Sarah Bird has had quite the couple of days in Washington D.C. this week.
The Moz CEO was invited to speak at The White House Summit on Working Families, which brought together industry leaders who shared their insight into the best workplace practices that are supportive of employees with families.
Bird was originally asked to come to D.C. after meeting the Second Lady of the U.S. Jill Biden at a similar event in Seattle earlier this year. In her opening remarks at this week’s summit, Biden actually mentioned Moz as an example of a company that employs successful work-life balance strategies, noting Moz’s no-meeting Friday policy.
“Moz works hard to create a flexible culture and recognizes the competing demands on its employees,” Biden said of the Seattle-based search marketing startup.
In addition to sharing insight into Moz’s culture with leaders like Michelle Obama and Joe Biden, Bird also sat on a panel that discussed how young entrepreneurs — particularly women and women of color — can succeed in the startup world.
Bird said that the experience reminded her of how crucial small implementations like Moz’s no-meeting Friday policy or its paid-paid vacation rule — which the company won an award for at the 2013 GeekWire Awards — can be to overall employee production and happiness.
“I’m in a tech bubble — I think about startups all day, I hang out at startups all day,” Bird told GeekWire. “So this was a great reminder that I have things I can’t take for granted. I want to spread my message loudly and hopefully inspire other kinds of workplaces to make similar kind of changes.”
