At PagerDuty, we’ve been on a journey to reimagine work for many months now, culminating in the launch of OneDuty—our vision for the new world of work—last year.

We have dedicated OneDuty workstreams helping shape this evolution to ensure we’re taking a holistic approach. This includes rethinking where we work. Our team has been intentional in consulting with Dutonians, experts in the field, and our industry peers to consider how we use offices safely, how we offer a work environment that enables employees to do their best work, and how we ensure this benefits our customers.

Recently, we conducted some internal research to inform the “where we work” components of the future.

Flexibility is the Future

The transformation to distributed work for nearly 800 Dutonians was a significant undertaking. What was previously 20% of our workforce operating from outside an office, was now all employees. The sudden shift for the whole company was a learning curve for us all, and a chance to rethink what the purpose of offices in a post-COVID-19 world could look like—with increased flexibility. The Where We Work team surveyed Dutonians to explore their experiences of working from home over the last year and what they’d like to see in the future.

Some of the findings were:

• Around half (54%) of employees said that access to an office was still important; however, they’d prefer to spend less time there, opting for one to three days rather than five days a week
• 20% of employees expressed interest in becoming permanently distributed, in addition to our existing distributed workers
• A small group still preferred to spend four to five days in the office
• Dutonians identified socialization and collaboration as the top two benefits of working in an office

The results were consistent across all departments and locations where we have employees. The findings are key to how we think about transforming PagerDuty offices to enable collaboration and equity for distributed teams, and to how we’ll redesign office space so we can still socialize.

Distributed by Design

We combined these findings with the outputs from internal discussions, workshops, as well as our SaaS peers, design firms, and workplace strategy teams. This helped us land on a new work philosophy that PagerDuty is committing to: distributed by design. Distributed by design means that we’ll offer the ability to work across a variety of approved geographies and workplaces, so Dutonians can focus on customer devotion and do their best work for our users. We will have three modes: Office, Hybrid, and Anywhere, and allow employee choice where possible to employees and their managers to identify their preferred workplace and mode.

At the core of our distributed by design philosophy is employee trust and leading with a digital first mindset. We always place value on productivity over presenteeism. And this past year has shown that Dutonians are dedicated and committed—from wherever they work.

Creating Equity in the Workplace

Above all, we want Dutonians to have equal experiences and access to growth and development opportunities. Distributed work is an opportunity to level the playing field and be more connected, supporting employees with bringing their best selves to work, wherever they are. To ensure everyone experiences belonging and connectedness, we’re focussed on improving digital experiences, setting goals and funding programs that ensure ownership, and staffing resources to drive programs that tangibly improve Inclusion, Diversity & Equity.

The next steps of the OneDuty program will include thinking about the purpose of our physical office spaces, and how we can reconfigure them to embed collaborative and social working, which we know matter greatly to Dutonians.

Finally, by being thoughtful, intentional, and iterative in how we think about work, we also ensure that we continue to live our values. Through OneDuty, we are equipping our workforce with the ability to keep innovating and building great products. We’re ensuring that Dutonians thrive and customers continue to benefit.