To some business leaders, remote work feels like an employee perk that’s gone too far. While work-from-home arrangements had to be accepted during the pandemic, those days are long gone and employees should be working in the office most if not all days of the week.
“We call it CloudHQ because we wanted to take the politics of proximity out of the equation and start from a place that remote work isn’t a perk, it’s a business strategy,” Dan Spaulding, Zillow’s chief people officer, said during Fortune’s Workplace Innovation Summit on Tuesday.
“It’s an intentional strategy of everything we do starts in the cloud,” he continued. “It’s going to be documented, it’s going to be written down, it’s going to be clear for our employees to follow.”
He said having to document everything so that employees “know the rules of the road” wherever they work from has been “really transformative on our culture.”
The need for face-to-face interactions isn’t lost on Zillow. It has a team that schedules gatherings where groups can bond and collaborate. The company shares the details of these “Z-retreats” on a “cruise calendar,” which shows all employees when, where, and why every group is gathering.
“Making that transparent to the company really gives our employees the ability to understand what’s happening outside of the virtual world that they work in on a daily basis,” said Spaulding.
Other business leaders who were once staunchly in favor of in-office work have come around to remote work.
Of course, whichever policy a company picks—fully remote, hybrid, or old-school office hours—there are better and worse ways to implement it.
