Allstate moved 95% of its global staff to remote work in one weekend. Here's how

The transition to remote has been a long, arduous process for most companies, with many still struggling to do so post-pandemic. But for Allstate, it was barely 48-hours long. 

In March of 2020 — like so many organizations — the insurance company moved 95% of its global workforce to remote work in a single weekend. Since, they’ve seen continued success with remote-first strategies and have continued to invest in the setup, even selling some of their physical office spaces and investing in new roles and tools.

“We sent everybody home in 2020, and in 2021 we took another look at how we were being successful,” says Stephanie Roseman, vice president of people solutions and experiences at Allstate. “We started by going out to our employees and asked them what their preferences were in terms of working: did they want to work remotely? Did they want to work hybrid? Did they want to come into the office?”

As a result, 83% of their workforce indicated that they’d like to be permanently remote and instead of imposing a hybrid model and forcing a return to work, Allstate listened and shifted gears on their future. Since then, the insurer has seen massive success in both their recruiting and their retention strategies — applications are up more than 60%, according to the company, and they’re seeing 30% more diverse candidates. 

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“We started posting jobs as remote jobs and it enabled people who have physical or family limitations, and couldn’t make big moves, to become part of our workforce,” Roseman says. “It enabled us to really widen the pool of candidates and find tremendous success in additional, more diverse candidates.”

But none of that would have been possible without Allstate’s willingness to put the employee at the forefront of all of their decision-making from the very beginning — which is the most critical part of a successful move to remote work, according to Roseman. 

“Everyday we’re learning something new,” she says. “It’s about driving equity in the conversations we’re having and making sure that regardless of where you sit, regardless of how you’re contributing, that everybody has a voice.”

Roseman recently sat down with EBN to talk about the truth behind their company’s massive transition, and why embracing change is the best chance employers have at surviving the future of work. 

Take me back to that fateful week in March — how were you able to move everyone to a functioning remote environment in such a short period of time?
We have an employee notification system that we used primarily for inclement weather, and that is how we notified our employees. They all got an email, a text message or a phone call on Friday, March 16, asking them to please work from home. We were only able to do that so quickly because 20% of our employees were already working from home at the time, so we had the flexibility built in. Everybody already had a way to log into our network securely from their homes, and knew how to do that immediately. We were in a very fortunate position. 

It really came down to a decision about health and safety. When we knew it was a health and safety issue, we immediately partnered with our IT team to make sure we wouldn’t overwhelm the network. I know it sounds like it should be much more complicated, but the truth is that we had the infrastructure in place to be able to do it faster than a lot of other companies, who perhaps weren’t allowing employees to work from home before, or frankly, didn’t have the luxury.

When you realized that this was more permanent than we had originally foreseen, what was the decision making process like?
It was all really about the employees and their well-being — that has been our primary decision maker through a lot of things. When the issue arose it wasn’t something we had to really think through, it was second nature to us to make this work. And we knew we could do it. We were a dispersed workforce; we also had offices in Northern Ireland and India that we were working with regularly, so working out of different offices was something that we were already doing.

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In the beginning, before the office closed, we were already making decisions based solely on health and safety and we were making really conservative decisions about sending groups of employees home. For example, if someone was exposed, we would send their whole team home. We really wanted to keep everyone safe. We probably spent the two weeks leading up to March 16th operating like that. When the whole world started shutting down, and they started closing schools, we started realizing that the safest thing to do was to keep everyone in their house. We initially told everyone it would be for two weeks, and our IT group was incredible at reinforcing our systems to be able to make that happen. When we started, we had to start with things like nobody could turn on their camera so as not to overwhelm the system because we didn’t have Zoom at the time. We have come a very long way in the last three years in terms of capabilities and technology. 

Allstate has since made some big changes, such as selling certain unused office spaces. How has that played into the continued effort to keep remote work running smoothly?
We sold our main campus outside of Chicago, but we have maintained a significant presence in the Chicago area. The workspaces we kept are more modern; we invested in better used footprints so that it’s actually drawing people into the office because it’s a really nice place to work. There’s all kinds of configurations of places to work, we just wanted to be really purposeful and let employees drive what that means. We’re watching who’s coming in and when they’re coming in and letting that dictate a lot about our real estate plans. We’re trying to make sure that we’re investing in the talent pool so that there aren’t geographical constraints, while keeping in mind that 76% of our employees are near an office — we made sure that we have offices so that we can gather when they want to gather. 

How do you guys plan to keep growing with these strategies?
We’re very cognizant of the fact that things are going to continue to change at a rapid pace. The biggest thing that we’re doing is investing in a new role that we’re calling a workplace futurist. That person is going to be ultimately responsible for gathering data and benchmarking what’s going on in the world as well as having the pulse on real estate. They’ll make sure those gatherings are purposeful and that we have the spaces and the places we need. They’ll act as guides for our leaders on how to use physical space, but also how to lead virtually. And so we’re really investing in the success of this.

Change can be scary for companies. But how did embracing it put your team on the path to success?
Change is inevitable. Embracing it and being okay with testing and trying and learning and testing again, it’s actually going to make you more resilient as a company. It encourages our employees to try things in a different way, and I think it’s probably going to be the wave of the future — things aren’t ever going to look again like they did, they will constantly be changing. The more agile we can be and the more flexible in embracing that change, I think it just makes us stronger.