GoKawiilKey Takeaways Skims chief product officer, Emma Grede, calls working from home “career suicide.”
She links widespread remote work to social problems like loneliness, declining marriage rates and falling birth rates.
She believes close, in-person relationships are key to a long and happy life.
Emma Grede says employees are overlooking the hidden cost of working from home. The serial entrepreneur, worth a reported $405 million, is the co-founder and CEO of denim company Good American, which did $200 million in sales in 2022, and the chief product officer and founding partner of Skims, a $4 billion shapewear brand.
In a newly released episode of the Leaders with Francine Lacqua podcast, 43-year-old Grede warned that remote work may carry broader social consequences that are largely going unnoticed.
“Working from home is career suicide,” Grede told the podcast. “And we only talk about the upside of working from home.”
Emma Grede. (Photo by Craig Barritt/Getty Images for Emma Grede)
Grede said that the dark side of remote work is both uncomfortable to confront and already materializing.
“Think about what’s happening in the world,” Grede said. “Declining birth rates, declining marriage rates, and the loneliness epidemic. And we think that none of that is linked to the number of people that don’t see people because they’re doing Zoom calls from the living room?”
Grede, who also runs apparel company Good American as CEO, said it’s “so crazy” not to see a connection between those trends and the rise of remote work.
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