Remote Work Was a Forced Experiment — Here’s What Cloudflare Learned
When Cloudflare closed all of its offices on March 13, 2020, the company was firmly a work-from-office culture. The leadership team was nervous. A year and a half later, the results of what was effectively a mandatory company-wide experiment have upended many of their assumptions about work.
Productivity went up, measured by sales success, the pace of product shipping, and even the speed of the finance team's book-closing. But the more striking change was in meeting dynamics: participation increased noticeably among women, non-native English speakers, junior team members, and other traditionally underrepresented groups. The flattened, grid-like video conferencing view smoothed out the social cues that can make in-person meetings less welcoming to some voices.
Internal surveys over the same period showed overall job satisfaction increased, even as the list of things employees wanted improved stayed the same. The candidate pool also became more diverse once location constraints were removed — a meaningful shift for a company that treats team diversity not as a reporting metric but as a business strategy, arguing that homogeneous teams produce fewer creative solutions to hard problems.
Not everything improved. Human interaction remains hard to replicate virtually, misunderstandings are more likely without full social context, and early-career employees lose the osmosis of learning by watching colleagues. For some, the office was also a refuge from difficult home situations, and losing that space amplified those challenges.
Eight Assumptions for the Post-Pandemic Office
Rather than issuing a sweeping decree about the future of work, Cloudflare expects to iterate through experiments over the coming years, likely landing somewhere different from where it starts. The company has shared eight working assumptions guiding that process:
- Flexibility is non-negotiable. The remote-work genie is not going back in the bottle. Since the forced experiment proved productivity and satisfaction can hold up, flexibility will remain a cornerstone.
- Rules are a last resort. Mandating specific in-office days or tying office attendance to seniority feels arbitrary. Cloudflare prefers starting with general standards for what success looks like, letting rules emerge later only if needed.
- Open offices without structure will fail. If colleagues come in on different days hoping to connect, no one gets the benefit. In-person work requires deliberate planning to work.
- Carrots work better than sticks. About 10% of employees want to be in the office daily. The goal is to make the office attractive enough that everyone wants to come in at least occasionally, not to compel attendance.
- Physical space must change. The pre-pandemic lego brick — the six-person conference room — and the eventual sea of neat white desks no longer fits. Offices need zones for team collaboration and quiet, heads-down individual work.
- Mixed meetings are broken. Hybrid meetings where some attend in person and others virtually are bad for everyone. Part of why the remote period worked is that everyone shared the same experience. Historically hybrid setups fail precisely because they degrade into that uneven dynamic.
- Global parity matters. With employees worldwide, full remote made all offices feel equal. Maintaining that sense of equal footing is a priority.
- Cultural osmosis is still valuable. Watching and learning from colleagues is harder remotely, particularly for people early in their careers.
Start With Hiring and Workspace Experiments
Cloudflare is already acting on several of these ideas. Hiring is now open for nearly all roles in any location where the company has a legal entity set up, recognizing that employees will likely still cluster near offices but no longer requiring it.
The San Francisco and London offices are being torn apart and rebuilt as flexible spaces, designed for teams of 10, 20, or 30 to gather and collaborate, plus one-person "Zoom villages" equipped with high-quality AV for video calls. The concept is the "on-site off-site": teams can reserve office space for intentional in-person gatherings, with most teams expected to meet at least quarterly.
One of the few rules Cloudflare starts with directly addresses the mixed-meeting problem: if any participant is remote, then everyone in the meeting goes remote. This will create odd moments of colleagues sitting next to each other talking over video, but the company considers it essential to keep the playing field level.
A designated "Czar of Serendipity" will coordinate cross-group activities, lunches, and in-person speakers to help people in different functions connect when their teams are in shared office space.
An experiment dubbed "Orange Card" aims to give employees a concrete reason to come in, especially those early in their careers. The plan is to turn employee IDs into charge cards that activate only after badging in for the day and can only be used at restaurants within a 10-minute walk of the office, using pre-tax dollars. The dual purpose is to encourage physical attendance and to support local restaurants hit hard by the pandemic, rather than building private company cafeterias.
Cloudflare doesn't pretend to have all the answers and expects to learn as much from peers' experiments as from its own. The pandemic forced an experiment the company never would have attempted voluntarily, and the lessons learned are not ones it plans to forget.
