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Duolingo CEO Luis von Ahn has revealed how he avoided backlash from employees after implementing a return-to-office (RTO) mandate at the company—something that other employers calling staff back to the office have failed to do.
Speaking on the “Decoder” podcast produced by The Verge, von Ahn spoke about calling staff back to the office three days per week.
The chief executive claimed that the move to call remote workers back to the office in 2022 remarkably did not cost the business any talent.
Research has indicated that RTO mandates could cost US employers their top talent, particularly if not managed effectively.
How did Duolingo avoid RTO recoil?
The key to avoiding backlash from Duolingo employees was careful and consistent expectation management, von Ahn revealed.
According to the CEO, the language-learning app told staff when the company was first going remote that it wouldn’t last forever; they’d eventually be called back into the office.
The same message was communicated to new hires, making the company’s position crystal clear. “This was not a surprise for anybody," he explained.
As a result, where other businesses have found staff heading for the exit door after about-faces on on-office work, Duolingo has seen a smooth transition.
“I don't think we lost a single employee from that,” von Ahn told Decoder.
The executive also revealed the company’s motivations for calling staff back to the office. Chiefly, the company was struggling with innovation and creativity, and the business felt that in-office work was the key to rediscovering these capabilities.
"Most of what we do is creative stuff," von Ahn stated. “Toward the end of the pandemic, "we had run out of new ideas.”
The CEO noted that when staff came back to the office three days a week – the most popular number of days in-office for hybrid working, with 41% of hybrid workers saying that’s how often they’re required to be in the office per Owl Labs research – creativity returned. “You would see all these ideas popping up,” he observed.
Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays are mandatory in-office days for Duolingo staff, with flexibility to work from home (or in the office) on Mondays and Fridays.
Clarity and communication are the key to RTO management
Several notable employers including Dell, Amazon, and Salesforce have similarly attempted to enforce RTO mandates in recent months, facing significant backlash from employees.
In some of these cases, criticism from employees has centered on the inconsistency of communication from company leadership about future expectations for remote work.
At Salesforce, for example, select teams including sales units were recently called back to the office from the beginning of October; at a company event in 2022, CEO Mark Benioff stated, “Office mandates are never going to work.”
Similarly, Dell’s increasingly stringent in-office requirements over the past year have left staff frustrated. With employees now back in the office five days a week, some have pointed out that the changes are a major departure from Dell’s historic communications on remote worker flexibility.
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“A common phrase used to be 'Work happens where you make it,' with the office often being a ghost town multiple times a week, or after lunch, or pre-holidays,” one worker told Business Insider earlier this year.
In 2021, CEO Michael Dell told CRN that remote working is “absolutely here to stay.” The executive also gave the example of two employers, one with in-office mandates and another with flexibility. “Which company do you think is a more attractive place to work? This is not really a hard test,” he said.
Duolingo staff, meanwhile, can be reassured by von Ahn’s belief that he doesn’t have the “political power” to change the company’s current position on hybrid work. "I feel like that would not go over well," he remarked.
