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Once upon a time, Jeff Maggioncalda was embarrassed at the thought of his workers running away from home one day a week.
But now, the CEO of Coursera, the $2. 6 billion online learning platform, has converted to remote work, saying the company is holding on to capacity longer and finding it easier to hire candidates.
Speaking to Fortune in October, Maggioncalda revealed that he was wrapping up a whirlwind tour of Europe and the Middle East, visiting Dubai and Saudi Arabia for a few days.
Maggioncalda has replaced his sleep patterns to be available to colleagues in other time zones when needed, such as taking a 45-minute nap in an airport lounge or waking up at 3 a. m. to lead the exhibition of Coursera’s hands.
The CEO leads by example. Since COVID-19, Coursera and its 1,400 painters have been working remotely at first, holding corporate meetings about eight times a year, but encouraging them to work most of the time however they want.
Maggioncalda, who earned more than $29 million last year (mostly in stock) to oversee the leading e-learning in partnership with Google and DeepLearning. AI, says he doesn’t know precisely where the peak of his workers are at any given time.
Some still paint near the center of the company, Silicon Valley, or in other offices around the world; Others get lost in a van in the middle of the countryside.
Speaking of his scattered employees, Maggioncalda reminds us that he has to move his Slack from Riyadh to London: freedom of movement is a merit clearly shared between the CEO and his employees.
It’s hard to believe this is the same user who, in 2019, supposedly hated the company’s “no-meeting Wednesdays,” which allowed staff to paint from home one day a week.
The policy was meant to compensate for the “brutality” its workers face in getting to Silicon Valley, Maggioncalda says, but it was hard to bear.
“I said, ‘You can do whatever you want, but I’m going to work,'” Maggioncalda tells Fortune, admitting that he was suspicious of what the staff did once a week.
“Do other people in the countryside have the time and attention to devote so much time and attention to the paintings we have in our hands?” Maggioncalda remembers thinking.
But when COVID-19 hit, Maggioncalda’s fears were allayed. He was amazed that the company was able to consistently achieve its goals while communicating entirely through Zoom calls.
Since then, Maggioncalda has been convinced to make Coursera a remote-focused company because of the way it affects staff satisfaction and how it has revolutionized Coursera’s skills recruitment beyond the boundaries of San Jose.
“If you need other people to come in and you don’t have s all over the world, you can rent only from other people who are close to you or move other people to your headquarters.
“Their group is much, much, much smaller,” he continued.
Today, Maggioncalda says, most of its executives are in the United States, while the company’s business leader is in France.
There’s been a big shift in the debate about where people work.
Despite workers’ protests, CEOs of the world’s largest corporations are increasingly starting to play more and more background music in anticipation of an imaginable return to five days a week in the office.
A KPMG survey of 400 bosses conducted in October found that 62% believed that pre-pandemic face-to-face jobs would return to 2025.
Maggioncalda is part of a dwindling minority of CEOs resisting calls to return to their desks. His trajectory toward adopting work-from-home is more surprising as other bosses backtrack on their openness to the concept, such as Salesforce chief Marc Benioff. and Meta co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Other CEOs who have gained an edge start by avoiding seeming as enthusiastic as ever about the move.
Matt Mullenweg, CEO and co-founder of WordPress and owner of Tumblr Automattic, may be one of the founding fathers of remote work.
Automattic has been “distributed” since Mullenweg founded the company with Mike Little in 2005. Mullenweg’s 2,000 employees are in 98 countries.
Other benefits, such as the ability to work fewer days at lower pay, are also ahead of the corporate package.
Like Maggioncalda, Mullenweg discovers a way to meet with his workers several times a year and sees communication as the key to the good fortune of a dispersed workforce.
“If a company came to me and said, ‘Hey, this works,’ I’d start by asking what kind of education do you offer, what’s your meeting culture?How do they communicate?” Mullenweg said, speaking to Fortune at one such convention in Malaga, Spain.
Mullenweg is arguably already starting to reap the rewards of workers’ resistance to returning to the office, calling Automattic’s retention rates “off the charts. “
Mullenweg says Automattic has noticed an increase in the number of executive programs over the past six months, which he says is no coincidence. By comparison, Mullenweg says the company has had a harder time recruiting formula managers, who have managed to stay remote.
Maggioncalda and Mullenweg admit that some artwork might be better done from an office, or that some companies would probably never be able to achieve the same effects via Zoom.
However, the Automattic co-founder wonders if remote work is being used as a scapegoat for other problems within an organization, adding that if you’re returning to the workplace five days a week, it’s possibly too late to fix them.
“What they’re going to find is that when they force other people back into the office, some of those issues will persist because, to be honest, it’s imaginable to be unproductive in an office,” Mullenweg said.
“I feel like the question of whether we’re productive and effective is necessarily orthogonal to where we’re running from. “
This story appears in Fortune. com
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