While many companies are increasing the number of days they want employees in the office, financial operations platform BILL is taking the opposite approach.
The San Jose, CA-based company announced Thursday that it’s now a remote-first workplace. However, BILL offices aren’t off-limits to employees if they’d rather work there.
“Every minute we save a BILLder from commuting into an office is a minute that they spend building, serving, and supporting the nearly 500,000 SMBs and accounting firms that put their trust in BILL. We think that’s time well spent,” BILL Chief People Officer Bobbie Grafeld wrote in a blog on Sept. 3.
She noted that half of BILL’s team was already fully remote, while the other half came into the office three days a week under the company’s hybrid policy. That created two very different employee experiences at one company, Grafeld said.
“[W]e spent real energy trying to bridge that gap instead of putting it towards the work that matters,” she wrote. “At the same time, the remote population proved the model works: hiring stayed strong, performance stayed strong, culture stayed strong, for half the company, for years. So instead of continuing to manage the divide, we realized the better path was to build one team that works the same way, with real programs for remote and for AI, at the same time, on purpose.
“We are committing to a single, consistent model rather than a hybrid approach. When everyone works the same way, you eliminate the hidden inefficiencies that slow teams down: uneven access to information, proximity bias, and fragmented communication,” she added.
As artificial intelligence has accelerated the way work gets done, Grafeld says the shift to a remote-first workplace will allow BILL to keep up with the speed and agility required to excel in this environment.
“The way work gets done has changed. Over the last year, AI has accelerated that shift faster than most companies have been willing to admit. We have felt this directly. As more of our work has moved into tools like Claude, the record of what we decided and why lives in a shared, searchable place and not just with whoever happened to be in the room. That is not a lesser version of collaboration. For a distributed team, it is often a better one,” she wrote.
“Going remote-first now is a deliberate decision to get ahead of that change, not a reaction to it. We measure our people on what they deliver, not where they sit,” Grafeld continued. “This is a design choice for speed and agility, a recognition that clarity and velocity of decision-making matter more than physical proximity. Remote-first gives BILL a consistent way of working, and it broadens our talent pool. As a company, we believe in the value of in-person connection. But in-person time should not be the baseline for daily productivity.”
Going remote means being far more intentional about bringing the team together, she said, as BILL is prioritizing company-wide events, team offsites, planning sessions, and customer engagements.
“We believe time in-person should be purposeful, energizing, and worth the investment, not something we default to out of habit,” Grafeld wrote. “That doesn’t mean the office disappears: for anyone who’d simply rather work from a desk than home, we’re keeping shared spaces open too.”
BILL customers really don’t care how many days a week the company’s employees are in an office, she said. They care that their pain points are being addressed and solved.
“A team that isn’t tied to zip codes is a team we can build with the best people wherever they live, moving at the speed our customers need from us,” Grafeld wrote.
“Yes, many companies are pulling people back to the office,” she added. “We are going the other way because we are building BILL for the next decade for our people, and for the customers who trust us to get it done.”
Photo credit: BILL
Sign in to get access to this free resource, and all of our whitepapers and reports.
Download this content today!
Register Now Already registered? Click here to Log In
