Since its founding more than two decades ago, Mozilla has taken a vastly different approach to many things, including challenging the status quo on the internet, focusing on people over profits, and supporting and encouraging a highly distributed employee base to ensure we can attract the best talent regardless of geography.
With more than 45% of our global workforce working remotely and not in a Mozilla office space prior to the Coronavirus pandemic, Mozilla employees demonstrated that a distributed workforce is not only feasible, but can be tremendously successful and less disruptive during an already tumultuous time.
With that in mind, we have chosen to take this time to reflect and rethink how we might want to use our physical spaces if and when we are able to come together again, so that they are even more impactful and valuable to our employees and the Mozilla community at large. We have also received a wealth of feedback from employees across the globe via ongoing surveys and other channels since the pandemic first hit.
Beginning in Q1 2021, we will close our office in London, England and the Pocket offices in San Francisco, CA. We will also take advantage of the January 2021 expiration of the lease on our current Mountain View, CA office to exit the location, and identify a more flexible and collaborative space for our Silicon Valley-based teams. In the interim our existing office in San Francisco will serve Bay Area employees to the extent we are able to work together in-person.
We’ve learned a great deal through the pandemic about how to operate as a fully remote organization and as a result there will be lasting changes to how we work. To that end we’re thinking about how all of our office spaces and policies will work in the future to support continued online and in-person collaboration, while also meeting the diverse needs and realities of our employees and the regions where they live and work. We’re looking to address questions like who needs a physical office location because working from home is not optimal or their preference? What are the limitations in terms of commute times and public transit options and their related costs — financial, physical, environmental and emotional? How should spaces be configured and right-sized to give the flexibility for a combination of frequencies of use?
We’ll be looking first at the configuration of our offices in Vancouver, Canada and Portland, OR with these factors in mind. For the time being our offices in Berlin, Germany; Paris, France; and Toronto, Canada will not change.
While our physical spaces and footprints may be shifting, the mission, focus and valuable impact of Mozilla remain the same. In fact, these changes, which reinforce our decades-long approach to supporting remote work, will allow for greater flexibility, collaboration and impact, while accommodating for the evolving needs of our people and community during these uncertain times.