How Wish Makes Hybrid and Remote Models Work for Employees

As part of Wish’s flexible work plan, its over 1,000 employees have the option to fully return to the office, work from home, or a hybrid of both. Here, Wish’s Employer Branding & Talent Communications Manager, Monica Kielawa, speaks with Milan Kim, Wish’s Senior Workplace Manager, and Shawn Pfunder, Senior Employee Communications Manager, to learn more about how the company is embracing a flexible working model and how remote employees are kept engaged and connected.

Monica: Tell us a little about Wish’s hybrid/remote work model.
Milan: Wish employees have the flexibility to come into one of our open offices or they can choose to be fully remote and work from home. The choice is between the individuals, managers, and teams to establish what will work best for them. We currently have our San Francisco, Toronto, and Amsterdam offices open for those who want to come in.

Monica: How are you encouraging employees to utilize the office?
Milan: We are currently still working to overcome the challenge of encouraging employees to utilize the office more. One of the ways we are doing this is by streamlining communication to promote the on-site offerings we have such as:

• Established core working office hours for anyone who wants to work in an office for either full or half days.
• Technology for seamless desk and conference room reservations. Employees can utilize the office for a desk, book a conference room for meetings, or reserve collaboration space for team offsites.
• We offer snacks, beverages, and lunch from Tuesday through Thursday.
• We host a social hour every other Wednesday to continue building relationships and showcasing our culture.

Monica: How does Wish keep remote workers aligned with the company culture?
Shawn: More often than not, we create it from the bottom up — not the other way around. Good leaders listen and amplify what’s working and what resonates with people. Discussion and dialogue create a company culture. Collaboration creates culture.

With that in mind, here’s what we’ve been doing at Wish:

Variable all-hands meetings.
We hold company-wide meetings every other week and adjust the time to accommodate employees around the world. No one should feel like they’re not important enough to interact live with the CEO and executive team — even if that means the executive team is at work until 8 PM to be available to our global employee base.

Conduct AMAs as frequently as possible.
Our bi-weekly, company-wide meetings try to dedicate at least 30 minutes for questions that employees can ask in person, online, or anonymously. No question is a bad question. The Q&A portion is a chance for employees to learn about our leaders, other teams, and the company.

Measure employee NPS.
We ask employees if they would recommend Wish as a place to work each month. We report our employee NPS scores and share feedback with everyone. Based on that feedback, leaders meet with their teams and present their plans to improve.

Keep open office hours.
We have open office hours when something important happens (product announcements, big campaigns, open enrollment, employee reviews, policy changes). They’re online meetings that anyone can join and ask questions. Sometimes we get hundreds of people in an open office session, and sometimes we get five. Either way, it helps employees stay connected and informed, and it helps leadership know what’s important to our employees.

Meet employees where they are.
As much as we want to dictate where employees go for connection and information (it’s less work for us), we meet our employees where they are. We use meetings, Slack, and email to communicate. We don’t demand they use one tool or visit a website to figure out what’s happening. Most of our employees end up using the same method to get answers, but they get there on their own.

Ditch corporate posturing.
We speak and write like a human, not a scholarly article. We encourage people to be themselves, not their manager, or corporate version.

Tell more employee stories.
This is a new project for us. We share employee stories publically, but we believe that consistently telling authentic stories will humanize leadership and sincerely connect employees who would otherwise never have met each other. It makes collaboration easier. That way at a meeting, for example, someone might say, “Oh yeah. I know you. You’re the woman from Idaho who collects old-school lunchboxes. That’s rad. This is going to be a fun project to work on together.”

Monica: What are some of the challenges remote workers face now that there’s less time for office-bred culture and team bonding?
Shawn: When we meet a lot of other employees in the office or at an event, we’re reminded that we’re part of a bigger team. This doesn’t quite work over video. If 500 people are in a meeting, we may only see a handful of them on the screen at one time.

Diversity breeds innovation. We’re building a product for humans all over the world. We need different experiences, ideas, and opinions to make something that works for everyone. It can be easy to forget that we’ve got a thousand creative and intelligent people at Wish. An engineer could come up with the best marketing campaign of the year. A marketer might teach an engineer how to collaborate with executives.

When we’re all remote, that’s not easy. We must consistently create ways for employees to understand and connect with each other.

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