At Evernote, we chose early in the pandemic to empower our employees to decide if, when, and how to return to the office. That’s kept our team happy and productive through challenging times, and created a lot more flexibility in who we hire and how our employees interact. It’s also meant re-imagining our office spaces to support the ways our teams choose to use them.
Commuters on Highway 101 passing through Redwood City, California have long been accustomed to seeing our elephant gazing proudly from atop our headquarters, a building we’ve occupied for ten good years. But we’ve discovered that while our Bay Area teams appreciate having a place where they can gather and collaborate from time to time, most of them prefer remote work. So we’re moving out of this building and experimenting with smaller, more flexible space that’s better optimized for what our people want and need.
The same is true in Austin, another of our biggest U.S. locations, where we’re preparing to open a new space that’s about half the size of our old office, focused significantly more on collaborative and gathering spaces than individual workstations, and drawing inspiration from a new office we recently opened for our San Diego team.
While moving away from our landmark building is bittersweet for us, rest assured these moves will have zero impact on our hiring plans, development and release schedules, or customer support. It’s just a part of ensuring Evernote teammates around the world can keep doing their best work, in the way that works best for them, while we all move forward together.
