Company also providing workers two 'wellness weeks' per year
Online worker-for-hire company TaskRabbit is closing all its four global offices to commit to an entirely remote work setup.
“For us, remote-first is the concept of putting virtual work and remote participation as priority and the primary way our employees work, with all other means of showing up to work as secondary,” the company said in a statement. “Most importantly, remote-first refers to how we work rather than where we work.”
The announcement came after the company surveyed its more than 200,000 global gig workers about the importance of flexibility and maintaining a work/life balance, reported Market Watch.
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TaskRabbit rolled out a remote-first strategy in April, after initially allowing employees to work from the office on a voluntary basis.
“We don’t force people to go back into the office, but instead are allowing for connections to happen more naturally,” said TaskRabbit CEO Ania Smith in an interview with The Washington Post. “That’s more likely the way [of] the future, given the flexibility that everyone is craving.”
Meta’s management team has also fully embraced the remote work lifestyle, according to a previous report.
Previously, Google’s hybrid work model proved unpopular. About two-thirds of Google employees were dissatisfied with the tech giant’s plans and 34% said they were considering looking for another job because of the return-to-office strategy, according to a report from the anonymous professional social network Blind.
Nearly two-thirds (64%) of employees forced to return to the office full-time say this makes them more likely to look for a new job, according to another study. In fact, earlier this month, Ian Goodfellow, director of machine learning at Apple, resigned due to the Cupertino, CA-based company’s return-to-office policy.
With workers out of the office, TaskRabbit is looking to host monthly get-togethers.
TaskRabbit is also giving workers more time to rest. The company is providing corporate employees with two “wellness weeks” a year, during which workers will get paid time off, according to The Washington Post’s report.
Two-thirds of Americans have already taken a workcation and 94% plan to workcation again in 2022 and into the future, according to a survey of more than 1,100 American workers by Passport-Photo.online.
While workcations are no panacea, there are some reasons why they could be valuable to employees, particularly amid today’s turbulent times. “For one, they let [you] change up your environment. That in itself could make you more productive and help devise unorthodox solutions to problems you’re stuck on. On top of it, workcations often allow employees to disconnect, distress, and breathe fresh air after the workday, which is key to tackling physical or mental exhaustion,” said Max Woolf, writer at Passport-Photo.online.
Meanwhile, San Francisco-based Bolt made headlines this year for pivoting to a permanent four-day workweek.
