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The Future of Work At ZestyAI: Introducing Remote-Flex

News — 3 mins

The Future of Work At Zesty<sup>AI</sup>: Introducing Remote-Flex

Do what you love from a place that you love.

Feb 16, 2021 | 4 min Read

The Zest

  • Remote-Flex is ZestyAI's remote (if you want to) work policy
  • This new era for work at ZestyAI is driven by quality of life, fostering our united culture, and continuing to build on our high-performance team
  • When safe, we'll gather for four weeks over the course of each year to tackle our hardest problems, whiteboard our future, and have fun together


The COVID-19 pandemic changed the world forever. In a matter of weeks, nearly every office worker in the world was working remotely. Insurers with tens of thousands of employees made the switch seemingly overnight. If you had asked insurance executives in January of 2020 whether that would be possible, they would have resoundingly said “no”. 


When we started working remotely, many of us were not sure how long it would work. On one hand, we hired well and the social capital that we had built up with our team was high. On the other hand, whether people would be effective working with a cat on their keyboard or having to entertain bored children was a serious question. Would we, as a workforce, have the discipline to make this work?


It is now clear that the answer to that question is not only “yes”, but that there are significant advantages gained by working remotely. 


We needn’t go into the many studies about how long commutes are bad for happiness. After all, ZestyAI started in the traffic-ridden San Francisco Bay Area, so we all knew that by experience. What we didn’t know but would soon learn was that working remotely was more productive, made people happier, and made sense for us as a business. As we came to this conclusion, we also recognized the need to provide clarity to our employees on future policy. 


The Guiding Pillars of Remote-Flex


When we began exploring the possibility of writing a remote work policy, there were three pillars that we always came back to:


Quality of Life: We will make decisions that protect the quality of life of our employees.
United Culture: We will invest in in-person interactions that strengthen our team and build trust with new hires. We are committed to equal footing, starting with having each person with video on, with their own camera, even if they are physically co-located. There are no outsiders at ZestyAI.
High-Performance Team: We will embrace new ideas that promote efficiency, teamwork, and attract a world-class team.

By providing these pillars, we keep ourselves honest and provide a framework for how we will answer every question from our team and prospects. It’s how we landed on creating a stipend for home office items and a plan for company-wide events.


Equal Boxes Means Equal Footing

In the past, remote workers often felt like observers. When they dialed into a meeting, they missed out on the office chat, were relegated to a static position on a wall or tv-cart, and occasionally were even forgotten. We’re putting an end to that situation with remote-flex. 

Even when meetings occur in a place where it’s possible to have a hybrid meeting, we’re asking everyone to be one person to one screen. This simple change means that all of our team will be on equal footing in every meeting. 


The Return of Togetherness

As the pandemic wanes, we’ll be able to gather again. We’re not just waiting for it, we’re planning on it. We’ll have four team-building, fun-having, action-packed weeks together each year. Two of those will be company-wide retreats and the other two will be planned by functional teams or by hub (Oakland / Montreal). With remote work, we still have to invest in high value in-person interactions that strengthen our team and build trust with new hires. We will not be gathering to work isolated in cubicles. Instead, for four weeks per year, we’ll come together to tackle our hardest problems, whiteboard our future, get to know each other better, and share unique experiences together that reinforce our united culture. 


Not every person in our high-performance team has the same needs. When safe, we’ll also be providing desk space in an office environment for each of our two hubs, for those who feel that they work best away from home or simply need to get out of the house. 


If you’re ready to join our team, no matter where you are in the US or Canada, visit https://www.zesty.ai/careers
 

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