S02E22: Job van der Voort, Remote

Our guest for the 21st interview with unicorn start-up leaders is Job van der Voort, co-founder and CEO of Remote.

Remote helps companies of all sizes hire top talent all over the world, in full compliance with local laws. A global platform for distributed teams, Remote makes it easy to onboard, pay, and delight remote employees and contractors, anywhere in the world. The company was founded in 2019 by Job and his co-founder Marcelo Lebre, in what was their second venture together. 18 months later Remote raised $150m and became Portugal’s fifth unicorn.

A neuroscientist by training, Job admits that the scientific world was too slow for him so he left it to found his first startup and then work at GitLab to the point where he ran their product for five years. For him, GitLab is a role model of a fully remote company and inspired him to create Remote and help other companies overcome the challenges of setting a remote. According to Job, he does not need to convince companies to make this change because „the weight of the decision does not lie with the employers anymore“. He adds, „it’s either you go remote in some capacity or you’re going to lose out on a lot of good talent.“ For him, South America and Africa will boom immensely and benefit most from a remote working world.

Among his advice on how to work efficiently remotely, he acknowledges that most meetings are a waste of time. He reveals that one of the best ways to make people productive is to teach them how to avoid meetings. Job also stresses that being brutally honest and open about any issue has been his life hack. For him, this is vital to successfully leading a company. He also points out that the biggest mistake an entrepreneur can make is not following up and fixing things, to just sit with that and let it be – you should always deal with the issue as fast as you can.

The interview, as usual, was co-hosted with Russell Goldsmith of the csuite podcast.

We have distilled the most valuable, actionable insights from our first 15 interviews with leaders of unicorn companies and bottled them in our book ‘Growing without borders: The unicorn CEO guide to communication and culture’. You can download it here.

Transcript:

Russ: [00:00:00] Thanks for downloading the 21st in our series of episodes of the csuite podcast that we are recording in partnership with the European PR agency Tyto and their own Without Borders podcast, where we are interviewing leaders of unicorn companies to find out about the key issues, pain points and challenges that start-ups face and how they can address them with a strategic approach to marketing and communications. My name is Russell Goldsmith. My co-host for this series of interviews is Tyto’s founder, Brendon Craigie, and today we are thrilled to be joined online from close to Amsterdam by Job van der Voort, CEO and co-founder of Remote. Founded in 2019 to simplify how companies employ global talent, Remote raised $150m Series B funding round in July 2021, and that brought its total fundraising to $196m, reaching a $1 billion valuation and making it the fifth unicorn to be founded in Portugal. Welcome to the show, Job.

Job: : [00:00:56] Thanks.

Russ: [00:00:57] Do you want to start by just giving a quick introduction to the business?

Job: [00:01:00] Yeah, you described us pretty well. So, what Remote does is it solves the fundamental problem of ‘I want to hire someone that lives in a different country’. And so, what we do is we make it possible. And the way we make it possible is we have entities all over the world and in those entities and through those entities, we can provide local employment, we can provide payroll, benefits and anything else that comes with hiring someone locally. And that’s what we do for a large part now, by now, a very large part of the world and for thousands of different companies.

Russ: [00:01:33] Now if I’ve got this right, doing my bit of research, your background, you’re a neuroscientist. So how do you go from studying that and that background to creating a company that enables hiring employees anywhere in the world?

Job: [00:01:46] Yeah, it’s a good question. It’s a long journey. I was in neuroscience, which I liked very much, but science is very slow, so I eventually left it to start my own start-up, which went nowhere because I had no money and it ran out really quickly, the little that I had, and did a bunch of other things ended up at GitLab as a programmer, and I supported programming and eventually led their product for five years. And in that time, we built GitLab from a tiny team to a very large company fully remotely. We had people in sixty-seven different countries all over the world. And the one thing we faced, and we struggled with was the problem that we solve today with Remote. So that’s essentially the journey.

Brendon: [00:02:24] So kind of feels like over the past 18 months or so, Job, that there’s been this incredible transformation in terms of how people view the idea of remote work at scale from being a curious thing that some companies do to something which obviously, loads and loads of companies do today. But there’s probably still some sceptics out there. And I’m just wondering, how do you convince those people out there that are still sceptical about the benefits of remote and hybrid models? Or do you not bother trying to convince them.

Job: [00:02:58] That’s it, I don’t bother. I don’t have to, because the weight of the decision does not lie with the employers anymore. It’s the individuals that choose to set the standard by their feet or less so, in their pyjamas nowadays. What we’re seeing is that employers that don’t embrace the ability to hire anybody from anywhere to build a team that is the best people you can find rather than the best people that happen to be close to your office. What we find is that employers that don’t do that, they are going to miss out on talent and their talent is going to leave their company. You might have heard about ‘The great resignation’, and that really is happening. We see it everywhere. And so, it’s either you go remote in some capacity or you’re going to lose out on a lot of good talent. That is basically it, and that’s where the majority of the world will go. It’s not to say that everybody will be working from home. I don’t think that is a good idea. And I think many people don’t want to work from home and they may not, should not even work from home. But we will move to a place where the company for which you work for does not have to be in the same place as you are. And you can move without having to change jobs. And that’s such a massive advantage by itself that, you know, of course, that is the way the world is going forward.

