Yelp’s chief people officer explains why the company is sticking with remote work

In recent weeks, companies including Meta, Google, and Citigroup have all tightened their return-to-office policies. But Yelp has zigged where other firms have zagged.

Carmen Whitney Orr, Yelp’s chief people officer, announced in a June 1 blog post that the tech platform would close offices in Phoenix, Arizona, and Hamburg, Germany, due to low utilization. This follows last year’s closure of offices in New York, Chicago, and Washington, DC, after co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman said Yelp would embrace a “fully remote” workplace.

“Overwhelmingly here, employees just voted with their feet,” Orr told HR Brew. In her June blog post, she noted Yelp’s Phoenix and Hamburg offices had seen a combined utilization rate of less than 6% over the last month.

“And if you only have a handful of folks utilizing your office, there’s a much better way to make use of those investments in real estate,” Orr said.

Yelp is keeping offices in San Francisco, London, and Toronto open for the time being, Orr said, as their utilization rates are higher. But the company remains confident that its employees are just as—if not more—productive working from home.

How Yelp measures remote success. Orr cited Yelp’s most recent earnings as evidence that a remote-first approach is working for the company. The company reported record net revenue of $312 million for the sixth quarter in a row this March, beating analysts’ estimates by 2.19%, though it also recorded a loss of almost $1.2 million in the first quarter.

Orr also said product velocity—referring to how quickly a company releases new products or features—is higher than it’s been in recent years. In April, Yelp announced a series of new features, including a search experience incorporating artificial intelligence and large language models, as well as immersive video for reviews.

Beyond business results, Orr said, employee sentiment data shows Yelp employees continue to overwhelmingly favor remote work, and the flexibility has helped boost recruitment.

Between 2019 and 2022, “the applicant pool for sales roles increased by 25%, and for [general and administrative] roles by 200%. And over that same time period, we saw a reduction in the time to fill our jobs by six days,” Orr said.

“We also know that underrepresented minorities even more strongly prefer remote work,” she said, referring to research that suggests queer employees or employees of color are more comfortable working remotely. “So, that’s important to us, as well, in terms of being able to recruit diverse talent.”

Data on remote work and productivity isn’t all rosy. While a remote-first approach is working for some companies, researchers are still trying to understand what effect it has on productivity.

A working paper published in 2021 by two doctoral students at Harvard initially found call center workers for an online retailer were more productive when working remotely, with the number of calls handled per hour by employees increasing by almost 8% in a remote environment. But a revised version of the paper published in May actually documented a 4% decline in productivity, the Economist noted, after the researchers received more detailed data on the employees’ schedules. Several other recent studies have also documented a decline in productivity for remote workers, the magazine noted, including one among employees of an online travel agency in China.

Even as many companies keep hybrid work schedules, “the balance of the workweek is likely to tilt back to the office and away from home,” the Economist predicted, “because better productivity lies in that direction.”