From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.

HR Brew

Adam DeRose

hr-brew.com

image of a white collar worker sitting at a desk in a red chair and an ball and chain attached to his ankle

What HR should consider before mandating RTO

As companies create plans to call workers back to the office, HR leaders should contemplate these factors to help execs make the right call. 

Kristen Parisi

How to close an office

Not every company can auction things off like Twitter.

Reducing office space can be a complicated process, but it doesn’t have to be

Sam Blum

Two hands playing tug of war with a piece for rope. 

Andreessen Horowitz thinks the future of work is remote

The HR tech stack needs to be ‘reimagined with remote work at its core,’ one investor says. 

Remote workplace tech is raking in investment, but bosses have other ideas

computers hooked up to a building with United States cut out

Remote work

Global employment and payroll platform, Remote, launched a new HR information system (HRIS) this week designed specifically for remote-first teams operating across international borders.

The move comes as more companies look to hire overseas, according to its own 2024

, which found that 71% of employers have “recruited outside their national borders” in the last year. The release of Remote HRIS marks a significant expansion for the global payroll platform, which has been providing employer of record (EOR) and payroll services since 2019.

“It’s literally everything you need to do administration for…the life cycle of an employee,” said Remote cofounder and CEO Job van der Voort, pointing to onboarding tools for background checks and verification, contracts and agreements, and device management; solutions for employees like managing PTO or public holidays in different countries, time tracking, shift management; and finally, help with managing employee exits whether they quit, retire, or are fired.

Remote HRIS integrates directly with Remote’s current suite and aims to help HR teams manage their entire employee lifecycle within a single system regardless of their country of origin. The platform also supports integrations with thousands of additional enterprise platforms, according to the company.

Van der Voort told HR Brew that Remote engineered the HRIS to address unique needs encountered in global employment with country-specific support to navigate labor laws and tax regulations. In doing so, the company isI leaning on its global expertise rather than retrofitting an existing US-based system for international use.

“We want to build foundational technology and foundational infrastructure—and infrastructure really is like people, experts, the ability to do payments in a particular country,” he said. “As an employer of record, we had to build the whole stack: payments, payroll, compliance, benefits, everything. It’s a whole lot of other things as well, including—I have on my desk—several different stamps for different countries.”

The evolution of its EOR services into an HRIS platform made sense for van der Voort. Remote’s direct ownership over its international HR infrastructure helps companies ensure their employment is both locally compliant and globally consistent.

For Globl.Contact, the international customer care and business services firm, its international mission would have been near impossible without the aid of Remote. The German-based company employs native German speakers all across the world, but its hiring needs span across dozens of countries with different requirements and policies.

“It was clear from the very early days that we would not only find the right talent in Germany, even if the German language was our priority,” said founder and CEO Kai Czeschlik. “But we know that there are native Germans all around the world.”

Globl.Contact employs more than 600 people across dozens of different countries in order to deliver for its customers.

“There are 20,000 Germans living in Brazil,” he said. “We would have needed an entity in Brazil to employ them, under Brazilian law, with the Brazilian Social Security tax, etc.”

In order to have the appropriate presence across different countries, Globl.Contact began working with Remote to enable it to operate abroad.

“We started in one or two countries, mainly in Europe, but as of now, we are in 27 countries around the world,” Czeschlik said.

A person in a suit points to an illustration of the globe with people scattered throughout.

Global payroll platform Remote launches full HRIS

The company aims to help others build international teams at scale.

Mikaela Cohen

When executive coach at TLS Leaders, Loren Margolis, invited a client to a Zoom meeting in 2018, they asked why she wanted to go to a Zumba class.

Nowadays, it may be hard to imagine anyone mistaking “Zoom” for “Zumba”—almost as hard as it may be to fathom any workplace operating without help from one of the most widely-used video conferencing platforms in the world.

Zoom (then called Saasbee) was founded in 2011 by Eric Yuan, a former engineer at Cisco’s Webex, with the mission to bring “human connection” to the virtual workspace, all while helping companies cut the time and cost associated with having employees travel to meet with clients and coworkers in other cities, Aparna Bawa, Zoom’s COO, told HR Brew.

With $9 million in funding from investors including Webex founder Subrah Iyar, Yuan and his team of 40 engineers spent two years developing the platform before releasing it to the public in 2013. By September 2013, Zoom had garnered 3 million “meeting participants” and 4,500 enterprise customers, and by 2017, it had raised $100 million in funding at a $1 billion valuation. The company went public in April 2019 at a $15.9 billion valuation.

