Tag: employees

3 Reasons Why Spotify for Work Should Be Your Next Employee Benefit

April 3, 2023

At Spotify, we’ve long believed that to do good work, you need to feel your best—and to know that your employer has your back. We know that we’re not alone in thinking this. So last year, we unveiled a new partner proposition: Spotify for Work. This allows companies to offer Spotify Premium to employees so that more people can access the unique power of audio as a benefit from their employer. 

Following our successful pilot last year, we’re now opening up the opportunity for partners with more than 50,000 employees to bring the power of audio to their staff. 

Spotify for Work is a modern benefit that has the potential to reach and resonate with every employee, no matter their role or location, and help build a stronger sense of community at every company. Here’s why employers should consider the benefit for their companies: 

  1. Over the past few years, as the barriers between work and personal life blurred due to an increasingly distributed workforce, employees around the world have needed more support from their place of work than ever before. For employers, being able to offer competitive benefits that are valued by employees is a key lever in attracting and retaining top talent. 
  2. Our research shows that audio helps with productivity, focus, and relaxation. So offering employees access to top-tier music and podcasts benefits both their work and their lives. Our extensive catalog of music and podcasts helps support employees at work and in their spare time—whether they’re streaming our Deep Focus playlist to get in the productive mindset, a meditation exercise to unwind, or an entertaining fiction podcast like Case 63. 
  3. Audio also builds community—whether through creating onboarding playlists for new joiners, a podcast-listening club shared between employees, or Blending with family and friends outside of a 9-5 job. So in addition to enabling entertainment and productivity, Spotify for Work can help employers create bonding opportunities for their teams.

Spotify and Accenture Collaborate To Offer Spotify Premium As an Employee Perk

May 18, 2022

The "Spotify for Work" logo in mint on a lavender background

Music and podcasts aren’t just for entertainment—they’re great for focusing, unwinding, and learning, too. With our new offering, “Spotify for Work,” a partner proposition that allows companies to offer Spotify Premium as an employee perk, employers of all types have the opportunity to offer their employees the power of audio to listen to while concentrating at work, working out, cooking dinner, and everything in between.  

“We know employers are always looking to offer competitive benefits to attract and retain top talent and provide additional value and experiences to reward their employees. That’s where ‘Spotify for Work’ comes in—it’s a modern benefit that has potential to build a stronger sense of community at every company,” says Marc Hazan, Vice President of Freemium Partnerships and Business Development.

To kick things off, global professional services firm Accenture is rolling out the new offering for their employees across Sweden, Latvia, and Lithuania. We asked Jan Jendeby, Managing Director at Accenture, a few questions on why he’s looking forward to bringing Spotify Premium to Accenture employees. 

How did your collaboration with Spotify to offer “Spotify for Work” for Accenture employees come about?

We are always looking for new ways to be an attractive employer. When the “Spotify for Work” proposition came about, we saw it as an interesting and relevant offer with multiple benefits for our people, so we explored whether it would be possible to become one of Spotify’s first collaborators.

We see a big potential in “Spotify for Work” on a global scale. It’s a great way to give employees a desired service so they can enjoy all the audio content available on the platform.

Where does Spotify Premium fit in alongside your other offerings?

It’s a new and attractive perk that can be used during work, after work, and while commuting. Our employees can use the service for various reasons such as to better focus, learn, or simply unwind. “Spotify for Work” is a good complement to the other offerings available to our employees. We expect it will resonate with many of our employees across various demographics and roles in Sweden and the Baltics.

Explain the value for employers in providing employee perks like this one. 

In today’s quest for talent, all aspects of what we can offer to our employees, and potential candidates, are important. We believe that “Spotify for Work” is a compelling offering that will resonate with our employees and is well worth the modest investment by Accenture. 

What excites you about this collaboration?

It is very exciting to be the first company to pilot this new offering. In this case, we are not only the first client or buyer of this service, but are also supporting the innovation and development of the new offering by sharing ongoing feedback. We see “Spotify for Work” as a great way for Spotify to reach even more users and offer companies an attractive employee perk.

What’s on your heavy audio rotation right now?

Music: Silk Sonic, Billie Eilish, Veronica Maggio, Marvin Gaye, Red Hot Chili Peppers.

Podcasts: Accenture AI Leaders Podcast, Framgångspodden.

This first-of-its-kind collaboration with Accenture is just the beginning. 

Spotify’s Statement in Response to the War in Ukraine

March 2, 2022

We are deeply shocked and saddened by the unprovoked attack on Ukraine. Our first priority over the past week has been the safety of our employees and to ensure that Spotify continues to serve as an important source of global and regional news at a time when access to information is more important than ever.

