Affirm's COO shares one approach the remote-first company uses to build a 'high-performance culture'

• Buy-now-pay-later provider Affirm says it's committed to being a remote-first company.
• However, one challenge of remote work is finding ways to get company culture to thrive.
• COO Michael Linford told BI about one approach he's using to get teams to work more effectively.

Back during the COVID-19 pandemic, buy-now-pay-later provider Affirm decided to commit fully to being a remote-first company.

"We debate it all the time," chief operating officer Michael Linford told Business Insider. The company had "not looked back," he said, and it "would be very difficult for us to go back on that."

"We think it benefits us and our employees," he said. "We recruit from deeper pools of talent. We get more productivity from our team."

However, Linford said one persistent challenge is finding ways to get company culture to not only survive but thrive.

In particular, the COO pointed to the importance of building what Affirm founder and CEO Max Levchin dubbed a "high-performance culture," which in true fintech fashion has been rendered into a key metric that is tracked each quarter.

In a recent blog post, Levchin defined the term as "a culture of individuals doing productive work for the company in the most efficient way possible and helping others do the same, while generally having a good time."

The puzzle, Levchin said, is how do companies actually accomplish this — and what should they avoid doing.

A high-performance culture is never final, Linford told BI. "That is a function of sustained focus," he said.

Right now, one approach Linford said he's focused on is less about maximizing day-to-day work experiences and more about creating additional opportunities to connect in person, especially in cities like Austin, Texas, where he and about 40 other employees live.

"We just take a couple of days a quarter and get a WeWork, and folks can come together," he said. "The point isn't that these folks are working together. They're not. They literally have no work overlap."

"The point wasn't that. It was to be Affirmers together in a room," he added. "That's where culture gets reinforced."

Bringing together people from across the company — like an Android engineer, a recruiter, an HR team member, and the COO — underscores a value expressed by Levchin that Affirm is made up of individuals working together.

At the same time, such cross-functional coworking likely helps the company avoid the pitfall of an "us vs them" dynamic that Levchin says is prohibited at Affirm.

"Max felt compelled, I think, to write that because we do want to not let culture just get created," Linford said. "We want to make sure we're influencing what it is the team is feeling, thinking, et cetera, and leave our mark on it."

Like Affirm, Spotify is another major company that has committed to not calling staff back to the office. While Amazon, Meta, Apple, and Google have all ordered staff back to the office for either a hybrid or fully in-person setup, Spotify has said it will continue to have physical offices and a "core week" where teams are encouraged to meet up in person.

The music-streaming platform said the flexible policy led to a decrease in attrition rates, increased workplace diversity, and hiring times that were six days faster.

However, Spotify's chief human resources officer, Katarina Berg, said in an October interview that it is "harder" to collaborate virtually.

"But does that mean that we will start forcing people to come into the office as soon as there is a trend for it? No," Berg said.