One year later, the Covid-19 pandemic would create the conditions for Zoom’s business to skyrocket—in just one day in April 2020 the platform saw 300 million meeting participants, reported 470,000 enterprise customers for the same year, and a $72.4 billion valuation. Its influence followed. The company is currently valued at $22.4 billion at the time of publication.

Virtual meetings in the early 2000s were “awful,” Carina Cortez, chief people officer at software company Cornerstone, told HR Brew.

There was often static in the audio and a lag in the video. And employees, Cortez recalled, would complain, “I don’t like seeing myself on the screen,” and worry if their “hair looks okay.” But the “initial weirdness” soon subsided, and as the technology improved and companies expanded their global workforces, she said videoconferencing became a normal way to conduct business.

“Even before the pandemic, it was this idea that video was becoming very normal,” said Bawa, who joined Zoom in 2018 as its chief legal officer. “Before Zoom, we had the conference call…[but Zoom] just made it much more personal. You can see my face. You can see my expression, you know how I’m feeling…It’s a much more personal connection.”

That’s why Margolis, who's also leadership faculty at Stony Brook University, chose Zoom over other videoconferencing platforms of the early 2010s, including Skype and Webex. Margolis said Zoom was easy to use, and she could still make a human connection with clients, which was crucial as she was starting her coaching business, TLS Leaders, in 2015.

“As someone who has to work so closely with the people element in working with leaders on how to use empathy, how to lead better, how to engage their employees better, you have to have something where you could almost reach across the screen, like you’re almost there in person,” Margolis said.

Zoom experienced a seemingly overnight surge in popularity in March 2020, when the World Health Organization declared Covid-19 a pandemic. One day, employees were in the office five days a week, and the next, millions were home, trying to figure out how to virtually connect without much, if any, experience.

At the time, Cortez was Glassdoor’s chief people officer, and while she said she was “fortunate” that she and her workforce could work from home, there were hurdles. Some of her employees, especially those early in their careers, didn’t have a quiet space to work remotely. In addition to providing employees with noise-canceling headphones, she said Glassdoor issued company-branded Zoom backgrounds, so they didn’t have to worry about what was going on in their backgrounds.

Margolis, meanwhile, said she became known as “a Zoom subject matter expert.” She went from coaching clients on leadership for the in-person workplace to the virtual one.

“A lot of organizations that I worked with, and still work with, their focus then became, could you teach our leaders [and] could you teach our employees how to use the digital body language?” Margolis said. “It was a combination of helping people use this new way of communicating and connecting with others.”

Once employees became familiar with the technology, Margolis said companies would ask her to teach their HR teams to maintain influence virtually and help managers promote inclusion—skills that didn’t inherently transfer from the in-person to virtual workplace, she said.

 While Zoom has helped workforces communicate and collaborate from afar, Margolis said the platform has also helped bring about an “acceptance of imperfection.” Zoom calls give employees a glimpse into the professional, and personal, lives of their colleagues, and the blurring of those lines has enabled more authenticity.

“You started to see people’s messy houses. You started to hear their babies crying in the background, or you started to hear their partner, or their spouse, or their roommate on their own videoconference call,” she said. “This emergence of imperfection, where that perfect picture of your life disappeared and people’s real lives emerged. Warts and all.”

Margolis recalled examples of this phenomenon, including one when a lawyer couldn’t figure out how to remove a cat filter from his screen during a Zoom 

While many employers have since mandated a return to the office, workers still use Zoom—the company boasts 192,600 enterprise customers. HR leaders, Margolis said, will play an integral role in setting “the rules of engagement” for how they communicate and get work done going forward.

“Here are some appropriate times to have virtual meetings. Here’s when an email suffices. Here’s when it should be in person,” Margolis said. “That’s such a great role for someone who is a leader in HR…because people need guidance in that now.”

Zoom founder Eric Yuan speaks before the Nasdaq opening bell ceremony on April 18, 2019 in New York City. (Credit: Kena Betancur/Getty Images)

How work has evolved since the dawn of Zoom

The word “Zoom” is part of the lexicon of every employee in corporate America, but the videoconferencing giant has changed more than just vocabulary.

