The billionaire Irish cofounders of payments company Stripe have sounded a cautionary tone in the widespread return-to-office debate, questioning a policy shift that seeks to cater to a company’s worst employees, while arguing remote work might help address a crucial productivity barrier in the U.S.
The remote vs. in-office debate turned another corner last month, when JPMorgan Chase announced its approximately 317,000 employees would be forced to return to the office full-time starting in March. In a feisty town hall, CEO Jamie Dimon lashed out at remote work, alleging “the abuse that took place was extraordinary,” while dismissing a petition against the RTO mandate.
JPMorgan employee Nicolas Welch told Fortune he was fired from the company after raising concerns about the mandate with Dimon in the town hall. However, JPMorgan denies this.
One pair unlikely to be found in a similar adversarial situation around remote work are Stripe’s cofounders, Patrick and John Collison. Stripe employs just over 8,000 people, with a sizable 40% minority thought to be remote.
Reacting on the All-In podcast to the leaked audio of Dimon addressing employees about his full return-to-office mandate, Patrick and John gave their take on the debate.
“Working remotely has had a bunch of benefits where there's a way larger talent pool available to companies,” John told the podcast. He touched on the potential knock-on effects of enabling this talent pool to work from anywhere, and how it might help address the sociological phenomenon of the "two-body problem."
“You see kind of the two-body problem, where it allows a lot of couples, where maybe one partner is assigned to some hospital in Idaho, and they don't get to choose what hospital necessarily they got assigned to, and the other person gets to work a high-paying tech job.”
His brother Patrick elaborated: “I think one of the theories for declining dynamism in the U.S. and declining TFP [total factor productivity] is that allocative efficiency of people declined as women entered the workforce because now you have…this two-body problem where both people have to make coordinated switches…and remote work solves that.”
Stripe remains a remote holdout
Stripe has been a rare holdout against a broader remote-work pullback, with an estimated 40% of employees working remotely last year. Its cofounders have resisted landing firmly on either side of the debate, though, indicating it should be down to the context of each company.
Last year, Patrick described himself as a “misanthropic introvert” who would still rather be a “cave dweller,” and it was only his seniority that meant he felt the need to work in an office. He is glad Stripe still provides people like him with the opportunity to work remotely.
John suggested a lot of the backlash to remote work was coming from a subset of online culture toward the practice, which generated phrases like “quiet quitting” and boosted the popular “anti-work” subreddit, where users would boast about slacking off or working more than two jobs without the watchful eye of their bosses. He said bosses' responses of widespread RTO mandates to correct for those behaviors were a mistake.
“You don't want to design your policies around like the bottom 5% of the company; that would be a horrible mistake. You want to design your policies against the top talent, and we have some outrageously productive remote people and they're off, again, in a cabin in Idaho somewhere just coding up a storm.”
As a transatlantic enterprise, Stripe did lots of remote hiring when it was expanding, even prior to COVID-19, in order to, as John says, gain access to the best talent. As a result, though, it was able to identify one subset that remote work didn’t benefit before others caught on: early career workers.
“We could actually measure in our productivity data before the whole discussion about remote work happened during COVID, and it's bad from a work point of view, it's also just bad from a personal point of view, where they go mad,” John said of graduate workers, before being interrupted by All-In host Jason Calacanis, who compared it to solitary confinement.
