Okta just hired a ‘head of dynamic work’ to rethink everything as it prepares for 85% of its employees to eventually work remote

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Okta has been moving towards becoming a remote-first company for almost two years. When the pandemic hit last year and forced most tech workers to work from home, it put that project into overdrive. But Okta’s approach is not just a shift from offices to working remotely.

CEO Todd McKinnon calls Okta’s approach “dynamic work,” where employees can be located anywhere and work from home, but still have access to the benefits of being an office worker, he previously told Insider.

Now, the San Francisco headquartered company has brought on someone to manage this transition. Samantha Fisher joined Okta as its head of dynamic work at the beginning of January, and is responsible for shaping employee’s experiences as Okta shifts to this new model of working. Her role is focused on adapting hiring and employee policies, office and real estate design, and the way employees work and collaborate.

“They really were thinking about it from a perspective of not just a binary function of ‘you either come to the office or you don’t come to the office,'” Fisher told Insider, “They were really thinking about it as an ecosystem and what the different stratifications of that ecosystem look like from an employee experience perspective.”

Fisher previously worked in executive real estate at Transwestern, Citadel, and Capital One, where she focused on strategies and operations to help employees work more effectively. At Okta she is part of its workplace services team, reporting to Armen Vartanian, SVP of global workplace services. 

She joins about five months after Okta officially announced a policy that gave all employees the option to work remote permanently, come back to offices when it’s safe, or do a mix of both. Already, 130 of its 2,600 global employees have requested to move somewhere new, with a majority requesting to move out of the San Francisco Bay Area (though, while some companies like Oracle have taken steps to relocate their headquarters, Okta doesn’t plan to). Nearly all of its new job openings are remote eligible and, so far, 60% of its new hires are not located near any of Okta’s 14 existing offices, which are spread across 10 countries. 

Ultimately the firm expects that once its transition to “dynamic work” is complete, about 85% of its workforce will be remote, compared to 30% pre-pandemic. 

However, while some San Francisco Bay Area companies have taken steps to relocate their headquarters, like Tanium moving to Seattle and Oracle moving to Austin, Okta doesn’t have does not have plans to move its headquarters.

How Okta’s head of dynamic work plans to adapt the employee experience for a remote first workplace

Fisher’s new role is key to making sure that employees are able to make the transition seamlessly and effectively, no matter how they choose to work. 

“We’re really considering how we support employees working cross-functionally in whichever way works the best for them, in a way that they can deliver the best products and services to our clients and our customers,” she said. 

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Source:: Business Insider