Hybrid work arrangements are often touted as the best of both worlds, but even they can present some 

That’s why financial services company Prudential Financial is trying to give its hybrid employees even more flexibility. The majority of the company’s roughly 13,000 US-based corporate employees work in one of its 145 offices two to three days a week. But in January 2024, the Newark, New Jersey-headquartered firm soft launched its Work from Anywhere (WFA) program, allowing these employees to work from any location for four weeks a year.

“We are a company and a culture of respect and inclusion, and this flexibility, specifically in ensuring that our employees were feeling supported as they were coming back to work, was really important to us,” Nya Patel, the company’s VP of culture and inclusion, told HR Brew.

In anticipation of its consistent hybrid work policy at the start of 2024, Patel said Prudential wanted to give its employees something in return, and landed on flexibility.

“We started this program as a pilot last year, as we thought about giving that flexibility to our employees,” Patel said.

When employees want to take advantage of the program, they discuss it with their managers in their one-on-one meetings. Patel said she hopes to eventually adopt a formal request process, like that which the company uses for PTO and volunteer days.

Some employees have tacked a WFA week onto their PTO to maximize flexibility. Patel said she’s done this herself: After traveling to Costa Rica last year to vacation and volunteer at an animal rescue, she used a WFA week to visit family in Texas on her way home to New Jersey.

Kate McKeon, a director of culture and inclusion at Prudential, utilized WFA in January alongside two of her colleagues, Sam O’Mara, a talent management manager, and Rosauri Rodriguez, an inclusive recruitment manager. The three, who are based on the East Coast, convened in San Diego, California for two weeks of coworking, during which they joined meetings by the beach and bonded over after-work walks with O’Mara’s dogs.

“Being in a different setting and place allowed us to have more of those conversations of being creative and thinking about things differently that sometimes in your day-to-day [and] in meetings, and out getting things done, that you don’t necessarily have that time for,” McKeon told HR Brew. McKeon, like Patel, said she plans to take another WFA week around the same time as some PTO for a family beach trip.

 One year in, Patel said she’s excited about the program’s progress and potential.

“It was this test and learn, and we actually didn’t know how this was going to go, and having heard all of these exciting stories from our employees and creative ways in which people are using it now, this is the year where we really have to think about, how do we think a little bit bigger?” Patel said. “How do we get creative about it? How do we add a little bit more structure around it that helps support our employees even further?”

Patel’s advice for other HR pros starting a similar program: “It all comes down to your core values as a company,” she said. “If you believe that your employees need the flexibility to do their best work, which we do, I think that then everything is driven from that.”

Prudential sign and building at its headquarters in New Jersey.

Why Prudential Financial lets its employees work from anywhere for four weeks each year

Prudential’s VP of culture and inclusion, Nya Patel tells HR Brew that the company’s Work from Anywhere program gives employees more flexibility.

While more and more companies are implementing 

 RTOs, some employees are continuing to work from home.

More than one-fourth (26.8%) of workers whose companies require in-person attendance report doing “some work” remotely on Friday, 

 to WFH Research’s latest Survey of Working Arrangements and Attitudes (SWAA). Anywhere from 9.3% to 17.6% said the same for the remaining workweek.

Despite “chatter” around RTOs, and large employers like Amazon and JPMorgan remaining bullish on in-person work, the average amount of time spent working remotely hasn’t changed much in the last few years, Jose Maria Barrero, an assistant professor of finance at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México’s business school in Mexico City and co-founder of WFH Research, told HR Brew.

The percentage of “paid full days worked from home” has hovered around 25% to 30% between January 2022 and February 2025, the SWAA survey found.

This is especially true for knowledge and white-collar workers. Due to the nature of their jobs, many had some flexibility before the pandemic necessitated remote work, Barrero said. So seeing them continuing to do some work at home “isn’t particularly new.”

“People who come into the office regularly have always done work at home to some extent,” he said.

Now, feel free to return your regularly scheduled programming of bouncing between your office, home office, and coffee shop down the street.

Two office workers sit far apart in a room full of empty desks.

Five-day RTO mandates haven’t stopped employees from working remotely

Despite “chatter” around RTOs, the average amount of time employees spend working from home hasn’t dramatically declined.

As HR pros await the verdict in the case of flexible v. in-person work, many are 

 it’ll involve dropping the one-size-fits-all approach.

