When there is a return to the office, will your organization have a more lenient WFH policy?

Yes I believe our WFH pre-Covid stance will change quite a bit. And thank goodness. With some of the cuts we’ve made to comp and benefits, if WFH on occasion or predominantly helps us retain strong staff, it’s a no-brainer. The past year has helped us eliminate business gaps so it’s tenable for most.

I can’t speak for my organization.

But, COVID showed in the last 2 weeks in March 2020 that WFH works for large swaths of people.

How well it works, will be different depending on the organization and culture.

But it opened a Pandora’s box that certainly will never close.

Yes, that’s what I expect.

Prior to pandemic, we had a work in the office culture. The overall feeling was that since we are a creative company, we make games, everybody has to be in the same room and have long, extended brainstorming and creative sessions. We've learned that's not the case. And also, being south of the market in San Francisco, even if you live in the city, you're lucky if it takes you a half hour to get to the office. All of a sudden it's turned into, well, this is fantastic, a total total mind shift. Literally, working from home was the off hour stuff people did. So it's been a real positive thing for our company. And it's a purely digital business, so there's no reason why anybody really needs to be physically anywhere. We're definitely going to be working from home more. We're putting out roles that can work from home 100%, and some who need to be nearby so they can be in 2-3 times a week. I'm just wondering if the pendulum swings the other way. Everybody used to have an office and open floor plans. Now we're talking about, well, we should get rid of the open floor plan. People like peace and quiet working from home. So it'll be interesting to see if companies decide that once they are back in the office, that we really were more effective that way.

Also, I think there was a lot of learnings on how to use video conferencing, because previously we used Zoom primarily site-to-site. And then, there'd be meetings where you'd have 10 people in the room, and one person who's connected in remotely, and everybody forgets there's somebody on the call, right? Or forgets to share their screen. Because of that, video conferences or working from home and dialing in was seen as completely ineffective. But it wasn't because of the person who was remote, it was because the people in the room never really understood how to do it. Now with everybody on Zoom, we realized it can work. And I'm hoping that transfers over when we start going to our hybrid model coming into the office. But then, I could see it flipping the other way where people stop being considerate of the people who are dialed in or connected in, going back to the way it was. It'll be interesting to see how that all plays out.

It's easier for tech companies to keep doing this. I mean, we really don't need to have an office. But I see a lot of companies around here, that you have to be in the office and they're struggling with certain kinds of workers, including the government workers, the city, the county, all that.