Episode 126: How Spotify Developed Its Successful Work From Anywhere Program (Interview with Anna Lundström)
In a world where flexible working is gaining more attention than ever, Spotify has been leading the way with its infamous Work From Anywhere program. This program allows employees to choose their place of work, whether remote, hybrid or in a different city.
In this podcast episode, David will speak to one of the architects driving the Work From Anywhere approach, Anna Lundstrom, Spotify’s VP of HR.
The conversation will cover:
The business drivers and hypotheses that led Spotify to develop the Work from Anywhere Program
How the program was designed and implemented, through a cross-functional approach and co-creation with employees
The initial impact of the program on engagement, recruitment, retention and diversity
The next steps for Work from Anywhere and its sister program – Dynamic Workplace
The critical role people analytics plays in Spotify’s research
Support from this podcast comes from HiBob. You can learn more by visiting: https://hibobl.ink/DHL
David Green: As many of you are aware, Spotify has been leading the way in the world of distributed and hybrid work with their Work From Anywhere policy; a policy, as the name suggests, that allows their employees to choose their place of work, whether it be a remote, hybrid, or in a different city. To date, Work From Anywhere, coupled with their dynamic workplace initiative, has been a huge success for Spotify.
So, to better understand the actions, steps, and of course, the data that made the introduction and implementation of this policy so successful, we invited one of the architects behind Work From Anywhere, Anna Lundström, Spotify's Vice President of Human Resources, to join me on the podcast.
Anna Lundström: Many companies were so quick to launch something about remote work when the pandemic hit. We kind of held back a bit really spent time on what we wanted to do. And a lot of companies were like, "We offer remote work", but then you looked into the details, and many of them cut pay.
David Green: Highlighting the importance of research and data analytics in their decision-making process, Anna will also be sharing insights into how Spotify is tackling the compensation and benefits structure for those employees moving locations. We look at preventing biases and fostering collaboration and belonging within a Work From Anywhere workforce. We also dig into the impact the Work From Anywhere programme has had on employee engagement, recruitment, diversity and retention; and we also examine the challenges and learning Spotify has faced throughout this journey to date and much more.
Tune in, take notes and enjoy, as this is a conversation you won't want to miss!
Today, I'm absolutely delighted to welcome Anna Lundström, Vice President of HR at Spotify, to the Digital HR Leaders podcast. Anna, welcome to the show. Before we dive into our conversation, could you start by sharing with listeners a brief introduction to you and your role at Spotify?
Anna Lundström: Of course, so happy to be here, David. Super-brief about me; as you mentioned, I am the VP of HR at Spotify; I'm currently running the HR for our Freemium business, which is basically the subscription business, but also our global units, which is our support functions. I've been with the company for six-and-a-half years, and before that, I had various positions within HR in the financial services industry, mainly at Nasdaq, so I have about 15 years of experience in the HR field.
David Green: Wow, and it must have changed over your six-and-a-half years at Spotify. We had Katarina Berg on the show in 2019, just after we'd started the podcast, actually; I think she was in episode 7 if I remember rightly.
Anna Lundström: Amazing!
David Green: And it's changed. I mean, Spotify give a sense to listeners about how big the organisation is now, how many employees have you got now, and how many markets are you in?
Anna Lundström: We are currently present in 183 markets, and we have a bit over 9,000 employees. When I joined six years ago, we were about 1,200 employees, so that gives you an indication of the hyper-growth we've been growing through and that we're still going through.
David Green: In recent years, we've seen evidence that a one-size-fits-all approach to working arrangements doesn't really work. Some people prefer to work in the office all the time, some people prefer to work at home all the time, and others like to do both, what you call your hybrid, I guess, it seems to be now. And obviously, the technology now enables us to do that as well, I think, which is maybe different from what it was a few years ago.
I know at Spotify, you've been right at the forefront with leading this flexible way of working with the introduction of your Work From Anywhere policy, which I believe was introduced in early 2021. As one of the architects behind that whole programme, I'd love it if you could share with listeners a little bit more about this policy. Does it really mean that Spotify employees can work from anywhere?