Business leaders often cite wanting to improve employee collaboration, connectivity, innovation, mentorship, and skill development as reasons to RTO, but a recent 

 from consulting firm McKinsey suggests these goals can be achieved no matter where employees work.

“We can’t just bring people back to the office, and changing nothing else, assume that all of a sudden we get collaboration, or all of a sudden we get connectivity,” Bryan Hancock, a partner at McKinsey, told HR Brew. “It does require practical actions of leaders and of managers to make that happen.”

 Despite many CEOs, like JPMorgan’s Jamie Dimon and Amazon’s Andy Jassy, pushing in-office work for collaboration, only 49% of mostly in-person employees reported feeling collaborative, compared to 51% and 55% for mostly remote and hybrid employees, respectively.

Collaboration, Hancock said, comes down to the environment in which employees work, not the number of days they’re in an office. Employers interested in improving collaboration in the office should ensure there are enough desks, dedicated meeting rooms, and flexible spaces, as well as quiet areas for solo work, he recommended.

 disengagement have taken a toll on workplace relationships, with some employees 

 seeking them out, but McKinsey’s data shows most employees still feel some level of connectivity. Some 72% of hybrid employees reported feeling connected to colleagues, while 66% of mostly in-person and 65% mostly remote employees feel the same.

If employees feel disconnected from their peers, Hancock said HR can help by prompting managers to facilitate connection through one-on-one meetings and collaboration opportunities.

 in-person work doesn’t automatically lead to innovation. Only 47% of mostly in-person workers reported feeling innovative, trailing behind 51% and 54% of mostly remote and hybrid employees, McKinsey found.

As with connectedness, Hancock said managers can help improve innovation by “setting the direction, making the ideas come together, and then making sure that team members have the time and space to execute on the new innovative idea.”

Learning and development opportunities can be a 

 recruitment and retention strategy. And they happen to need the most improvement across each work model. Only 52% of hybrid workers reported having L&D access, a percentage that drops to 45% and 43% for mostly in-person and remote employees.

“What we’re seeing across modes is individual employees saying that they would like to see more investment in learning opportunities,” Hancock said. He recommended HR create intentional mentorship opportunities between “novice and expert” employees, and an “apprenticeship culture,” by encouraging employees to learn on the job through coworkers and training programs.

 No matter how a company chooses to work, Hancock said, each of these areas will continue to need improvement.

“We see organizations that we’re working with that are being quite thoughtful on this, thinking through both: What are the underlying management practices that we want to change? And then how do we make sure that our physical environment is making that happen? And if we need to change the physical environment, let’s invest in changing it,” he said.

RTO mandates are not leading to more collaboration, connectivity, or innovation

“We can’t just bring people back to the office, and changing nothing else, assume that all of a sudden we get collaboration, or all of a sudden we get connectivity,” a McKinsey partner tells HR Brew.

Since starting his second term, President Donald Trump has made many swift changes.

On his first day, he signed a flurry of executive orders, 

 HR and the workplace. One in particular 

 remote work in the federal workforce, requiring all employees to work in their respective offices five days a week.

More than half (54%) of the federal government’s 2.3 million “civilian” employees already work in person, NPR 

While the mandate only extends to federal workers, it could send a signal to private-sector employers about how they can handle an RTO.

“There is definitely this polarizing trend where we go from one extreme to the other, and now we’re on this other pendulum side of the extreme,” said Susan Leger Ferraro, founder and chief curiosity officer of professional training and coaching firm G3 Works.

By issuing an executive order, Trump is taking an “authoritarian” approach to RTO, Ferraro told HR Brew. “[The administration is saying] ‘You’re going to do what I say you’re going to do, and I don’t care,’” she said.

This may signal to executives that they can do the same, she said, abandoning the authentic, transparent leadership style that has recently become commonplace in corporate America.

Even before Trump’s RTO mandate, companies like 

 had called their workers back to the office, despite some experts’ suggestion that hybrid 

 can achieve the best of both remote and in-person arrangements.

 as a reason for an RTO. The Trump administration, meanwhile, has been 

 that its requirement is intended to reduce headcount and, by extension, costs.

This may be a motivating factor for employers looking “to weed out resources,” Sujay Saha, an employee experience strategist and founder of consulting firm Cortico-X, told HR Brew.

Leaders should remember that while an RTO may solve some problems, Saha said it can also create new ones, especially for employees. “It’s been four years, so people have figured out new ways of how they handle certain things,” he said, adding that his company is 100% remote.

