Spotify is jumping on the remote work bandwagon in a big way with an announcement on Friday that it will let its employees choose where they’d like work, both for their preference of coming into the office or staying mostly at home and their geographic location in the world. Spotify is calling the initiative Work From Anywhere and it describes it as a “new way of collaborating that allows Spotifiers to work from wherever they do their best thinking and creating.”
“Through this distributed-first mentality, we are giving employees the opportunity to elect a Work Mode—whether they’d prefer to work mostly at home or in the office—as well as their geographic location,” the company’s blog post reads. Spotify says it will implement the new options this summer, and the choice of how often, if ever, an employee returns to the office will be decided by the employee in conversations with their manager and team.
As for the freedom to work for Spotify anywhere in the world, the company says it will let employees decide their location “with some limitations to address time zone difficulties, and regional entity laws in the initial rollout of this program,” reads a more in-depth post on the company’s human resources blog. “If someone chooses a location that is not near a Spotify office, we will support them with a co-working space membership if they want to work from an office.”
Spotify’s decision comes on the heels of an announcement from Salesforce earlier this week, in which the cloud computing giant said it would give employees the choice to work mostly from home from now on and also give workers more flexibility around their daily schedules for taking care of children or attending to personal matters. Scores of other major tech companies, include Facebook and Microsoft, have similarly announced major commitments to remote work and letting employees make their new COVID-era work environments permanent going forward, if they so choose.
