About Anna Lundström
Anna Lundström, Chief Human Resources Officer at Spotify Technology, has discussed the company's efforts to prevent proximity bias in the workplace. In a September 2023 interview, Lundström stated that Spotify is working to ensure there are no disadvantages or advantages depending on where an employee works. She described tailored manager and leadership programs for leading distributed teams, and said the company analyzes compensation data to check for differences between home-based and office-based employees in promotions and salary increases. Lundström noted that Spotify has not yet seen inequalities in its data, but emphasized the importance of awareness and regular bias checks.
Lundström previously discussed Spotify's "Work From Anywhere" program in a September 2021 interview. She said the company chose to implement a single salary range for all of the US rather than paying per location, to avoid reinforcing historical pay disparities and simplify internal mobility. Lundström described two offerings: working the majority of time remotely while staying connected to Spotify culture, or spending most time in the office with greater flexibility. She noted that a common misconception is that Spotify has gone fully remote, stating the company still reinforces its culture and values through in-person gatherings. Lundström also said Spotify launched a "Band Reunion" program to reconnect employees with company values, and that the company underestimated the time needed to address leaders' concerns about the transformational change.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Anna Lundström's recent appearances.
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Transcript (3 segments)
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Interviewer0:00
A couple of things maybe about, you know, if we look at some of the stuff that we're reading around more virtual working or remote working, you know, in terms of recognition in the workplace. There's proximity bias: some managers may be more favorable to promote those that come to the office over those that work remotely and away from the team. Can you share what you're doing to prevent these biases and ensure that everyone has an equal opportunity to a promotion, obviously based on skills, ability, and performance, whether they've taken this?
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Anna Lundström0:47
This is something we spend a lot of time on right now. Just think about making sure that everyone has an equal sense of belonging and connectedness to Spotify. I can share a bit more about that later also, but yes, number one is that we are aware and that we need to make sure that there is no disadvantage or advantage depending on where you work from and where your manager sits. So a couple of things: we have tailored manager and leadership programs that are tied to what we expect from a leader at Spotify. We had that already before the Work From Anywhere launch, but obviously we've added quite a lot of new content to that because now our leaders, all of them, lead in a distributed environment. So training the managers and leaders on how to lead a team, how we are spending a lot of time on how to ensure that we create a sense of belonging regardless of your work from. We are not budging on certain things, such as every single employee that starts at Spotify gets invited to Introduce, which is our introduction event for all new employees. And now, when the pandemic hopefully is kind of, hopefully it's going away—don't quote me on this—we are bringing them back to welcome them to the Stockholm office for three days, where they get to listen to our executive team, our leadership team, to learn about Spotify's cultural values, really get that injection of who we are. Then we work with a lot of people analysis again, and when we get to our two cycles for compensation, we look at if there's any notable differences between home-mix and office-mix employees in terms of how many get promoted within these two buckets, any changes in the size of increases, if there's a certain manager sticking out. We look at all of that. And so far, it's safe to say that we haven't seen any of these inequalities in our data. But just to be aware, I think that's crucial: all people have biases, and you need to make sure that we kind of check them on a regular basis. So a few things we're doing, but again, the belonging piece we can talk more about another time, but that is something we are super focused on. And now is the next step for this program.
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Narrator3:15
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