John Collison, co-founder and president of payments giant Stripe, thinks everyone’s getting needlessly worked up over remote work. At European conference Sifted Summit in London earlier this month, Collison explained how Stripe has been on the cutting edge of distributed work well before it was fashionable.
“Prior to COVID, we were more pro-remote than the consensus, and post-COVID, we are more pro-office than the consensus,” Collison said. That shift is not because of a change in viewpoints on Stripe’s part; it’s because the broader consensus has shifted so dramatically, or “bounced around” as he put it.
That may be an understatement. Numerous companies have flip-flopped on their remote work stances; walking back flexibility promises in the hopes of making workers more productive has been an enduring feature of the business landscape. Bosses have, by and large, been angling to move back towards a pre-pandemic work plan (dangling carrots for workers who comply), while workers, by and large, refuse to relinquish the control and balance the lockdowns afforded them.
But perhaps some of these issues aren’t brand new. A “significant fraction” of Stripe’s workforce has always worked remotely, Collison said, from roughly 20% pre-COVID to “30% or 40%” today. While he didn’t disclose numbers, he maintained that the majority of Stripe employees work in an office—but they’re not required to do so. That key distinction puts Collison in a league of his own on the long continuum of CEOs with different where-to-work opinions: He sees the merits of convening in one place, but he doesn’t push the issue. Or, he hasn’t yet, at least.
“There’s a defragmentation that companies need to do because they did a lot of hiring [during] COVID without that assumption [of in-person work], and now they are working back to more of a steady state," he said. As a result, Collison has come to recognize both the drawbacks and perks of both at-home and in-person work.
Many bosses tend to underestimate the amount of forethought and legwork required to pull off a remote plan, Matt Clifford, a UK-based entrepreneur who shared the stage with Collison, commented. “Of course, the whole world was forced into a great experiment.”
The great, ongoing experiment
Flexible work is hardly a monolith, Collison pointed out. At Stripe, “we like to co-locate remote teams together,” he said. “That’s a funny way of saying it, but remotes should be on teams with other remotes, so there isn’t a bunch of office context that they are missing.”
For instance, he said, with a 14-person Stripe team, seven workers should be in the office in San Francisco and seven should work remotely, as opposed to a random smattering of locations. “On the margin, you can’t always do that, but in general, you should where you can,” Collison said. “It’s very deliberate and takes a bunch of work. And then we had all these remote tourists wash in during COVID, and that effect hasn’t fully disappeared yet."
A “remote tourist,” a Stripe rep clarified to Fortune, is anyone who pivoted from in-person to remote work during the pandemic.
That’s most of them. Stripe has set itself apart from other big tech giants like Google, Meta, and Salesforce by maintaining its pandemic-era commitments to flexible work wherever possible. Ensuring co-location has long been crucial for company leadership.
“When only one member of [a] team is remote, they often suffer a combination of isolation (both socially and with respect to work-related decision making) and organizational burden (because they are effectively responsible for rearchitecting the team’s processes to be remote-friendly in addition to doing their actual job),” Jay Shirley, Stripe’s engineering manager, wrote in 2020. “Instead, moving multiple remote engineers simultaneously onto a team has yielded much better results for their productivity and happiness.” It also better supports asynchronous work, task distribution, and opportunities for socializing, he added.
The company also saw “major uptake” to its unorthodox pandemic-era proposal for its workers: If they moved away from high-cost cities like New York and San Francisco, and agreed to relinquish 10% of their base pay, they’d receive a $20,000 bonus.
“There were a lot of people where they took advantage of all the remote working that was going on last year to be able to move to be closer to their families, to somewhere they wanted to move previously,” Collison said at the time (Stripe has been hiring remote workers since 2013, and opened its inaugural “fully remote engineering hub” the year before lockdowns.). “We have not come to our ultimate stance or ultimate decision of what the exact mix of in-office versus remote will be, [but] everyone has been working remotely.”
In early 2021, Stripe became the most valuable U.S. startup, Fortune reported, earning a $95 billion valuation (it’s now worth about $50 billion). That might suggest that the office isn’t so vital for productivity after all.
