Hybrid work is here to stay – Envoy CEO

NEW YORK: Larry Gadea, CEO of the workplace platform Envoy, founded his company a decade ago to solve inefficiencies around front desk management. When the Covid-19 pandemic shut down offices, the San Francisco-based company had to adapt fast.

Envoy’s services are used in 16,000 offices around the world by clients including Slack and Lululemon. The company raised $111 million in new funding last year that brought its valuation to $1.4 billion.

“It’s now about bringing them together on similar days and having teams organize each other and allowing the flexibility and the hybrid portion of it all… There’s an app where you can see the availability of things, and you don’t have to walk around in circles in the office for 20 minutes trying to find a room,” Gadea told Associated Press (AP).

“Internally, people were like, ‘Is this still a business?’ ‘Will this still work?’ I had to give the confidence that yes, obviously it will work, look at all these things, but I don’t know the future either, nobody does. It’s a very tricky thing to balance,” he added.

Gadea admitted they are one of those companies to bring people back as things gradually went back to normal and it was not easy having tried many approaches.

“Our policy is three days a week, and those days are specifically Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. We don’t want people randomly picking days because when they randomly pick a day, everybody picks a random day, which means that on average, the office is pretty empty,” he said.

“One of the things we’ve noticed over time is that it really sucks to just give a whole bunch of downsides to not coming into the office, like, ‘your performance reviews will be impacted,’ ‘we’re going to be looking at the numbers,’ ‘we’re going to be turning off Zoom.’ That kind of stuff is not very great, and it’s a very negative way of dealing with it. For what it’s worth, with all policies, there’s always a plus and a minus. But one of the things that we were really pushing ourselves to think about is what positive reinforcement can we do… So, they have to do at least three days, but for the teams that actually do it, they will get a day off the following month,” he added.

Gadea concluded that hybrid work will remain, but something will change.

“Companies were already aggressively trying to do this kind of thing. I think this just makes it easier. One thing that will change, and will be very clear, is the data collection in all of this stuff. Knowing which teams are in which days and planning for that and seeing the trends among all your 100 offices — not just your HQ — is the really big part and the part that is really changing,” he said.