In response to the crisis, we have taken several steps. We have closed our office in Russia indefinitely and we are providing individual support to our people in the region as well as our global community of Ukrainian employees.

Our team has reviewed thousands of pieces of content since the start of the war, and has restricted the discoverability of shows owned and operated by Russian state-affiliated media. Earlier this week, we also took the additional step of removing all RT and Sputnik content from Spotify in the EU and other markets. Today, we launched a global guide on the Spotify platform to provide our users around the world with trusted news. We think it’s critically important to try to keep our service operational in Russia to allow for the global flow of information.

Our employees around the world are committed to helping people affected by the war in Ukraine and we are matching their donations two to one to support local humanitarian efforts. We are exploring additional steps that we can take and will continue to do what is in the best interest of our employees and our listeners.

*Update as of March 4, 2022: As devastating events continue to unfold in Ukraine, the global community of artists and listeners have been looking for ways to help those affected by war. So, we are mobilizing our Artist Fundraising Pick feature in Spotify for Artists to be used to help raise funds for the effort. This feature allows our community to seamlessly contribute by allowing artists to select a fundraising destination to place at the top of their Spotify profile to then collect donations from listeners. Artists will also have the ability to change their artist image on their Spotify profile to support Ukraine. Read more about this feature on Spotify for Artists. 

*Update as of March 25, 2022: Spotify has continued to believe that it’s critically important to try and keep our service operational in Russia to provide trusted, independent news and information in the region. Unfortunately, recently enacted legislation further restricting access to information, eliminating free expression, and criminalizing certain types of news puts the safety of Spotify’s employees and possibly even our listeners at risk. After carefully considering our options and the current circumstances, we have come to the difficult decision to fully suspend our service in Russia.

*Update as of April 7, 2022: Spotify will fully suspend our service in Russia on April 11th.

Nontraditional Hack Week Projects Pave Way for Innovation and Accessibility at Spotify

March 22, 2021

For many, Hack Week brings to mind images of strings of code and furious typing across multiple monitors. And while March 8-12 may have felt like that for some of the thousands of Spotify employees who participated in our annual Hack Week, for others, a successful event looked very different. 

For the five days, employees across many teams within and outside of R&D dedicated their time to projects that explored new ways of making Spotify better for creators, consumers, and employees. The week, themed around “Making Space,” especially gave time to employees who wanted to find better ways of working, for themselves and their colleagues—together and apart.

Kathleen Bright, an Agile Coach based in London, had been thinking about building trust and relationships asynchronously since December. “Part of what I do—my professional mission—is understanding that asynchronous collaboration, or working on the same thing but not necessarily at the same time, is something we’re not practiced at,” they explained. “We’re asynchronous by default now working remotely, and people are really unfamiliar with that way of working.”

According to Kathleen, email, instant messaging, sending documents and slide decks, and relying on video calls are the top ways Spotifiers are connecting with each other in the remote world. But there’s also an opportunity to show what asynchronous communication can look like. 

“One of the things that I’ve found to be really interesting is that often, when people are talking about asynchronous collaboration or communication, they talk a lot about text and the like—saying ‘we need to get better at writing.’ And I think we do need to get better at writing. But there’s a risk of us just having massive documents and slide decks flying around even more than we already do, and that’s not inclusive or accessible. And so I really wanted to focus on other ways of communicating and bring those in,” they said. 

Kathleen spent their Hack Week alongside 12 other band members from across the company working on ways to make employees more familiar with different mediums of communication—such as drawing or recording a voice memo—as well as helping teammates build up some confidence with using these tools alongside the ones they’re already using. “The point isn’t, ‘OK, well, instead of text, I’m going to use audio,’ but to combine stuff like, ‘OK, so I’ve got audio and a transcript or subtitles. I’ve got a doc that includes images and text,’” said Kathleen.

In true asynchronous fashion, Kathleen even shared some drawings they had made throughout Hack Week following meetings with their cross-functional team and topic experts at Spotify, including Casey Acierno, Media Responsibility Lead, Social Impact, and Babar Zafar, Vice President of Product Development.

“That’s something I really appreciate about Hack Week,” Kathleen said. “How we have a block of time when everyone in R&D (and beyond) is working on this. People you wouldn’t normally get to talk to are more available. So I had a meeting with Babar, who is the head of Freemium, my mission. It was really helpful to see where he’s at with asynchronous communication.”