An Open Letter to Elon Musk
Dear Elon (I hope it’s okay that I call you by your first name),
I am writing in response to the internal Tesla memo about remote work that has been making its way around the internet. In it, you explain in no uncertain terms to Tesla employees who do not put in a minimum of 40 hours a week in a real Tesla office that “we will assume you have resigned.”
I get it. I really do. You are a visionary, and that kind of work doesn’t come easy. You’ve poured your heart and soul into your business ventures and accomplished amazing things as a result. You’ve spent more hours in your factories than most employees will spend at their desks in their lifetimes, and though you don’t talk much about the personal sacrifices you’ve made, I’m sure there have been many.
But this narrow perspective on remote work threatens to undo what many scholars and diversity advocates have been trying to do for decades–normalize non-traditional work patterns. And while I agree that not every position is amenable to remote work, I am alarmed by your summary dismissal of the concept.
Excellence requires commitment and hard work, but the real leadership challenge in the post-COVID world is to figure out what commitment looks like and the best ways to get it. Does commitment really mean sitting in a desk chair for 40 hours per week? Are there different ways for employees to contribute to your organization? What happens if we step outside the 40 hours per week paradigm and reimagine work entirely? You are a billionaire and can call your own shots, but I urge you as a savvy entrepreneur to take a moment to consider what you are risking.
We can’t have diversity in the workplace without flexibility. Here’s why. The 40-hour (in person) workweek is based on a single breadwinner model, where one partner stays at home and tends to domestic tasks (child care, cooking, cleaning) while the other engages in full-time employment. For most of the 20th century, this model was highly gendered, meaning that men were the default breadwinners and women the default caregivers.
But this model is no longer the norm for American families. In the late 20th century, women entered the workforce in droves, and now dual breadwinner families constitute the majority of two-partner families. Unfortunately, domestic tasks didn’t go away, and women are far more likely than their partners to pick up the slack in heterosexual couples, shuttling kids to and from school, attending school events, tending to sick children, making the pediatrician and dentist appointments, planning meals, and the litany of other tasks required to manage a household and family.
To be clear, many of these women are highly committed to their jobs and are willing to go the extra mile for you if you give them a little flexibility. They will log back into their computers late at night or early in the morning and work through sheer chaos if it means getting the job done. The women working for Tesla are some of the most committed employees out there, and they are being discarded simply because they cannot fit the 40-hour a week, face-to-face model that is predicated on their staying at home. These women need ambitious leaders to break the cult of face-time to not only participate in the workforce, but to rise in the leadership ranks.
This is where you come in.
Supporting women in the workplace means creating opportunities for flexibility for men and women. We need grace from employers like you so that women and men can share caregiving and domestic responsibilities more equitably and that both can participate more actively in the labor force during prime child-rearing years. Five years ago, when remote work was not widely accepted, a sick child meant that one parent would have to take the day off from work. Now, except in the case of severe illness, a parent doesn’t have to take the day off to monitor a child who is running a fever, but otherwise fine. In other words, inflexibility is costing you and your company in ways that you don’t see.
Do I think some employees abuse the privilege of remote work? Absolutely. But somehow, I very much doubt that their behavior would be any different in-person. We’ve all seen slackers in the office who spend most of their time trying to look productive but who accomplish very little. It is the responsibility of managers, who should be well-equipped and capable of rooting out less committed employees, to monitor productivity.
Remote work cannot and should not take the place of face-to-face work in all industries at all times. However, flexible work enables millions of talented women the opportunity to contribute to the workforce in ways that were unimaginable just 10 years ago. Surely, the point of progress is to harness the productive powers of everyone in society, not to cling to outmoded models because we lack the imagination to think about work differently.
And you, Elon, are not a person who lacks imagination.
In 1926, Henry Ford shocked fellow industrialists by instituting a 40-hour workweek at his factories, a bold departure from the 48-hour workweeks that had become the norm in the late 19th and early 20th century. Ford’s peers balked at the prospect of a shorter workweek, convinced that productivity would suffer. Much to their surprise, however, Ford’s experiment was a resounding success, and not long after, they, too, adopted shortened workweeks.
There is a place in almost every company for occasional remote work, and by drawing such an uncompromising line in the sand, you are not only missing out on the benefits of a more diverse workforce, but you are also missing out on the most important innovation of our time–the future of work. Are you up to the challenge of thinking outside the box, of reimagining how innovation and productivity happen?