Anna Lundström: At Spotify, when we do business strategy planning, we both do long-term planning, like a five-year horizon, and also annual planning. And actually, in the fall of 2019, so before the pandemic was known or had escalated, the leadership team put together a distributed-first goal, which read more or less that Spotify wanted to become a distributed-first organisation by 2025. So, early in 2020 is when we started the work, and then obviously, with the pandemic, it accelerated things.
But the whole reason for us already in 2019 starting to talk about distributed first that we wanted to offer our employees more flexibility because we've seen that for a long, long time that that is one of the top drivers towards engaged employees.
And really it took about a year to put together the programme, and we were a small working group with participants from various specialist fields within the HR and Strategy and Operations team.
And we really, David, started out with a blank paper.
We started out with a few beliefs, and the core belief was that work is not something that you have to go to the office for; it's something that you do, and that was the core belief. In our hypotheses, a few of them were that we wanted to tap into an even more broad and diverse talent pool; we wanted to, at the same time, retain and grow our current employees by giving them increased flexibility; and all of this would lead to an even happier workforce, which would lead to improved productivity, efficiency and collaboration across the organisation.
With a blank paper, with the belief, we then sat back and said, "Okay, what does this mean for Spotify; what do we want to offer our employees?" and that landed in the two core pieces of the offering, which is you choose either a home mix or you choose an office mix. And when you have done that, you can add location on top of that. So, me being based in Stockholm, I choose home mix as an example; this is just a fictional example because I do come into the office.
I choose a home mix, and then, let's say I want to take my family to Spain for a year; I can add that location to my home mix, and I can move to Spain for a year.
We are offering this within every region that we are present and where we have a legal entity.
David Green: Interesting firstly that you were thinking about this as an organisation before the pandemic even happened, and also that you had reasons why you wanted to do it, some hypotheses and beliefs that you thought would benefit the organisation by doing it as well. So, even if companies now, and I guess most companies have got some sort of policy around where people work, because of what's happened over the last two and a half years, they've kind of had to; but a piece of advice that you would give is, think about what is going to be the result of this because then you can actually measure if it actually happens?
Anna Lundström: Start with a few core beliefs and a few hypotheses that you can aim to not only measure but really strive towards, that also is tied to your org.
Don't copy anyone else for the sake of it, but think about what the needs are for your org, what does your business strategy look like, and how do you tie those two together.
David Green: So, you've talked a little bit about why you introduced the policy.
How did you go about implementing it; what steps did you take? I can imagine offering a Work From Anywhere policy would require lots of preparation and collaboration with various other functions. You talked a little bit about that, actually, within Spotify; legal, obviously, finance, and technology. I also understand that you did this with employees rather than just coming up with something in a dark room and then announcing it as well.
Anna Lundström: 100%. And I love to share this story because I think this was one of the key factors to why it has been successful. We started with those more high-level strategies and beliefs that I shared earlier.
But then, we took another approach.
We actually, within the core working group, which was HR and Strategy and Operations, and then to your point, we started to invite employment legal and a few other core functions, we basically took an opposite approach. Rather than spending a lot of time on expanding on strategies and long-term beliefs, we then created a playbook.
We basically started to write a Q&A first, changing our mindsets into being an employee's mindset and what questions will we have to answer. And when you start with that, you find yourself with quite a few questions like, "How will conversation work? How will business travel work if I'm home mix in the middle of America and want to fly to New York? How long can I have my option? What equipment will the company offer? How will our leaders lead through all of this?" everything from very tactical questions to really complex labour law to leadership to communication.
That led to us creating a playbook of around 40-50 pages. We then, a couple of times, went all the way up to the executive team, to our CEO and the leadership team, to get their buy-in for not only the broader strokes but also actually the tactics. We then went to all the VPs and shared the draft documents, and then we pulled together a group of employees, about 20 employees representing all different business units in the company, to look at the Q&A and to look at the content of the programme. And they had a lot of great questions that we hadn't thought of, so we added them.
