It’s hard to believe, but it’s been nearly three years since the pandemic began, and we recommended that all our employees who were able to work from home do so. We subsequently updated guidance a few times, with the last guidance (in the second half of 2021) being that Director-level leaders would decide for their teams where they’d work, and we’d experiment for the next chunk of time.

Because the pandemic lasted as long as it did, we were able to observe various models—some teams working exclusively from home, some in the office full-time together, and many flavors of hybrid—over a meaningful period of time. S-team listened to employees, watched how our teams performed, talked to leaders at other companies, and got together on several occasions to discuss if and how we should adjust our approach. The guiding principle in these conversations was to prioritize what would best enable us to make customers’ lives better and easier every day, and relentlessly invent to do so. Our respective views of what we thought was optimal evolved as the pandemic wore on and then eased.