just to close out the challenges first. I think what we did when we launched it, that's important to share is that we told our organization that we don't have all the answers. We're going to learn this together. And we're going to make mistakes and we're going to have to correct mistakes. And that helps people have a lot more empathy. For the pains, the growing pains that comes with implementing such a program where you break new ground. So that was very helpful. But to talk about the program, then what's the offering to answer your actual question? As an employee, you get to decide how you want to work. And we've looked at two different dimensions. One is if you want to be in an office, or if you want to be at home. And the other dimension is geography, from what location do you want to work? And we call it work mode mixes. So you choose what work mode you want to have and what work mode fits you the best. And then you send in an application. So I want to work from home, or I want to work from an office. And I want to work from this location. And then we have a list of locations where we are registered that you can pick and choose from. So it's very clear what you can pick and choose from as an individual. And then you manage your hands to approve. And then we support you with. So you can move to another location, but you're responsible for the relocation yourself, like the cost, the move, and things like that, and finding housing because it's on your initiative as an employee. And we have the approval step for managers to approve or reject an application. And what we've said is that the default stance is that we're approving applications. So you don't have to motivate a yes, but you have to motivate a no. So if you're not, you're not going to be able to do that. And if you as a manager are going to say no to someone, you have to motivate that. And it could be performance issues. Maybe you shouldn't move to a different time zone or a new location if you're not. fully hitting the goals for the job that you're in. Let's sort that out first, and then we can talk about it. And there's a few questions that you as a manager and you as an employee also need to think through when you make this decision and when you submit your application. And it's everything from the most basic things for the employees. Do you even have infrastructure that's good enough to be successful from the location where you want to work? Do you have broadband? Do you have a space where you can sit and have focus time and those type of things? But also to more general, bigger questions. How will this impact the team? And have you talked it through within the team so it makes sense for the team and those type of things? And then, again, the default is to say yes. But if you say no, which we do in some cases, you have to motivate the decision to say no. I think it's really nice to see that you are really separating both. And actually doing the other way around instead of having to motivate why you should let somebody work from another location, you have to motivate why not, why they shouldn't do it and actually like give right answers. Because this is what I've seen is not happening enough is that employees are demanding for that. They're just told no without any reason of when they actually have all the excuse that would let them to be able to do the same work and keep the same productivity as well. So it's really cool that you're doing that stand instead of being the other way around. I thank you for sharing that. I agree with you fully, and I think all change is difficult. And when you introduce a new program, it's always going to be easier to let me know what you have. You don't know what you'll get. So it's going to be easier for managers to say no than to say yes in many cases. So that's why we implemented this to also set the direction that we truly believe in this, and this is where we're moving. It makes them rethink really like, you know, does it really make a difference for your team after two years of working from home and you haven't seen them, how did it change their performance? And would it really make a difference if they were in another location? Do you have the right processes in the way you're working to be able to work asynchronously, or you don't depend to someone to be in the same location as you? Like, you know, it's, and then it might, I think it's going to give so much more opportunities for managers to hire outside of their location. They might be able to have teammates in other countries and have a completely different flow of work. How does it look like at Spotify in the actual workflow of how people are working together? We had a few different work streams. Like, first of all, this is complicated and we haven't nailed everything. And we are far from perfect when it comes to asynchronous work. We are still a highly synchronous organization. Um, but we're on the trajectory of, of getting to becoming more asynchronous and allowing people to work from different locations is a forcing functions that would help us get there. Um, otherwise we would just spend time drafting docs about how do you collaborate, how do you work and those sorts of things. But nothing really happened. Now we're pushing the change while we're learning and implementing ways of working. But, uh, we have two different work streams that address this. One was, um, like a learning and development work stream. So how can we support. Our organization with tools, um, from a learning and development perspective. So we put together a workshop where you can do, uh, how, uh, asynchronous read the, are we, or how distributed first read the, are we as a team? And one of the team worked through this workshop, they asked themselves a bunch of questions and the end product was like an agreement. This is our distributed first agreement. This is what we commit to. And it can be simple things like it's one person dials into a meeting. Everyone dials into a meeting and we have camera on, and this is how we document and store decisions that were taken in a meeting. So people that wasn't in the meeting can take part of them if