That's usually how we work at Spotify; we always work like that. We collaborate and invite, and that led to us really feeling good about the policy, that we have thought of every angle and still represented us.
That was one of the success factors, and as I said, yeah, it took about a year to go back and forth to tweak, put our own touch to it, and get the buy-in from various stakeholders until we were ready to launch.
David Green: And such a key thing, because obviously, it's a big change to the way the company's working, which could have a positive or a negative impact on performance and engagement and people's propensity to stay or not; and we'll talk a little bit about some of the outcomes you've had from it. But actually involving employees, and obviously, it sounds like you involved a group of employees that represented all your different business units, you took input from them; that helped formulate the approach, so really important.
As HR professionals, employee experience is obviously one of the key things we're there to do, to really help employees thrive at work, and it's much easier to do when you work with employees rather than just designing things for them, isn't it, because they'll have questions, as you said, Anna, that even though you had a lot of great minds around the table, you hadn't come up with those questions? So, I think it's a really important point for people.
Anna Lundström: Exactly. And I think we had direct proof of this being successful because when we launched, we used our intranet, which has this Facebook feature. So, Katarina, our CTO, who you talked to in an earlier podcast, she launched with a communication plan and everything, and I think we got 1,000 unique questions from various employees. And I'm not joking when I tell you that we answered, I think, 99% of them because they were covered in the playbook. So, it's always my advice to really think through the details when you do come up with a programme like this.
David Green: In just a few moments, we'll continue my conversation with Spotify's VP of HR, Anna Lundström. But before we go back, let me take this short break as an opportunity to talk to you about the sponsors of this season's podcast.
So, you said that, obviously, one of the considerations was around compensation and benefits. What does this mean for people who are moving, for example, to different cities or countries, where the cost of living, for example, may be higher -- cost of living's a bit of a topic at the moment, certainly in the UK -- or even lower, and how have you gone about deciding on the best compensation and benefits structure to support the programme?
Anna Lundström: Great question. This one we spent a lot of time on as a working group. We went all the way from, "Okay, do we think about zones, such as if you take America, should we have one compensation zone for the East Coast, one from the middle part of the country and one from the West Coast, and depending on where you move, you have different compensation ranges?" and these types of conversations. But then we reminded ourselves about, "Okay, we're in hyper-growth, we're trying to scale our organisation, we always try to strive for simplicity in whatever we do in the people organisation, to not put a lot of red tape around things".
We landed in, okay, before the launch of Work From Anywhere, we had a very location-based compensation strategy, which meant that you had one set of benchmarks for New York, another set of benchmarks for Boston, a third one for Chicago, and so forth.
So, we moved away from that, and we moved into one national pay range for all of America, stemming from the East Coast and the West Coast benchmark ranges, so actually the top of the benchmark in the US, and we let all employees keep their compensation.
So, employees in New York and on the West Coast that wanted to move back home to, they might be from Ohio or Idaho or Arkansas, and they moved back there with their new compensation because we also don't want to create kind of a -- we don't want to contribute to any societal issues by, for example, cutting pay for employees that might come from communities that are overly represented by minority groups, and then they move back, and you cut their pay, and that community cannot thrive or continue to thrive. So, that was also part of it.
Then for Europe and Asia-Pac, we had the same strategy. So, when you moved within a country when you moved within the UK, you moved from London to Scotland, you keep your compensation for London, for example.
The same in Sweden; if you moved from Stockholm to the northern part of the country, you keep your compensation.
If you moved between countries, from Sweden to Spain, you keep your net take-home, of course, in the new currency, but we make sure that you're placed in a certain place in the comp plan; you keep exactly that place in Spain, so you still would have the same cost-of-living situation.
That is kind of, in essence, what we've done, and it's been highly appreciated by our employees. The benefits package is, for the sake of global benefits, everyone has the same parental limits and so forth, but then, of course, there are certain local regulations we need to adhere to, certain vacation pay laws in certain countries and so forth. So, we have, of course, complied with those, and if you move to a new country, you get the local benefits but with a global Spotify lens as well.
