Reshma Saujani weighs in on the return to office debate — and who benefits from flexibility.
When the coronavirus pandemic first hit, Americans nationwide had no choice but to work from home due to shelter-in-place orders. Even though the global health crisis has thankfully ended, a significant number of us still haven’t returned to the office, and one business leader believes this trend isn’t going anywhere.
“Remote work is here to stay,” Reshma Saujani declares. “And employers should implement it in a way that doesn’t hold women back or penalize them.”
As the CEO of Moms First and the founder of Girls Who Code, Saujani knows a thing or two about the impact working from home can have on the employee and the employer. Everyone on her staff either has a hybrid setup that allows them to work from home some days of the week or is fully remote. And Saujani’s approach seems to be completely on point: Workers want to keep their flexibility, which explains why when people have the chance to work flexibly, 87 percent of them take it, according to McKinsey’s American Opportunity Survey. Last year, 34 percent of Americans worked “some or all” of their time at home, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics’ annual American Time Use Survey. While that number is down from its peak of 42 percent at the height of Covid in 2020, it’s still higher than pre-pandemic levels, which hovered around 24 percent.
But not everyone’s on board with their employees working remotely — and this includes some pretty influential business leaders. Martha Stewart has slammed the practice, saying workers “can’t possibly get everything done” at home. Tesla CEO Elon Musk says productivity isn’t the only downside, even going so far as to call remote work “morally wrong.” Of course, they’re not alone: A slew of major corporations, like JPMorgan and Disney, have issued strict return-to-office mandates. And these rules could be hurting them — almost half of the companies who mandated in-office work now report a higher level of employee attrition (or gradual loss of employees), according to a 2023 survey by the firm Unispace.
This debate is currently heating up (unlike the cup of coffee you’ve had sitting on your desk all day), so we turned to Saujani to weigh in and explain why she thinks working from home is especially important for families, which Katie also spoke to Saujani about on a recent episode of Next Question.
Katie Couric Media: What has been your experience working from home, and how has it impacted your family life?
Reshma Saujani: It’s been a gift. Before I had my first child, I had more miscarriages than I can count. And when he was born, I was never there. I didn’t see him walk or crawl for the first time, and I didn’t see him say his first words, because I was on two trains and two planes a week. And I thought that was the price I had to pay to build Girls Who Code and to make a difference. Because of the pandemic, with my second son, I’m at every meal; I do bath time; and I’ve seen him walk, crawl, and talk. I can both raise him and be with him, and build an organization that’s gonna be larger and bigger than Girls Who Code. So I’ve learned that if you give mothers and women control over their schedules, they don’t have to choose between being a caretaker and being a worker.
What do you make of CEOs like Martha Stewart and Elon Musk who criticize remote work over concerns that it may not be as productive?
They’re not following the data. Studies have shown that people who work remotely are just as effective if not more effective. But still, there’s this assumption that because people are not in the office, they’re not being productive. As a CEO, every person working for me has KPIs or deliverables that they have to execute and I measure those to assess productivity, not where they’re working from.
The reality is that workplaces have worked for some people but they’ve never worked for women. We’ve never designed workplaces to make it possible for us to do both two-thirds of the caregiving work and our jobs. So it’s really important at this moment to make sure that flexibility and remote work are here to stay, and that it’s implemented in a way that doesn’t hold women back or penalize them.
But it’s not just moms, it’s dads, too. Remote work has kind of created breathing room for working parents. And yet we find ourselves at this juncture where businesses want to rewrite the rules again and actually defy the truth and the data, which has shown that remote work has not resulted in a loss of productivity.
How do you foster a sense of collaboration and community within your team in a remote setting?
We’re very intentional both at Girls Who Code and at Moms First. Every Monday, we all come together, and we also do virtual coffees with one another on Friday — and we have an “innovation day,” where we all work on a project.
I’m also someone who believes in face time. Every six weeks, we try to meet in person and have dinner or something, so I feel like I really know everybody on my team.
Should employers have certain rules and mandates when it comes to the workplace?
Companies have to figure out what works for them, but it’s also about giving people flexibility.
When you’re coming together, you should be thinking about how you’re collaborating and how you’re using that time. To me, having face time for the sake of having face time doesn’t make sense anymore. Instead of commuting to work, people can be using that time to work out or take their kids to school. The pandemic really taught us that we can still be productive remotely, so having this flexibility and having the ability to work remotely has been good for society.
But I think a good middle ground is hybrid work. The most important question is how we’re going to design hybrid or remote work in a way that allows for connection and culture.
Where do you see the future of work going?
I’m hopeful. What I’m trying to push for the future of work is to make sure that we design for the most vulnerable. We must take advantage of this moment to figure out how the most marginalized people in workplaces can survive and thrive.
When the pandemic first hit, the first resources to go were women and girls. Half of the girls I teach in Girls Who Code are under the poverty line, but their mothers were essential workers, so instead of going to college, they had to stay home and take care of their siblings. I saw how this broken structure of care creates a generational cycle of poverty and that has been a big eye-opener.
I could teach millions of girls to code, but if I didn’t support their mothers, we’ll never get to gender parity. When it comes to women’s equality, we’ve far too often been focused on fixing women rather than fixing the structure. So we tell women just to lean in, color-code their calendar, and girl boss their way to the top, but that’s not the answer. We have all these structural problems and impediments to progress that are the real issues holding women back. That’s why I started Moms First — we’re working to transform our workplaces, our government, and our culture to better support them.
This interview has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.
