Once upon a time Jeff Maggioncalda ground his teeth at the idea of his staff working from home one day a week.
But now the CEO of the $2.6 billion online-learning platform Coursera is a remote work convert: he says the business retains talent for longer and finds it easier to hire high-quality candidates.
Speaking to Fortune in October, Maggioncalda revealed he was winding up a whistle-stop tour of Europe and the Middle East, visiting Dubai and Saudi Arabia over the course of a few days.
Maggioncalda altered his sleep patterns to be available to colleagues in various time zones when needed—maybe grabbing a 45-minute nap in an airport lounge or waking up at 3 a.m. to conduct Coursera’s all-hands meeting.
The CEO leads by example. Since COVID-19, Coursera and its 1,400 employees have been remote-first, with the company meeting up about eight times a year but encouraging staff to work most days anywhere they like.
Maggioncalda, who earned more $29 million last year (the majority in stock awards) to oversee the major e-learning site which partners with Google and DeepLearning.AI, says he doesn’t know exactly where most of his workers are at any given time.
Some are still working near the company’s hub of Silicon Valley or at other offices across the globe—others could be getting lost in a van in the countryside.
As he speaks about his scattered employees, Maggioncalda remembers he needs to update his Slack location from Riyadh to London—freedom of movement is a perk evidently shared between the CEO and his employees.
From remote work critic to advocate
It’s hard to imagine this is the same person who in 2019 apparently hated the company’s ‘No Meetings Wednesdays,’ allowing staff to work from home one day a week.
The policy was intended to offset the “brutal” commutes faced by his staff to get into Silicon Valley, Maggioncalda says, but it was hard to stomach.
“I said: ‘You can do what you want, but I’m going to work,’” Maggioncalda tells Fortune, admitting he had suspicions about what staff were up to once a week.
“Do people have the discipline to focus as much of their time and attention on the work that needs to get done?” Maggioncalda recalls thinking.
But when COVID-19 struck, Maggioncalda’s fears were put to bed. He was amazed that the company was able to consistently hit its targets while communicating entirely through Zoom calls.
Maggioncalda has since been convinced to make Coursera a remote-first company because of how it’s affected staff satisfaction, and how it’s revolutionized Coursera’s recruitment of talent by looking outside the confines of San Jose.
“If you require people to come into the office, and you don’t have offices everywhere in the world, you can either only hire people who are proximate to your office, or you have to relocate people to your office.
“Your talent pool is much, much, much more narrow,” he continued.
Now, Maggioncalda says, most of his execs are based across the US, while the company’s head of enterprise is in France.
CEOs bite back
There has been a clear sea change in the debate about where people work.
Despite protests from workers, CEOs of the world’s biggest companies are increasingly starting to play the mood music on an eventual return to five days a week in the office.
An October survey of 400 bosses by KPMG found that 62% thought jobs that were in-person before the pandemic would be back in the office by 2025.
Maggioncalda is one of a shrinking minority of CEOs resisting calls to get staff back to their desks. His trajectory toward embracing work from home is more striking as other bosses retract their openness to the concept, take Salesforce boss Marc Benioff and Meta co-founder Mark Zuckerberg.
Execs looking for remote work
Other CEOs who got a head-start on shunning the office still appear as keen on the movement as ever.
Matt Mullenweg, the co-founder of WordPress and CEO of Tumblr owner Automattic, could be regarded as one of the Founding Fathers of remote work.
Automattic has been “distributed” since Mullenweg started the company in 2005. Mullenweg’s 2,000 employees are stretched out across 98 countries.
Other perks, like the option to work fewer days on less pay, are also ahead of the corporate pack.
Like Maggioncalda, Mullenweg finds ways to meet up with his employees a few times a year, and views communication as key to a successful dispersed workforce.
“If a company were coming to me and saying ‘Hey, this isn’t working,’ I would start to dive into what sort of training are they doing? What’s their meeting culture? How do they communicate?” Mullenweg said, speaking to Fortune from one of those meetups in Malaga, Spain.
Mullenweg might already be starting to reap the benefits of employee resistance to returning to the office, describing Automattic’s retention rates as “off the charts.”
Mullenweg says Automattic has seen a surge in applications from execs in the past six months, which he doesn’t think is a coincidence. By comparison, Mullenweg says the company has had a tougher time hiring systems administrators, who have broadly managed to stay remote.
Both Maggioncalda and Mullenweg accept that some jobs might just be better done from an office, or that some companies may never be able to achieve the same results over Zoom.
However, the Automattic co-founder wonders whether remote work is being used as a scapegoat for other issues within an organization, adding by the time staff are back in the office five days a week, it might be too late to fix them.
“What they’ll find is when they force people back into the office some of these problems will still be there because to be honest, it’s possible to be unproductive in an office,” Mullenweg said.
“I feel like that question of whether we’re being productive and effective is orthogonal to necessarily where we’re working from.”
