Seattle-based real estate tech company Redfin Corp. (Nasdaq: RDFN) is requiring employees to spend two days a week in the office starting July 11.
Employees within a 20-mile radius of Redfin's offices in Seattle, San Francisco and Frisco, Texas, will have to come in for a full day on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Employees outside the 20-mile radius will have to travel to one of the offices quarterly for a full day of meetings.
"I’ve concluded that a change is necessary to our culture. It has become clearer over the past year that the culture we’ve developed around remote work has been at best good, not great," Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman wrote in an all-staff email Sunday posted to the company's website. "As teams have changed, we haven’t been able to draw as much from our pre-pandemic relationships; it has been harder to form new relationships with people we see only in virtual meetings."
The company isn't making exceptions to the policy besides medical accommodations and will use Google Maps to determine the distance on the road from the office.
Redfin has gone through three rounds of layoffs since last June, including laying off 862 employees in November and 201 employees earlier this month. It had 5,572 employees companywide at the end of 2022.
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In-office employees can work for two weeks away from the office per year, but one week must be after September. Employees commuting will get subsidies. Employees outside the 20-mile radius will lose permanent desks unless they let the company know they plan to still come in two days a week.
Kelman acknowledged that the decision has trade-offs, such as commute times, recruiting and making remote employees feel included. Redfin plans to hire mostly employees who can work in-office, but exceptions can be made with the approval of someone on the company's operating committee.
The email also noted Redfin is facing a difficult market with high interest rates and decreased homebuying demand.
In addition to its brokered listings and home search tool, Redfin offers mortgages and a high-end home service called Redfin Premier. The company in November said it was shuttering RedfinNow, in which it bought homes directly from consumers to fix them up and sell at a profit.
Other Seattle-area companies are introducing office mandates as well.
Amazon has set May 1 as its return-to-office date but disclosed internally its Seattle-area offices won't be fully ready at that point. Starbucks, meanwhile, started requiring corporate employees to come back to the office three days a week at the end of January.
"Some people will quit over this decision, others may dislike it, but no one can say we haven’t made it deliberately. I’ve read thousands of surveys, communicated with hundreds of employees, answered all sorts of questions at meetings and on Slack, and met with nearly a dozen execs or CEOs who fell on different sides of this decision," Kelman wrote in the email to employees. "We want you to stay and to put a bit of yourself into the culture we’re building anew; we want you to thrive. But stay to make this work, not to make it fail. Regardless of how you feel about this decision, we need you to commit to it."