Executives committed to an office return should be honest and clear with employees about their reasoning, even if it’s a “brutal reality,” Saha said. And given the seismic effects such a transition can have on employees’ lives, he also recommended being compassionate and understanding, giving, for example, “mental adjustment time” so they can “take care of their lives before you change them.”

The US Capitol Building in Washington, DC.

How the federal government’s RTO may affect corporate America

President Trump’s approach to RTO in the federal government may trickle down into the private sector.

Return-to-office mandates continue to feel like high-level math equations that even the business world’s brightest can’t solve.

 are among the most recent companies to require a full-time RTOs. But some of these mandates have faced obstacles, including a lack of office space and dissatisfied employees.

Amazon, for example, said in September, it wanted its 350,000-person workforce in the office by early January. As of February, many of their offices didn’t have 

 to accommodate the return, leaving many employees continuing working from home. AT&T had a similar 

. In response to JPMorgan’s RTO mandate, employees expressed their outrage on an internal 

. The company then disabled comments. Some 

 workers have also signed petitions protesting their employers’ requirements.

What’s missing from some of these RTO plans is the recognition of a cultural change, said Jennifer Moss, workplace strategist and author of 

Why Are We Here?: Creating a Work Culture Everyone Wants

. The post-pandemic workplace should combine lessons from the pre-pandemic and pandemic-era models, she said.

“When we’re trying to get people back into the office, we still are executing the office in the same way that it used to be,” Moss told HR Brew. “We just can’t jam the toothpaste back in the tube.”

Improved collaboration, culture, and productivity are often cited as reasons for an RTO, Moss said, but being in the office won’t necessarily help employees achieve these goals.

“People are going into the office, unfortunately, it feels very much like what it feels like to be at home,” she said. “You’re still on Zoom, and you’re still spending your day doing the exact same things you could be doing at home. It feels very arbitrary.”

To facilitate this new era of work, employers should embrace a model Moss called “the third office.” Instead of “pushing” for employees to go back to pre-pandemic norms, she said, employers should consider how they can incorporate the benefits of remote work, like autonomy and flexibility. To that end, a hybrid approach, she said, typically works best.

Moss also urged mindfulness around how the physical office space can affect employees. If a company doesn’t have enough desks, for example, she said HR leaders should rethink how employees work in the office, and create quiet or collaborative spaces outside of the open floor plan.

“The [third office] is a place where you have challenging discussions, where you learn to network, develop soft skills, be able to have team building, build up that social energy and that cohesion,” she said, adding that these activities were undervalued pre-pandemic and lost during the pandemic, and should be part of this new era.

Eventually, however, companies that require five days in the office should offer employees their own dedicated workspace, Moss said. It may seem simple, but being able to personalize a desk is something that, she said, may help employees feel more connected to their workplace.

Identify and communicate the play-by-play. 

Some executives want RTO to alleviate their own “trust issues,” without considering how it might affect employees, according to John Frehse, the global head of labor strategy at consulting firm Ankura.

“You only trust me when I’m in the office. You don’t trust me when I’m at home. What kind of a worker and employer relationship are we dealing with?” Frehse told HR Brew.

Sujay Saha, an employee experience strategist and founder of consulting firm Cortico-X, emphasized the need for a plan. “Don’t make the decision and then try to figure it out, how do I make that decision happen for people…that is the biggest problem in a lot of this,” Saha said. He suggested HR start by identifying employees’ “personas,” like whether they’re working parents or belong to the sandwich generation. This can give HR a sense of employees’ needs and schedules, which can help inform what kind of RTO might make sense.

“There are pros and cons in all of this, so the most important thing that we can tackle is how we do it,” Saha said. “Maybe there is a pace at which you could do it…Reduce the pace and give people that mental adjustment time that is needed genuinely, to take care of their lives before you change [their lives].”

Frehse also advised against focusing an RTO announcement on the enforcement and repercussions of not following the mandate. Instead, communicate the steps and value-add for professional growth.

“It’s both culturally and intellectually lazy to announce a certain number of days of return to office each week, without listing in heavy detail the reasons why—not just benefits for the business, but the benefits for the employee,” he said.

Saha agreed. “Don’t do it, just for the heck of doing it…Be clear about why you’re doing it.”

An office cubicle desk split with an at home desk setup.