they are outside of the office and those type of things. And then there was a bunch of trainings that were focused on individuals, on teams and on managers. So that was like the three headlines. And then you could drill down and take those to help prepare yourself and your team and your colleagues. The other work stream was a specific way of working work stream, um, where we looked. That, okay, so what actually behaviors needs to change in your organization was to be ready for this change and to enable this change. And we put together a ways of working deck and this is what we expect from everyone. An example that I gave from the L&D perspective actually applies here as well. So what we decided on the company level was that, uh, if one person dials into a meeting, everyone has to dial into a meeting cause that creates equity in the conversation. I think we've all been in, in situations where five people have sat in a conference room. One person have dialed in and the dynamic is just completely off. And the person dialing in is never on the same terms as everyone else and contributing at the same level as everyone else. So that's why we put some of those guidelines in place. Um, and it's also about, yes, you might be in a different location, but you're not disconnected. So lean in to communicate with your team and check in with your team, uh, a bunch of rules, uh, or not even rules, but guidelines and principles that we believe in will help achieve this. And so. How does work happen outside of meetings? Like how does collaboration happens without meetings right now at Spotify? Cause I hear a lot of the, the like, okay, meetings should happen. You know, uh, people are all on the same page and I should, you know, include everyone equally in everything, but work does not happen only on meetings. You also have work happening, you know, uh, in front of your laptop, you're using software, you're using different tools to, to collaborate. There's a toolish, there's a tool aspect, but there's also. A process aspect and like a workflow aspect. So I'm curious about that part where, how does work happen outside of meetings between people the most? Like how do people get work done? I think it's best explained by looking at our culture and some of the beliefs that we have. Um, and to give you an example of our culture, we, uh, we believe in trusting your people, which you can see throughout the program that we implemented, but it also means that we want to provide autonomy to people in owning their own work and you provide autonomy to people by providing clear swim lanes. So if I can tell you, um, that this is your area of responsibility, and this is the metric that you're pushing for, or this is, this is the expectations on your role or your team or what have you. Then that team gets autonomy because they know within what boundaries they can operate without bouncing into someone else. And that's the key. That's a key aspect to becoming a. Distributed first organization. You need clarity throughout the organization. What am I responsible for? And the more clarity I have on the boundaries of my job, uh, and my responsibility, the more autonomous I can be, which means that you can drive a lot of things without having to connect in meetings as much with others to align and collaborate and figure out priorities. And how, like, do you draw the line here or is it 10 centimeters to the left? Um, so that's one key aspect of, of, of. Of becoming successful here. And I think all organizations struggle with inefficient meetings. You have meetings to have meetings. You feel that you need to have meetings when you can, need to be productive. So we've talked a lot about time management, um, what's actually valuable to spend your time on and not valuable to spend your time on. We've talked a lot about, uh, meetings where you just report back on progress. It's usually not as value adding. You can do that async. You can do that over documents. Over slack, over email meetings should be focused at resolving bottlenecks, collaboration problems, talking about specific problems, and not about what you've done since the last meeting, uh, but more about what we should do for the future and the things we need to resolve to get there. So we've changed, um, um, well, not really changed, but we've continued to drive efficient meetings, uh, and, and what we do in meetings versus not in meetings, and that allows people to then be efficient in their. async time because they know what they can do and what they can't do without aligning with others, if that makes sense. And do you have, I'm curious to know if at Spotify, is there some sort of a digital hub or a place where people are kind of connecting or having news about the company, having their recent updates, being able to feel a bit of the vibe of the company basically, but now that they are not coming to an office, but they still want to feel the Spotify feel of the company. You know what I mean? Is there a place for that? It is. And I want to bring it back to principles again. When we went distributed first, we said that we believe distributed first is the future, but it doesn't mean that we don't believe in human interaction. So we still want people to meet. I think it's highly important to build trust and to have a high degree of trust in a distributed first setting and in a remote first company. And we are still human beings. So we build trust a lot better when we meet physically. So we still encourage teams to get together once every quarter or six months so you can build that trust and that allows you to then be efficient when you don't meet as much. And then going into the specifics, yes, we use Workplace for instance, which is Facebook's version of an intranet where you can connect with each other, where you can share news. We do frequent all hands where our CEO meets with the entire organization. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then we use Slido where people can ask questions that the executive team then answers. And then we do that at various levels. levels to make sure that we get information out, that people can ask the relevant questions for that. We have Slack as an instant messaging tool. We have G Suite where you have mail and documents that you can collaborate in and video conferencing capabilities. So we have a bunch of different tools. What we do struggle with and what we need to improve though is where do you host content and how do you make content easily accessible? Guidelines, principles, our culture, instructions, what have you, and those tend to be in a bunch of different places and we haven't fully figured that out yet. So it is in the pipeline for us to figure out how can you make things simpler and more accessible for everyone throughout the organization. What would be the ideal, you think, considering the culture of Spotify for something like this? I know tools that can do that. But I mean, tools cannot do everything. Sometimes this is where you get stuck because one tool is good at one thing and the other one is good at something else. Ideally, what would be the best scenario? Personally, ignoring where we stand as an organization today. Okay, personally, ask Alexander. Yeah, ask Alexander. I think Google, the search bar, and then you can search for everything and get the most relevant hits at the top. And then make Google a bit more, exactly, and then power that with machine learning so it's relevant for you as well to understand what you're looking for. Okay, so you're going to take a very explicit example. You are trying to understand our parental leave policy for instance. Well, then it's very easy to understand that you also want to apply for parental leave. It's very easy to understand that your manager probably needs to understand what responsibility do they have, so then we can flag that for the manager. Here's where you can order baby swag for your employee that's going out on parental leave. And then we do that at the moment when it happens. And this is how you backfill someone on parental leave with a contractor or a full-time hire. And then you loop in TA. Like that connectivity and discoverability and machine learning together. I think that's the optical. I think that is the future, but we're not fully there yet. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. I also think a strong culture will mitigate for most of this. Organizations that are very focused on rules and policies will struggle in the future, but organizations similar to Spotify that are very focused on culture and using culture as a decision mechanism and that's an empowering mechanism and that's a providing autonomy to its employees mechanism will be successful because it means that people can always lean on the culture when making decisions and then those decisions will be right. And people can always lean on the culture when trying to understand how we view parental leave policy or something else, and that will give them a sense of what's right or wrong as well. So you don't need access to non-policy documents and those type of things. So culture, clarity on where we're going, empowering people will soar for most of it, and then discoverability and machine learning to solve for the rest. I think that's the way to go. Mm-hmm. That's the way to go. There's so much opportunities for a startup entrepreneur to build the future of work. And I love to bring on the podcast startups that are working towards these goals. We had a few people coming from Catalog who talked about their own platform creating a digital hub. There's so much that is happening at the moment. There is, I think Elastic also has actually a discoverability, I think they have Elastic Workplace or something like that. For really researching content. Notion has become super popular recently, just because of the fact that you can create a knowledge management platform, like a website. You can have access to all of your documents. You have search and everything. There are things that are being built. I think there's still a lot of work to be done because this is a big concern about when you have a lot of information being stacked everywhere. You just might end up with just an overload of information and actually not being able to find what you're looking for. And then in the end, all this information that was written has become completely useless because you were not able to find it in the end of the day. Exactly. I completely agree. And it's a tricky challenge to solve. I've been thinking a lot about it. And I think you have to cut the problem horizontally. You can't solve it from start to end. So you can't find one tool where you host everything, where everything is accessible because you're going to have so many different systems. That the organization operates in. You're going to have different hubs based on local leads. You're going to have different ways of visualizing data and so on. So I think that the key to success is probably having a horizontal on top of everything, like an interface between all the content and your organization that can help you organize it, that can help you provide that discoverability. And you won't be able to find one solution where you can host everything and make it accessible and then through. You have to find that interface. I believe at least in the coming years, maybe in the future, it's going to be different, but who knows? Who knows? Well, thank you for joining Alex and sharing everything about Spotify. I think there's a lot still that is coming and I'm looking forward to see like how the company evolves and maybe talk to you next year and see, you know, what evolution you've done in the next year. So thank you so much for joining. Is there anything you'd like to share on how people can reach you? Or if you want any documentation that they can access online? Thank you. It was super fun to be here and talk about this. And you can look at our HR blog, search for Spotify, HR blog, and we've tried to summarize everything there. So it's a great start. Thank you for tuning in to Remote First. You can find all links and show notes in the episode description. And if you found value in this show, we'd love your rating on your listening app of choice. Thank you for being here. See you next time. you