Earlier this year, Reddit had to evolve with the unexpected challenge of going 100% remote. Our employees, or Snoos as we’re known, rose to the occasion, adapting our business and the way we work together quickly to help Reddit come out stronger on the other side. Evolve is one of our company values and we have always challenged ourselves to continuously make our culture and work experience better.
Looking ahead, we want to meet the needs of our employees so they can do their best work, especially in a time of uncertainty. And as we deliver on our mission of creating belonging for everyone in the world, we want Reddit to be positioned as a workforce that’s as diverse as its ecosystem of communities and users.
Moving forward, teams and team members will have flexibility to explore where they work: in the office, remotely, or a combination of the two. There are some exceptions; we have some roles at Reddit that need to be performed from our offices or specific geographic locations, such as Facilities or IT Support. Ultimately, we empower our leaders and their teams to make those decisions, balancing the needs of the business and employees.
What does it mean in practice?
- Some team members will want to move away from a Reddit office and if they can be effective while remote, we will be supportive of the move—and won’t adjust their compensation down (we’ll talk more about that in a bit).
- Reddit will be able to find and hire more amazing talent wherever they live, opening up more meaningful opportunities for diversity.
- And our leaders will create virtual and in-person (once it’s safe to do so) interactions to build culture and foster trust, collaboration, and innovation among their teams and across Reddit.
What about employee compensation?
To help drive the idea home (pun intended), we’ve reimagined our approach to compensation in the US. To support employees to live where they want to and do their best work, we are eliminating geographic compensation zones in the US. It means that our US compensation will be tied to pay ranges of high-cost areas such as SF and NY, regardless of where employees live. We believe this is the right balance of flexibility and support for employees, recognizing the varied tradeoffs people consider when deciding where to live. Internationally, we have had one pay range per country, and now the US will be consistent with this approach.
And offices? Culture? The proverbial “water cooler”?
We are reimagining the future of our office space to support those team members who will be in the office 1-5 days per week. Imagine: casual and coffee shop-style seating, private space for heads-down focusing, larger bookable resources and collaboration spaces for teams to strategically meet IRL, and no more fixed desks—we’ll have neighborhoods for teams to gather and bookable desks for employees working in the office.
To make this all work, we are focusing on creating processes, workflows, and a culture that supports employees being distributed and remote to drive productivity and build connection, belonging, trust, and alignment.
What are the benefits of this approach?
There are many upsides to this approach, across talent attraction, retention, diversity, inclusion, belonging, and more. We believe that providing more flexibility will increase our ability to:
- Attract top talent by not requiring people to relocate and increase the diversity of our workforce in the process.
- Drive employee engagement and productivity by meeting our Snoos’ needs.
- Manage existing office space more efficiently to foster collaboration and connection.
There are some downsides, of course, like not being physically together as frequently, but we’re confident that by leaning into creating meaningful moments of connection and doubling down on processes to support a more distributed workforce, the pros will greatly outweigh the cons.
As our teams become more distributed, we will have many learnings about the impact of this model on our performance as a business. We will not be afraid to continuously adapt and evolve our workforce philosophies, programs, and processes. 2020 is an unprecedented year, and we strongly believe that for the foreseeable future, providing flexible work arrangements to our current and future Snoos is the right thing to do for Reddit.