Scoop CEO and co-founder Rob Sadow (l) and his brother, co-founder and Chief Product and Technology Officer Jon Sadow (r), are launching a searchable database to try and collect work-from-home policies of some 4,000 companies.
Photo courtesy Scoop.It can feel like a waste of time: Find a promising job description and apply. Snag an interview and prepare for it. Have a great discussion with the hiring manager—only to learn the “hybrid” policy touted in the job posting means getting to work from home just once a week.
A new tool launching Tuesday is trying to make employers’ flexible work policies searchable and help job seekers—as well as human resources executives, academics and anyone else looking to compare practices or track hybrid work trends—research employers’ arrangements in one place.
Called the Flex Index, the database is using standard terminology such as “fully remote” or “specific days/week” to try and catalog types of remote work set-ups culled from employee surveys, career web sites and job postings. Currently, it has categorized the policies of some 4,000 employers. Users can search by city, state, industry and company size, as well as by type of flexible policy—but relatively few company profiles have yet been verified by employers at the newly launched site.
Launched by hybrid work management startup Scoop, the Flex Index ultimately aims to fill a void of organized information about remote work policies. Many companies don’t publish their office requirements on their web sites, or talk about them only in vague, room-to-wiggle terminology.
Outside of blue-chip companies like Disney, Starbucks or Google whose policies get regularly covered in the press, many firms say things like “we’re supportive of flexible work” but are “very sparse on details,” says Scoop CEO and co-founder Rob Sadow. “It felt like there is this disconnect between how important this topic was for job seekers and the marketplace and how little information was publicly available on it.”
Sadow admits the Flex Index could have a marketing payoff for Scoop, which builds software that helps workers plan their in-office days (who will be there, where they’ll be sitting) and gives employers insights on the hybrid location habits and trends of their workforce. He hopes it will help with brand awareness, as well as be a lead generator for companies that might become customers, he says. “We have really, really good data on which companies are hybrid.”
Even if it also helps build Scoop’s business, hybrid work experts say the database offers a tool not currently available in the same form elsewhere. “This is, I think, the best data set I’m aware of on what firms are doing for their work-from-home and hybrid policies,” says Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economist who is an adviser to Scoop—and holds equity in the company—but whose monthly research on remote work trends is widely cited. Bloom says most existing data sets follow trends about individual workers, rather than companies’ practices.
So far, Scoop’s tool has been primarily gathering employers’ remote work rules through employee surveys about their companies’ policies; it also does a manual culling of policies listed on company career websites, job postings and other publicly available information. From the employee surveys, Scoop confirms respondents work for the company by cross-checking email addresses and then emails human resources leaders to let them verify details.
But job seekers shouldn’t rely on it as gospel quite yet. Of course, policy can differ from practice—how employees and their managers really behave when it comes to remote work can be a matter of culture, especially as people grow nervous about their jobs. And so far, much of the data is self-reported by workers or culled from public sources and not verified by employers. Only a handful of companies have gotten a recently launched check mark confirming they’ve verified the information, Sadow says; “relatively few” companies have verified data in company profiles, though he believes that number will grow significantly after launch.
Scoop’s software, which integrates with platforms like Slack, Google Calendar and Workday to help workers plan their time in the office, hasn’t always helped companies with the logistics of hybrid work. Sadow and his brother, Jon, launched Scoop in 2015 to help businesses coordinate employees’ commutes—a market the pandemic “jack-knifed,” says Scoop investor and Haystack general partner Semil Shah, who was part of an early stage $8 million round Scoop raised in October. (In its earlier incarnation facilitating commutes, Scoop had raised about $100 million in several rounds of fundraising before the pandemic.)
By late 2020, Sadow had to lay off more than 80% of his workers as it became clear people would not be commuting at the same rate again. Realizing they knew logistics, they pivoted to helping workers coordinate the logistics of hybrid work and avoid going to the office and having a day full of onsite Zoom calls because they didn’t know their coworkers’ plans.
Shah, who said in an email that Scoop is part of a new software category called “employee location management,” thinks as many CEOs wrestle with hybrid work, “we viewed that as a new, secular, global, gnarly problem.”
Bloom says the index will need to meet three challenges: How representative it is of the full employer market, how accurate the data is and how well it keeps up with employers changing policies and suddenly calling everyone back to the office, particularly in the current environment. On the first, he sees similarities between aggregate trends in the Flex Index and government data, giving him confidence. On the third, he says work from home trends have been relatively flat in recent months and may have leveled off. On the second, “the onus on them is to keep it up to date,” he says.
He also thinks it will be a source for researchers like himself and others interested in tracking hybrid work trends. In its report aggregating data from the index, Scoop found that 87% of employers who have a minimum number of required office days set them at two (41%) or three (46%) days. Smaller companies (those with under 500 employees) are more than twice as likely to be “fully flexible” compared to larger ones (those with more than 1,000 workers). And there was one day that was most common when it comes to employers’ in-office requirements: Tuesday.