‘The Tyranny of Geography’

Zillow Group made a bold move in the summer of 2020 when it announced that most of its employees would work from home at least part of the time “indefinitely.”

The Seattle-based real estate tech company was one of the first in the United States to adopt a “permanently flexible” workplace. Today, the bulk of its 5,800 employees now work remotely, freed from what Zillow calls “the tyranny of geography.” Zillow has since dubbed the workplace-policy shift “Cloud HQ.”

Globally, 16% of companies are now fully remote, according to a study by videoconference device manufacturer Owl Labs. A study by Stanford University found that remote workers were 13% more productive than those in an office.

Though the pandemic forced Zillow (and others) toward remote work, the company increasingly finds that a cloud-based model gives it a competitive advantage.

“We saw an opportunity for us to improve our workplace and improve the flexibility that employees had really been asking for in different ways, I think for a long time,” says Chief People Officer Dan Spaulding. “That’s where we really came to this concept of Cloud HQ, and we went from being headquartered in Seattle and anchored to 11 offices (around the country) to having employees (across the nation).”

As of the end of 2022, 82% of Zillow’s 5,800 employees — including 1,600 in Washington — said they expect to work only once a month or less from one of the company’s office locations across the country. Prepandemic, only 2% of Zillow’s workforce was fully remote. Now only 2% work primarily from an office. More than two-thirds are fully remote.

Even more striking: Women now comprise almost half the company’s workforce, and the percentage of workers identifying as BIPOC is also higher. “In terms of women, it’s the single largest demographic shift I have seen in my entire corporate career in the first year of this policy,” Spaulding notes.

Zillow employees still gather for collaborative meetings as needed at the company’s corporate office space in downtown Seattle and elsewhere around the country for what Zillow leadership refers to as Z-retreats. The gatherings are focused on connecting face-to-face, relationship-building, and improving team dynamics, “with a central focus on fun and interactivity.”

“I think that there’s always going to be a meaningful need for people to come together and do the things that drive businesses forward,” Spaulding says. “We’re saying to our employees that we are giving you flexibility over 95% of your days, but the days that we say it’s really important that a team gets together to work through an important project, we do want you to prioritize that.”

The company also prioritizes remote and virtual meeting time as well through what it calls core collaboration hours — 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. Pacific Time.

“We talk about the tyranny of geography, but we also can talk about the tyranny of ineffective meetings,” Spaulding says. “Core-collaboration (time) is our way to meet the flexibility needs (of the entire workforce spread across multiple time zones), and it forces radical prioritization of how people connect.”

Spaulding admits that Cloud HQ and the permanently flexible workforce is a project in motion that Zillow is still working to perfect. But it appears the company is getting far more right than wrong in its vision. Business drives company culture, and “your culture drives your business,” he adds.

“When we get our culture right, the business tends to follow,” Spaulding says. “We’re continuing to feel really positive about the investment that we’re making into Cloud HQ. So far, in the last three years, we have found that it is keeping that virtuous cycle moving forward.”