David Green: Yeah, I mean, as you said, simplicity and actually very employee-centric as well.
Anna Lundström: We saw a lot of companies; we researched a lot of companies, like 2,000 different companies, what they had done, because many companies were so quick to launch something about remote work when the pandemic hit. We kind of held back a bit and really spent time on what we wanted to do. And a lot of companies were like, "We offer remote work", but then you looked into the details, and many of them cut pay if employees moved back to countries or states where it's usually more low income or low cost, and we decided to go in the opposite direction.
David Green: I can only imagine that at the launch of the Work From Anywhere programme, you reaped the benefits of a more diverse talent pool and increased retention rates. Can you share more about this with listeners, and how has the Work From Anywhere programme impacted your recruitment and retention? And some of those beliefs and hypotheses that you had right at the start have they borne true?
Anna Lundström: Great question, and yes. We are one-and-a-half years into the programme, and we all need to note that the first six months after the launch, the pandemic was ongoing. So, let's say our data is about a year because we started to open up our offices during the fall of 2021, and then a few months were closed again due to the pandemic, but let's say about a year of data. And, yes, we are actually seeing some very positive and early signs that our hypotheses are being proven right.
Number one is that we have decreased the time to fill a role from 48 days on average to 42 days.
And that is mainly because now, hiring managers has a much broader area. Instead, before you had to perhaps pick a location, "Okay, I need to hire a software engineer in London". Now, you put EMEA, and you can hire from all the countries in EMEA where Spotify has a presence or a legal entity. The same for the US. We are present in, I think, 40 out of 50 states now where we can hire people.
So, that has obviously impacted the time to fill. That is amazing for companies, ours, that are dependent on hiring great talent in a timely manner to execute on all our strategies as we're moving with speed.
That is number one.
Number two, we're seeing some great diversity stats, also. We have increased our gender diversity numbers, we've increased women leaders in R&D. In the US, where we can measure race and ethnicity, which we can't in the majority of our other countries where we're present, we have doubled the number of race and ethnicity hires, and we had some real aspirational goals around those as well. So, very positive signs.
We also have lowered our attrition rate slightly, and that confirms that the current and existing staff are also quite happy with the flexibility being offered. So, it's all great signs so far. We are also hiring in quite a few locations outside our main hubs.
I'll give you an example. We are increasing quite a lot in Washington State in the US. Before, when we tried to tap talent there, we were offering them relocation to New York or to LA. And I know for sure I have all examples of talent not being able to move, and we couldn't proceed with them in the process. Now, they are staying where they are and would like to stay, and they work for us.
So, those are some, I think, good examples and early signs that our hypotheses have been proven right.
David Green: A couple of things maybe about if we look at some of the stuff that we're reading around more virtual working or remote working, in terms of recognition in the workplace, there's proximity bias. Some managers may be more favourable 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?
Anna Lundström: Super-good question. This is something we spend a lot of time on right now, to think about making sure that everyone has an equal sense of belonging and connectedness to Spotify, so I can share a bit more about that later also. But yes, number one that are aware and that we need to make sure that there's no disadvantages or advantages depending on where you work from and where your manager sits.
So, a couple of things; we have tailored manager and leadership programmes that are tied to what we expect from a leader at Spotify. We had that already before the Work Form Anywhere launched, but obviously, now 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, and we are spending a lot of time on how to ensure that we create a sense of belonging, regardless of where you work from.
We are not budging on certain things, such as every single employee that starts at Spotify gets invited to Intro Days, which is our introduction event for all new employees.
And now, when the pandemic is hopefully 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 cultural values, really get that injection into who we are.
Then we work with a lot of people analytics again, and when we get to our two cycles for compensation, we look at if there is any notable differences between home mix and office mix employees in terms of how many get promoted within these two buckets, the size of increases if there is 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 kinds of inequalities in our data.
But just to be aware, I think that's crucial. All people have biases, and we need to make sure that we check them on a regular basis.
