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.