S3E2: HRTheRealDeal_VideoOnDemand_WFA with Anna Lundström

Sure, and it's my pleasure to be here. So I am running HR for our Americas region and I'm overseeing our content and advertising businesses. So basically taking care of all the HR-related work for these two businesses as well as the Americas region at Spotify. And I've been with the company for about five and a half years.

Yes, so I think a big part was that Alex and myself are overseeing two areas within the company that have a lot of talent that we could foresee would really both appreciate but also their roles would work very well to work remotely. So I oversee the content piece and Alex R&D, with engineers and creative employees. Our hypothesis was that these employees really could work from wherever in the world. And since we are the HRBPs for these areas and know their business as well, I think that was one reason why Katarina assigned us the task.

It was really not that much information, which is typical Spotify fashion. But it was really about, you know, I know Katarina and Daniel for many years have had a conversation around what does the future of work look like, not only in the world but also for Spotify, and how do we keep attracting the very best people, how do we retain the very best people. And Daniel really had a vision that we wanted to become a distributed-first company and really enable our talent to be the very best regardless of where we work from. That was basically the overarching mission, and then we kind of got to work after Daniel and Katarina shared that vision with us. The process was really me and Alexander sitting down and looking at not only the HR part of the work, the Work from Anywhere program with the cultural aspects, the labor laws, the compensation, all of these pieces, but also the other pillars connected to Work from Anywhere: adapting our workplaces to this new way of working, the long-term strategy, how do we ensure that having a remote workforce or a flexible workforce still meets our long-term and short-term goals. We needed to tie into our strategic pillars as well. Alexander and I really early understood that we need to create a cross-functional team with representatives from all of these parts of the company to ensure that we have an overarching philosophy and strategy around Work from Anywhere, not only the HRBPs but the other very important areas as well.

So that is Mathias, who heads up our global workplace solutions team, and also Sonia Simmons, who heads up the design and build. And then we have Nina Hammerstrom and IA, who are part of our strategy and operations teams. We were like the small core team, and then we had of course a larger part of our organizations tapping into the product as well.

So we started with really, and this I think became the most important thing but also the most challenging piece, that we have this overarching vision: we want to become a distributed-first organization. For us, it's not really about going into the office; it's really about what you do. And we have these strong beliefs that if we offer flexibility and a great work-life balance, we will both retain talent but also tap into a new and diverse talent pool. But having all these items in front of us and also our current HR strategy, trying to then put together a program that would really work for Spotify, we took the flexibility part and started to think, okay, what does this mean? We landed in two offerings. One is offering a home mix, which is really about offering our employees to work the majority of their time remotely, still of course staying connected to the Spotify culture, our offices coming in for meetings, meeting with the teams, but spending the majority of your time remote. And the other offering is the office mix, where you spend the majority of your time in the office but with greater flexibility than we had before, for example working from home a couple of days a week if you want to. So these were the two offerings we landed in from an HR point of view. But then you take that and you divide these two into all the different parts of HR and make sure that we had answered all the different questions. So if you take the office mix first, what does that mean? Everything from the tactical questions around how much time do I need to spend in the office, can I work from my current office, can I move to another office? Then you break them down into what does this mean for taxes, for labor law, for compensation. So all of a sudden we had all these different questions that we needed an answer to. So we started to create this playbook that has been the core offering. And I think that was, to be honest, the success of the program, that we really put that together. We just kind of served as the bible, if you want to call it that, for our employees and our leaders to really tell everyone the same story and send the same message around what this program really means.

Yes, no, you're absolutely right. It is the million-dollar question. I think this is the area where we spent probably most of our time as an HR team discussing and also discussing with the executive team, getting their buy-in. We really looked at three different approaches. One was let's keep as is, meaning that we would pay per the location you're in and we use the market data for that location, so you have one salary for New York, another for Boston, a third for Chicago, for example. Or secondly, should we look at dividing compensation per regions, such as divide the US into four different regions and you pay different per region? Or third, do we move into one salary range for all of the US? And we chose the latter. There are pros and cons with all these three options, but there are a couple of reasons why we chose going into one benchmark and range for all of the US. We believe that one of the main reasons why you would move from, for example, you're based in New York today and you decide to move to Minnesota is probably because you want to move back home or move back to family. And if you would then come from an underrepresented group, we believe that that underrepresented group might be overrepresented in that region, and the market data and the pay is probably skewed towards the lower end due to historical reasons, and we don't want to reinforce that. So we wanted to try to actually change that. Another reason is that as we were working to Work from Anywhere, we also wanted to really make this a simple, smooth process for our employees and for the organization to really create this internal mobility. And if you add a lot of admin and a lot of different pay guardrails, that would probably cause a lot of debate, for example, how do you decide the zonings around compensation, how do you decide who should be paid what if you live very close to each other but you're in different zones? So we decided that was the approach we wanted to go with, and so far it's been actually receiving a lot of positive feedback on that decision.

I would say two things: it was overwhelmingly positive and a lot of questions. I think we got 1,500 questions when we launched it, just on our intranet. But the good thing was that we had done such a thorough work leading up to the launch, so I would say we had basically answered more or less the majority of the questions that we received.

Yeah, we had them in the playbook, so that was very helpful. So a positive response. And then obviously you got and still have quite a lot of media coverage on the Work from Anywhere program. So what would you say are the biggest misconceptions about your program?

I think some people haven't read the details of it and they just believe that we've gone fully remote. They couldn't be more wrong. We have done the opposite. We are still really very much reinforcing our culture, our values. That hasn't changed at all. We're just providing more flexibility, and we still really strongly believe that people need to come together in person on a regular basis, but the day-to-day can be done much more flexible. And I think another misconception is that you will not really be able to know what your employees are doing, and that is also absolutely not true. If you have great managers and leaders, you don't need to control your employees. You just put trust in them and they will do great work.

Great question. I would say we had estimated that this is obviously a huge transformational change and shift in our ways of working, and we had estimated that we need to really anchor this internally, we need to spend time with leadership. But we hadn't estimated how much time we needed to spend with leaders and managers to make sure that we had captured their concerns, potential worries, questions. That took much longer than we had anticipated, so I think I would plan for that better. Another thing that kind of came up as we went along, which was a great thing, was we started to present our initial thinking to our executive team and to our leadership team, and they had so many questions that we decided to put together a larger working group with representatives from each of the businesses, with managers or leaders. So we gathered a group representing again the cross-functional business units, and they had so many great questions that we were able to capture and provide answers to before we launched. So that was a great thing that I would probably, we should have thought of that, but luckily we were able to capture it going into the project.

Not with the program. I mean, it's not a bad thing if culture evolves or changes, but I think one thing that really is our core is that we are valued for the company, we always have been and we always will be. And we are doing a couple of things to maintain that. One is, I'm sure you've heard about our intro, where all new employees get to spend time in Stockholm with our executive team, learn about our businesses, our journey, our values. We've done that remotely during the pandemic. But then also we felt going into this year after last year with the pandemic that we needed our employees to reconnect with our values, with our culture. So we launched a huge program called the Band Reunion, with a lot of great content around who we are as a company, the journey we've been on, our values. We had jam sessions led by our managers and leaders really talking about our values, and that was such a great way to get the organization to reconnect. We'll do more of that as well. So we're not worried that this program will lead to a change in the core cultural aspects of who we are. They'll be reinforced and evolve.