So, a few things we're doing. But again, the belonging piece, we can talk more about also if we have time, but that is something we are super-focused on now as a next step for this programme.
David Green: What does the data say in terms of the impact Work From Anywhere has had on employee engagement?
Anna Lundström: Actually, our engagement scores, we've seen them stay quite flat, a slight dip throughout the pandemic, which I think is not uncommon from other companies; but interestingly enough, in our most recent survey this spring, the overall engagement score out of the 50-plus questions that we are asking is exactly the same for home mix versus office mix.
David Green: You've obviously got to focus on belonging at the moment. What are some of the steps that you're taken to try and make sense of belonging similar, I guess, at home and the office?
Anna Lundström: 100%. It's all the way actually from us having a main goal for the entire people organisation, and actually even on the larger organisation, Spotify, to really increase our sense of belonging. And a few things we are doing are mentioned, certain things that we're not budging on, regardless if we are distributed, such as inviting everyone to Stockholm, getting that early injection into who we are, training our leaders and our managers really on tips and tools for how you can lead in a distributed-first environment.
We are really doubling down on mental health as an overarching initiative. We have a team, that is called Heart & Soul that is located within our Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging organisation, and we have around 60 Heart & Soul ambassadors across the organisation that are educated and trained within the field of mental health that are not only points of contact for employees to reach out to, to talk more about, but they also are responsible for all of our great programming that we have very much focused on being virtual, around how to remove the stigma around mental health, how to ensure the employees feel safe, that we create a psychologically safe environment that our employees feel that they can speak up if they're not having a good day, a good week, a good month; and that the leader and employee, manager and employee connection is there.
So, we have created certain programmes, or our GreenHouse team created, focused training about how to create a psychologically safe environment and how to create that consistent culture of belonging. We have a lot of offerings for leaders, for managers, and we speak a lot about it.
And now, one of our listen-focused areas is about accessibility, accommodating employees that might have a disability, regardless of where they work from. Because it might have been easier before when we had someone in the office that needed certain support, now, this person might work from home; how do we solve for that? So, we have created this kind of playbook for managers to support them.
But then also, us as HRBPs, which is a big part of my job to coach managers and leaders, is just small things, like to check in on our your employees in a different than before, you could just grab someone in the corridor and see on their body language how they were doing. Now, it's more intentional and deliberate; you need to be as intentional as you are with executing on your business plans and strategies, and you need to lean in a bit more.
When you have your virtual one-on-ones, it needs to be part of your one-on-one agenda; it needs to be, "How are you? How's life?
What support do you need?"
It needs to be recognition on a whole different level, which we have also created some initiatives around. It needs to be telling your own stories and being vulnerable yourself, showing compassion, so someone will open up to you when you can kind of help, coach and guide them because it all comes back to us wanting our great talent to stay with us, and to retain them to make them feel good because we always like to say that's part of a marathon, not a sprint.
David Green: And one other thing, are you looking at things liked connectedness, so understanding how -- are you looking at collaboration patterns, for example, for people that are on the home mix versus the office mix, and making sure that the teams that need to connect with each for innovation and productivity are connecting as well; are you doing anything around that?
Anna Lundström: Yeah, we have also a deliberate focus on when we bring teams together in person. So, this fall and also before the summer, I would say that the majority of the Spotify teams that collaborate have met in person for different offsites, team buildings and so forth, because we also say, and instruct our managers and leaders, that the day-to-day is virtual, but then you should be very intentional about when you plan the in-person collaboration.
We've also seen some trends where people collaborate quite well virtually but then use the social time to build relationships. While before used to be, the time together in person was more hard-core work and some social, but now we've seen some shifts in patterns there as well because we've realised that you can do quite complex strategy work distributed.
David Green: And I guess with, obviously, you're still in hyper-growth and scaling, is it having an impact on how you design your workplaces, for example? I know people who have opted for the office mix are probably also going in and doing focused work in the office as well as doing it at home, but obviously, where people who have a home mix are coming into the offices, you talked about that collaboration and getting together and social time; is it having an impact on your workplace design as well?
