Twilio CPO: ‘There wasn’t a reason why we needed to be back in the office’

Five years ago, the world was grappling with an emerging deadly pandemic, and HR teams were figuring out how to enable people to work from home.

“Everybody was remote in 2020 by necessity.”

However, as the pandemic waged on, $4.15 billion-revenue cloud communications giant Twilio really leaned into how to manage its now remote 6,000-strong remote workforce.

As its CPO Christy Lake tells UNLEASH in an exclusive interview, it wasn’t too much of a challenge as actually “we were already working in this way”.

For the first time, Twilio looked into the composition of its teams globally; it found that “in the pre-pandemic world… only 15% of our teams were intact in location where if they all went into the office, they would be there with their team”.

The vast majority, 85%, were distributed teams and had “been in operating in a remote fashion” even before 2020, and they had the tech tools to enable that. Given they were already successfully working in this distributed manner, “we let that guide us” when thinking about a long-term working model, Lake explains.

This was brought to life through Twilio’s ‘Open Work’ approach, which was born in 2020, but solidified in 2021. It is holding strong five years later, despite the wider push for return to office (RTO) mandates from large corporations like Amazon, JP Morgan and AT&T.

UNLEASH was keen to sit down with Lake to find out why Twilio remains so resolute about remote-first work. What are the benefits of this type of working for the cloud comms giant?

Why remote-first work is a “massive differentiator” for Twilio

A key realization for Twilio in the early 2020s was that being remote gave us “the ability to attract, recruit, retain talent” anywhere in the world, and this was going to be a “massive differentiator”.

Lake continues: “When we’re in the market interviewing folks, we ask for the reason why they’re talking to Twilio – the number one reason is remote work.”

Plus, the comms giant’s retention is “record high”.

Of course, the wider labor market has a role to play there, but the Twilio’s latest employee listening survey found that 94% of employees report effective team collaboration while remote, and 81% would recommend Twilio as a great place to work (a stat that has increased each quarter over the past two years).

Oh, and, by the way, the company was performing,” states Lake.

“There wasn’t a reason why we really needed to be back in the office” – “this works for us, this is what our people want, we’re being incredibly competitive in the marketplace, so we’re going to stick with it.”

All of this explains why Twilio’s CEO Khozema Shipchandler stated on LinkedIn: “As CEO, people often ask me if Twilio is returning to the office. My answer is simple: Not while I’m here.”

The need to be intentional about the design of remote-first work

While there are huge benefits to remote-first, there are also significant challenges. These are often cited by the opponents of working from home as reasons to return to the office full-time.

UNLEASH put these concerns to Lake to find out how Twilio is protecting against them in its ‘Open Work’ approach.

Lake shares that there’s an underlying framework made up of three pillars: impact, connect, flexibility within a framework.

“The first one speaks to none of this matters if we’re not having an impact for our customers, for our shareholders”, the second is about intentional connection, and the third is about “how are we architecting our policies, our tools, our technology to make sure we’re able to support our folks”.

Over the four years of ‘Open Work’, Twilio has iterated the most on the second pillar: Connection.

“The first year was scatter plot – we were doing all the things” – Twilio hosted lots of hub events to bring people together who live in the same area.

These were very successful – 2,500 people turned up to one of these events last year –“but what we realized is just because you work in proximity together doesn’t necessarily mean you want to hang out”.

Instead, what Twilio employees wanted was more connection with their teams, so the HR team created an ‘Off site in a box’, including large budgets for travel and entertainment.

Leadership also asked for teams to meet at least once a year, but there are also virtual team building activities for people to leverage to build connection from afar.

Christy Lake, CPO, Twilio.

Interestingly, Twilio still has offices around the world, and also works with a co-working partner to provide “access to real estate in places that we didn’t have offices”.

“There is still a place for our offices” – “people are really keen in having that flexibility to work how they want”, but there is absolutely zero mandate for people to use go to the office or the co-working space.

The offices have also been rethought  to make “sure they’re built for purpose”.

While there are still spaces for people to do individual work, the offices have been redesigned – “the previous construct of desks and a small meeting space” has changed, instead there’s a need for multiple 30 to 50 person meeting spaces because “what they’re really being used for is for teams to come together”, adds Lake.

The success is clear for Lake, as Twilio now has a 90% favorable response to employees having high connection and high trust to the employer.

The remote vs RTO debate

Evidently, remote-first work is working for Twilio – and this success is happening, of course, in the context of a wider pro-RTO discourse.

Given this wider environment, UNLEASH was keen to find out Lake’s perspective on how Twilio is feeling about its stance on remote work.

“Are we patting ourselves on the back? A little bit,” notes Lake.

“It is working for us. We feel good that we’ve made this commitment.

Our people are happy with it. We are capitalizing on a pretty frothy talent market, and we’re able to pick up talent that probably otherwise wouldn’t have [had] access to from great brands.”

Twilio is not so concerned with what other employers are doing, and Lake is clear that she doesn’t want to tell other HR leaders what to do.

“I both respect and appreciate that every company is in a different position”, and has different needs dependent on sector, job type, skills etc.

However, Lake is very “grateful that I don’t have to spend time relitigating” the RTO debate.

She adds that, in her view, “it seems a lot of top down beliefs drive [RTO]”. There are concerns about productivity and innovation, but “those are beliefs, you should look at the data to understand are those true?”

If organizations cannot explain the “why” behind a RTO decision, for instance, then “it turns into a trust issue”.

“Follow your data, and make sure that you have some guiding principles” on your working model, whether its remote-first, RTO or somewhere in between. This data-focused approach, according to Lake, will help employees get on board.

Skills, AI and the future of HR at Twilio

“In a world where our retention is record high, and our folks are choosing to keep their talents at Twilio, we owe them development,” Lake tells UNLEASH.

That’s why a big investment Twilio is making this year is in becoming a skills-first organization.

“If you feel like you’re out of sight, out of mind, and your career has stalled, we’re not winning,” states Lake. So, Twilio is investing in “ensuring that people can really drive their career path forward”, and have opportunities to learn, grow and develop.

While this has been a priority at Twilio for years, the technology wasn’t up to scratch – but now, with the evolution of AI, the comms giant has found a continuous learning partner who they are working with in Beta.

The key was having an AI-powered tech solution that could adapt to, and keep pace with, the ever-evolving skills landscape.

“This is a multi-year evolution” for Twilio, and sits alongside its implementation of AI.

The company is experimenting with AI, including leveraging copilots and chatbots.

“There are massive productivity gains and efficiencies that can be had” from AI – Lake believes that AI will change the work that people do as AI continues to augment and automate.