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It always helps knowing someone else has it worse.
Robinhood CEO Vlad Tenev said the company’s principle is that change has to start at the top, which also applies to its return-to-office policy.
“If you’re a senior leader, an executive, you’re five days; if you’re a manager, four days; if you’re an IC, three days,” Tenev said in an episode of the “Cheeky Pint” podcast published on Wednesday. “It’s good because if you’re an individual contributor and you’re doing work, it’s very nice to know that your manager is going through more pain than you.”
Tenev, who cofounded the stock trading platform in 2013, said this lead-by-example approach has been helpful for motivating employees.
“It has to start at the top,” he said. “You have to be willing to do yourself, to an even higher degree, what you ask of everyone else.”
In 2022, Robinhood declared itself a remote-first company and said it would be “staying primarily remote.” Tenev said he regretted his 2022 decision to be remote “pretty much immediately,” and a year later, the company told staff to expect to return to the office at least four days a week on average.
In a 2024 interview, Tenev said that coming out strongly for being remote-first made it “much, much harder” to reverse the decision.
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On Wednesday’s podcast, the CEO said he learned that you can reverse your decisions if they are the wrong calls.
“I think there’s a natural sort of reluctance to not feel like a flip-flopper,” he said.
“In our case, we emphasize the in-person experience. We found that makes a big difference,” he added of the company’s culture.
Robinhood is part of a wider push among tech and finance companies to bring people back into offices despite the pushback RTO mandates often receive.
In the last two years, tech giants like Meta, Google, Amazon, and TikTok have cracked down on a US tech culture known for pandemic-era remote work, unlimited office benefits, top-line pay, and job security.
Across the industry, perks like free massages have been replaced with memos from CEOs filled with words such as “efficiency” and “scrappiness and frugality.”
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