Anna Lundström: 100% and great that you reminded me to speak about that because that is one of the most crucial components as well about the distributed-first strategy. As I mentioned early on, when we started to talk about distributed first in 2019, we saw different tenants being part of that org strategy. One was Work From Anywhere in the HR programme. The other is dynamic workplace, which our amazing design and build team, that is also organised under the people function, have put together and launched.
It basically meant, David, that they had to unlearn everything that we thought we knew about the office and how it's supposed to work. They did a lot of intake meetings, and surveys, also with representatives across the different business units, across different roles, skills on what they were looking for at their best scenario of a workplace; because we now launched the dynamic workplace, which is really a people-centric approach to the office, and we try to mirror the ways all our employees are working.
So, to your point earlier, we have spaces for focus work, you can come in and almost sit in a library type of setting, so I'm sitting here working kind of, "Do not disturb". Then there are social places; there are cafeterias, there are stages and, obviously studios. There are traditional meeting rooms and conference rooms, there are spaces for really creative work, for stand-up meetings. And we moved completely away from one-in-one sittings. So, the ones that come in, they can sit anywhere in the office, depending on what work you're going to do that particular day.
We launched dynamic workplace about a year ago, and we're soon through with all our major offices because it's a complete redesign. It's just taking some time, but it's super-inspirational.
David Green: And it's got interesting, and we're starting to see this at Insight222 with some of the companies we work with, particularly in the technology space.
We're seeing that people and places are coming together under one leader, like Katarina, for example. And obviously, then, the people analytics teams have got access to workforce and workplace data to do exactly what you've described; look at workplace design and make sure that it's employee-centric and it's helping deliver the innovative parts, the collaboration parts and allowing that flexibility at work as well for different modes of working, whether it's focus time or collaboration. Very, very interesting.
Now, with every new initiative, there is a teething process; I'm sure you can probably tell me about that. What are some of the challenges that you've faced, or are currently facing, as part of the Work From Anywhere programme, and obviously, what are some of the steps that you're taking to overcome these challenges?
Anna Lundström: Great question. I think number one is that you need to segment the work; you need to understand that this is a multi-year transformational journey to make a strategic shift like this, so you can't solve for everyone at once. We took the approach, as I mentioned earlier, to create the Work From Anywhere HR programme first, more the policy, the handbook, the tactics, as well as the dynamic workplace.
We're now super-focused on, I would say, the trickier part, which is maintaining that sense of belonging, the connectiveness, ensure that everyone understands who Spotify is, what our long-term, and short-term goals and strategies are and so forth. And again, I said a little bit earlier about why we're doing that in terms of a sense of belonging. But it's so easy to boil the ocean when you start to think about a big strategy like this.
So, that is my number one advice, to not do everything at once, and I think that is what made us this successful.
Then I think again; you can't be too focused on the details; the devil is really in the details, and there were certain things we missed out that created some administrative headaches, such as the amount of employees that picked different mixes and changed work moods, which required a lot of new employment agreements. And we hadn't really figured out an automatic way to do that, so we had to do all these contracts manually. Now we have, so things got a bit delayed when it comes to the contracts being ready and so forth. That sounds very tactical, but it's kind of part of the experience.
So again, the devil is in the details; you cannot spend too much time on those before you launch an initiative like this.
David Green: If you look back at the start of Work From Anywhere and its approach to a distributed workforce programme now, obviously, we talked about some of the learnings on our way. So, for our listeners that are considering they're working in an organisation, they might be a CHRO, or a senior HR leader, who's thinking about doing something like this, what would you share has been your biggest learning?
Anna Lundström: I think it has been how crucial it is that you have stakeholder buy-in on all levels. As I said earlier, we started with getting buy-in from executive management and then the BPs across the org. And it was the BPs, in discussion with them, who then nominated a cross-functional working team. And that working team, more than the executive teams, gave us what I think is now a really successful programme. Obviously, we had a lot of content prepared; but as I said, that input was crucial to us.
