Spotify is hopping on the remote train widely with an announcement on Friday that it will let its employees choose where they want to work, both because of their preference of coming to the office or mainly staying at home and their geographic location in the world. Spotify calls the initiative Work From Anywhere and describes it as a “new way of collaborating that allows Spotifiers to work from anywhere they do their best to think and create.”
“Through this ‘distributed first’ mindset, we give employees the ability to choose a work mode – whether they prefer to work at home or in the office – and their geographic location,” said the company’s blog post. Spotify says it will implement the new options this summer, and the choice of how often an employee returns to the office is decided by the employee in discussions with his manager and team.
As for the freedom to work for Spotify anywhere in the world, the company says it will let employees determine their location “with some restrictions to address time zone issues and regional entity laws on initial rollout of this program,” reads one more – in-depth post on the company’s staff blog. “If someone chooses a location that is not close to a Spotify office, we support them with a membership to a co-working space if they want to work from an office.”
Spotify’s decision follows an announcement from Salesforce earlier this week, in which the cloud computing giant said it would give employees the choice to work primarily from home from now on and also give employees more flexibility around their daily schedules to take care of. for children or attending personal affairs. Scores from other major tech companies, including Facebook and Microsoft, have similarly announced big commitments to remote working and allowing employees to make their new COVID-era work environment permanent, if they so choose.