Christian Sutherland-Wong, CEO of Glassdoor, the largest job search website in the United States, revealed in a recent interview that the company will immediately close its remaining offices in Chicago and San Francisco and sublease these offices because "it will redouble its efforts in the future to become a remote work-first company."
Glassdoor transitioned to fully remote operations on March 3, 2020, when its San Francisco Bay Area headquarters was one of the first areas in the country to feel the surge in COVID-19. Wong recalls: “Like other companies, we were very pleasantly surprised to find that working from home was still very efficient. Before this, we were basically an office company; we believed that we needed to work together face-to-face and work together.”
And once that belief proved unfounded, Glassdoor never looked back. "Our [remote work] is very efficient, employees love it, and it really opens up the talent pool to people we've never had access to before," Wong said. "So it's been an incredible catalyst for us to recruit talent."
Wong acknowledges that office work is still unmatched in terms of the ability to learn by osmosis and connect with superiors. "I'm going to be frank, our embrace of remote (working) has not been perfect," he said. "We certainly have trade-offs with being remote when it comes to the joy of being face-to-face every day, and I also think the informal learning opportunities that come with just being around colleagues — we have to deal with those trade-offs."
"We haven't fully addressed that gap yet, but we're confident that with a more concerted effort we can go a long way toward addressing it very well and making sure that managers really know their people and know that things may be missing," he said.