So I think don't go with these traditional ways around only just getting buy-in from the top management team and then down here, think about who you're really creating this programme for, and it's for the employees. Then ideally, you hear from them also before you launch something like this.
David Green: So, looking to the future, Anna, what's next for Spotify and the Work From Anywhere programme?
I guess part of that is the workplace initiative that you've been running in parallel with that as well, but what else; what next?
Anna Lundström: Great question. Again, we keep checking ourselves to make sure that our hypothesis doesn't fall short.
But ideally, a few years from now, you can truly work from anywhere for Spotify. Right now, you can within the region you're based, meaning that you can move wherever you want to within America or within EMEA or Asia-Pac.
Ideally, we do not have any time-zone constraints a few years from now. Ideally, you're able to collaborate and work synchronously, regardless if you're 13 hours away from your closest team members.
So, those are a few years away, and by going there, we need to first strengthen a sense of belonging and connectiveness, and make sure the people really understand our strategy from our business lens, where we're going, and how we collaborate towards reaching that.
David Green: And as you said right at the outset, this was a vision that you were looking to put in place by 2025. Obviously, partly it was accelerated by the pandemic, so you're only two years into this anyway, aren't you?
Anna Lundström: I really thought that the other day; I'm not five years away anymore; it's two years! It was a realisation for me too! But I think nothing is impossible, and it's good to have audacious goals to strive for.
David Green: What sort of support has people analytics and data and some of the technologies that you use within HR at Spotify? What help have they given to setting the programme up, but certainly monitoring and, as you said, things like the sense of belonging, and connectiveness; what sort of support are they providing?
Anna Lundström: They're crucial to everything that we do in the people organisation, and not only because they're extremely proactive, but they've been part of the working group from the beginning. So, they are also looking at patterns and lenses of Work From Anywhere that we hadn't thought of. They identify patterns or themes where we should dive deeper, which is extremely helpful and helps us create additional hypotheses or additional areas that we need to spend more time on in all different fields; if it's engagement, if it's compensation, if it's leadership, training, whatever it might be, it's absolutely a crucial partner in the work that we're doing.
David Green: The final question of the day, Anna, and this is a question we're asking everyone on this particular series of the Digital HR Leaders podcast, and I think your answer to this could be really interesting, actually, given the experience that you're going through; what tips can you share with leaders and listeners on how to foster collaboration in a hybrid team, so in your world where you've got a mix of people who have got a home mix and a work mix together?
Anna Lundström: First of all, be very focused on it; this is not easy. You need to be deliberate and intentional about one thing to create this really great sense of collaboration, and you do that by a few things.
You make sure that you decide on the things that are super-important for your organisation and that people need to be able to rally behind your business. What we've done is make sure we are super transparent about our business goals, our strategy, and our culture. We invite everyone to the Intro Days, as I mentioned, and then we have an intentional approach and policy around when you also meet in person versus work you can do virtually to make sure that you really are creating that long-lasting relationship.
But it's hard work, and you need to be very deliberate and intentional about it.
You can't just say, "Let's collaborate well", and then you run off and do something else; you need to speak about it as an organisation, you need to offer a plan and a few sets that you're not budging on, regardless if you're distributed or not. And I think we have landed in a few that we feel strongly about, that we share with all employees and let them take part in, and I think that is working out quite well.
David Green: How can listeners stay in touch with you, follow you on social media and find out more about your work, but also the work of the people team at Spotify, because I believe you have a blog that your colleagues and you contribute to regularly.
Anna Lundström: Yeah, thank you, we do have, in my opinion, a really great HR blog.
We have new content almost every month.
They can follow me on LinkedIn; I'm quite active on LinkedIn, sharing a lot of our work and our observations about general HR and people trends, so I look forward to connecting more there.
David Green: Anna, thanks so much for being on the show, and I look forward to hopefully meeting in person at some point, either in Stockholm or at a conference in the not-too-distant future.
Anna Lundström: That would be lovely. Thank you so much, David; this was so great.