There was a time when Jeff Maggioncalda was gnashing his teeth at the idea of his employees working from home one day a week.
But now the CEO of Coursera, the $2.6 billion online learning platform, is pivoting to remote work: He says the company can retain talent longer and hire high-quality candidates more easily.
talking wealth In October, Magion Calda revealed that he would end a short stay in Europe and the Middle East and visit Dubai and Saudi Arabia within days.
Maggioncalda changed her sleep patterns to be available to colleagues in different time zones when needed, such as taking a 45-minute nap in an airport lounge or waking up at 3 a.m. for a Coursera all-hands meeting.
CEOs lead by example. Coursera and its 1,400 employees have been remote-first since COVID-19, with the company holding about eight meetings a year but encouraging employees to work from wherever they like most of the time.
Maggioncalda, who made $29 million last year (mostly in stock awards) to run a large e-learning website that partners with Google and DeepLearning.AI, said he doesn’t know where most of his employees are at any given time. .
Some still work near the company’s Silicon Valley hub or at other offices around the world, and others may be lost in a van in the countryside.
When it came to a distributed workforce, Maggioncalda remembers that he needed to update the Slack location from Riyadh to London—freedom of movement was an obvious benefit that CEOs and employees shared.
From remote work critics to advocates
It’s hard to imagine this is the same guy who apparently hated the company’s “no meeting Wednesdays” in 2019, allowing employees to work from home one day a week.
Magioncalda said the policy was intended to offset the “brutal” commute his employees faced into Silicon Valley, but it was unacceptable.
“I said, ‘You can do what you want, but I have to work,'” Magioncalda said wealthadmitted he was skeptical about the weekly activities of his staff.
“Do people have the discipline to focus as much time and attention on what needs to be done?” Magion Calda recalled thinking.
But when COVID-19 hit, Maggioncalda’s fears were put to rest. He was amazed that the company was able to consistently meet its goals while communicating entirely through Zoom calls.
Maggioncalda has since become convinced of making Coursera a remote-first company because of how it affects employee satisfaction and how it will revolutionize the way Coursera recruits talent by looking beyond San Jose.
“If you need people to come to your office and you don’t have an office anywhere in the world, you either have to hire people closer to your office or you have to relocate people to your office.
“Your talent pool is much, much narrower,” he continued.
Magioncalda said most of his top executives are now based across the United States, while the company’s corporate chief is in France.
CEOs fight back
The debate over where people work has clearly changed dramatically.
CEOs of the world’s largest companies are increasingly turning to mood music in an eventual return to five days a week in the office despite protests from workers.
An October KPMG survey of 400 bosses found that 62% believed pre-pandemic face-to-face work would return to offices by 2025.
Magion Calda is one of the few CEOs refusing to let employees return to their desks. His trajectory in embracing working from home is all the more remarkable as other bosses, such as Salesforce boss Marc Benioff and Meta co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, become less open to the concept. Mark Zuckerberg).
Senior executives looking to work remotely
Other CEOs who have taken the lead in eschewing the office appear to be as enthusiastic about the sport as ever.
Matt Mullenweg, CEO and co-founder of WordPress and Tumblr owner Automattic, can be considered one of the originators of remote work.
Automattic has been “distributed” since Mullenweg co-founded the company with Mike Little in 2005. Mullenweg’s 2,000 employees are located in 98 countries.
Other benefits, such as the option to reduce working days and salary, also lead corporate benefits.
Like Maggioncalda, Mullenweg manages to meet with employees several times a year and believes communication is key to successfully decentralizing the workforce.
“If a company comes to me and says ‘Hey, this isn’t working,’ I start digging into what type of training are they doing? What’s their meeting culture? How do they communicate?” Marenweg said in an interview said wealth A party from Malaga, Spain.
Mullenweg may have begun to benefit from employee resistance to returning to the office, describing Automattic’s retention rates as “record-breaking.”
Mullenweg said there has been a surge in applications from Automattic executives over the past six months, which he doesn’t think is a coincidence. In contrast, Mullenweg said the company has had trouble recruiting system administrators, who have largely managed to keep working remotely.
Both Maggioncalda and Mullenweg acknowledged that some jobs may be better done in the office, or some companies may never be able to achieve the same results through Zoom.
However, the Automattic co-founder wonders if remote working is being used as a scapegoat for other problems within organizations, adding that by the time employees are back in the office five days a week, it may be too late to address them.
“They’re going to find that when they force people back into the office, some of these issues remain because, honestly, it can be inefficient to be in the office,” Mullenweg said.
“I feel like the question of whether we are productive and efficient is necessarily orthogonal to where we work.”
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