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In a tech hub like San Francisco, it\u2019s increasingly rare to find a job<\/a> that will still let you work from home the majority of the week. But at $12 billion company Docusign, that\u2019s still the case\u2014in fact, nobody\u2019s required to come into the office on a Friday.<\/p>\n Allan Thygesen, the CEO of the agreement management platform, spoke to Fortune<\/em> from the company\u2019s London office as part of a global tour.<\/p>\n The company saw exponential growth during the pandemic\u2014booming by 60% when the corporate world went remote, and contracts had to be signed virtually.<\/p>\n But when the globe returned to \u201cnormal,\u201d Thygesen, a father of four born and raised in Denmark, wanted to retain some of the pandemic\u2019s benefits, namely, a more flexible work model.<\/p>\n So the company shed a significant amount of its office portfolio\u2014half of its floors in San Francisco and Seattle\u2014and asked its near-7,000 employees <\/strong>to come in two days a week instead: Mondays and Wednesdays or Tuesdays and Thursdays. <\/p>\n No one is asked to come in on Fridays, though the offices are open.<\/p>\n \u201cI would say we\u2019re very light-handed when it comes to enforcement,\u201d he added. <\/p>\n \u201cI don\u2019t think we\u2019ll be introducing anything draconian, I think relative even to the San Fransisco Bay Area and the Seattle area\u2014which are both very tech-heavy and the last bastion of fully flexible work rules\u2014we\u2019re on the very flexible, very light requirement.\u201d<\/p>\n Thygesen\u2019s laid-back approach differs from that of Mark Zuckerberg at Meta who, despite saying in 2020<\/a> that half his workforce would be remote by 2030, is now enforcing a three-day-a-week<\/a> in-office policy or risk discipline. <\/p>\n Amazon<\/a> pushed a similar mandate<\/a>, which prompted something of a rebellion within its ranks, while Google\u2019s plan to integrate office attendance with performance reviews has been subject to the ire of its union<\/a>.<\/p>\n \u201cAny time you change these types of rules, people hate it because, of course, employees want maximum flexibility. It\u2019s good for their personal lives,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n \u201cSo there is a balance there between the needs of the company and what employees think is good for them. I do think people have come to understand that being fully remote is good in the moment, but it may not be great for your long-term career development, particularly early in your career.\u201d<\/p>\n Thygesen said he would sometimes go into the office at the end of the week, but he joked that it was a \u201clonely\u201d experience. <\/p>\n However, the tech boss\u2019s most \u201cintense\u201d meeting of the week\u2014a product strategy review\u2014is invariably conducted online with every contributor chiming in virtually.<\/p>\n \u201cThese are very intense, very good meetings and there\u2019s not a particular reason we all need to be in the same place,\u201d Thygesen said.<\/p>\n Thygesen\u2019s meetings have become all the more intense this year after Docusign launched its new Intelligent Agreement Management (IAM) which will use AI to create, integrate and analyze agreements and documents more seamlessly.<\/p>\n Nicholai Tangen, the CEO of Norway\u2019s Norges Bank Investment Management, has noted that Americans work harder than their counterparts across the Atlantic.<\/a><\/p>\n There\u2019s a difference in the \u201cgeneral level of ambition,\u201d Tangen told the Financial Times<\/em>. \u201cWe [Europeans] are not very ambitious. I should be careful about talking about work-life balance, but the Americans just work harder.\u201d<\/p>\n Docusign\u2019s Thygesen\u2014an alumni of Stanford and the University of Copenhagen who now oversees teams working out of offices in India, Australia, America, France, Germany, and Japan, to name a few\u2014has seen firsthand how different regions operate.<\/p>\n He agrees that Tangen\u2019s view is \u201cobjectively true,\u201d but qualified: \u201cThere\u2019s more to work than how many hours you do. I feel like my European teams work very smartly, they\u2019re very efficient, work tends to be a bit more organized.\u201d<\/p>\n Thygesen and Tangen are correct, according to the data. <\/p>\n According to the\u00a0European Union<\/a>, in 2022 the average workweek of people between the ages of 22 and 65 was 37.5 hours. <\/p>\n The longest working weeks recorded were in Greece\u201441 hours a week\u2014and Poland\u201440.4 hours. <\/p>\n By contrast, the Netherlands had the shortest working week of 33.2 hours, followed by Germany at 35.3 hours.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, data from the\u00a0International Labour Organization<\/a>, last updated in January, showed the average hours workers clocked in the U.S. was 38 hours a week. <\/p>\n However, of those employees, 13% worked 49 hours or more per week, outstripping most European nations.<\/p>\n Countries like the U.K. also have a statutory requirement entitling staff to 28 paid days of leave a year\u2014if you\u2019re a full-time employee. <\/p>\n In the U.S., it is not a legal requirement for staff to be given any paid time off; however,\u00a0according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics<\/a>, the average employee who is in their first year of service takes eight PTO days.<\/p>\n Thygesen was also quick to point out that neither nation had made the wrong approach, but they simply had different priorities. <\/p>\n He explained: \u201cThese are conscious choices that societies have made about the trade-off between work and leisure time\u2014maybe Americans aren\u2019t necessarily happier. <\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re certainly wealthier, and that gap has probably widened more over the last decade, but life is a holistic sum of all those things, so having spent time on both sides I see the merits of both.\u201d<\/p>\n Thygesen has a point here, too. The World Happiness Report 2024, released in March, found that four of the top five happiest countries on earth were European, and 14 of the top 20 were also from the continent. <\/p>\n Meanwhile, the U.S. fell to its lowest point since the report began in 2012, ranking 23.<\/p>\n Headquartered in San Francisco, Docusign staffers could well form part of a community of tech employees bashing the city for increasing levels of crime and homelessness. <\/p>\n But criticism from the likes of Elon Musk may have skewed the reality that Thygesen, his family and his employees live in. <\/p>\n The Tesla<\/a> CEO said last year the city was in a \u201cdoom spiral\u201d<\/a> having previously\u00a0labeled<\/a>\u00a0downtown San Francisco a \u201cdisaster\u201d and likened it to \u201ca derelict zombie apocalypse.\u201d<\/p>\n\nEuropean vs American ambition<\/h2>\n
Is Elon right about San Francisco? <\/h2>\n