Brendon: [00:04:07] I guess your current business and your previous business, you’ve been involved in the building of companies which are almost entirely remote, whereas I guess there are companies out there that have stumbled into this, and maybe they’ve got kind of like a legacy office infrastructure. I mean, I’ve built a business which is entirely remote, and I’m grateful for the fact that I don’t have to deal with that complexity of the hybrid model. I mean, how do you see all of that shaking out, are you a believer in the hybrid model? Do you think that remote teams and office-based teams can coexist really well together? What’s your view on that?

Job: [00:04:45] I think there’s not a clear definition of what hybrid means, right? I think that’s the first one. Does it mean that you’re part of the time remote, does it mean that part of the team is remote? In general, I think it’s incredibly hard to make work independent of what way that you do this. If one person is working remotely, everyone has to act as if they are working remotely and if they don’t do that, they are going to isolate that one person or that group of people. Because in the office, the distance and the ease of communication is of course is far greater. The only really good thing that you can do in a situation where you have an office and that you don’t wanna really go into an office and that some people still want to go there is you should treat it like a co-working space, and you say ‘Everybody always works remotely, you always act as if you’re working remotely. No one is ever expected to be in the office. Not for a meeting, not for day-to-day work, not for anything, but if you want to, if you don’t want to work from home or you don’t want to work from a different place, you can come in. You can use the office to your liking’. I think that is the only way to work. Any alternative is going to result in creating an A team and a B team where people in the office have some sort of better situation than the people outside of the office. And I think for companies that do this half-half, where they say, well, certain days we work remotely, certain days we work in the office, you’re going to create an even greater problem where the days that you’re not in the office, you’re going to behave differently, which you don’t want, right? You want that work is always somewhat similar day to day. You have access to the same kind of information and can take decisions just as fast.

Brendon: [00:06:08] Do you think people are just going to learn that the hard way? Or do you have a sense of how you think that’s going to play out over the next 12 to 18 months?

Job: [00:06:16] No, they will learn it the hard way. Actually, I was talking to a friend this weekend and he was telling me that he works at a large consultancy and they’re starting to go back into the office. But the employer says, ‘Look, we are remote friendly. You can work from home whenever and how much you want’. And there were a bunch of people in the office and there were two people on the invite for a meeting they had. And those two people, they were working from home or somewhere else, but they booked a meeting room without any kind of AV equipment. There was no way for them to attend the meeting in that meeting room, which was just a room with a desk and a bunch of chairs and nothing else. Yeah. People will start to realize this, and they will have to learn the hard way that the only real solution to this particular scenario is everybody, go back to the desk, open your laptop, and that’s how you hold the meeting, which might feel stupid in a moment, but it’s much more inclusive.

Russ: [00:07:02] That’s interesting. Job, I mentioned that at the start of the intro, you’ve gone from zero to unicorn in just two and a half years. So, what would be good is just ask them what part in that intense period were you most proud of? And also, what’s been the most challenging moment in that journey?

Job: [00:07:19] I think the thing I’m most proud of. It’s not like… there’s not a moment, but it’s the fact that we managed to build an incredibly kind, talented team of people from all over the world. It’s a very diverse group of people. They all are very hardworking. I really care about what they’re doing. That’s easily the thing I’m most proud of. I think it’s genuinely a really nice place to work, Remote. And the most challenging thing is not necessarily the same thing with like when you grow this fast, you know, everything feels like it’s just it’s all really fast. Everything is really fast. Like, the whole company is new every two months or so, every three months, right? Like we did a survey the other day. How long have you been with Remote? Most people had been there significantly less than six months. And by the numbers, that’s the case. A year ago, we had maybe 40 employees. Today we have about 540, and that is in a lot of ways very difficult because you have to constantly be moving. I had a conversation with someone the other day and we were looking back upon the distant past and we realized it was four weeks ago and everything was different back then. So that is very difficult. I think scaling a business this quick is very challenging.

Russ: [00:08:24] And what about at that point where you reached that unicorn status? Did that change the perception of the business at all in any way?

Job: [00:08:31] Yeah, I mean, in some ways, well you get more press. You get more attention, like it sort of puts a banner on your company that says, this is a real deal. There’s something here, something big. It’s also a bit of a vanity thing, of course, because like it is, there’s no direct impact on the day to day of me or any of the people that we work with.

Brendon: [00:08:51] I know that when I was creating Tyto, I looked out there for companies that inspired me to go remote and learn from their lessons. When you kind of look out onto the world, who do you think are the benchmark for doing remote work or setting up remote business models the best, I mean, beyond the obvious of Remote themselves?

Job: [00:09:12] Yeah, yeah. I was going to say I’m going to toot my horn even more because I think it’s GitLab being one of the biggest one, and we build a lot of the way that we function based on how we did things at GitLab. And then Automattic, the creators of WordPress, I think, is another organization that is really leading in this regard for many, many years. So that’s basically it. There are not that many organizations have done this successfully in the way that we would define like a modern workplace to be working remotely. There have been a surprising number of organizations that supported remote work for many years, some of them for decades. But usually, it was like for a particular set of workers in those companies and for a particular set of functions or particular departments. So yeah, a whole organization is at this kind of scale and this kind of level of like, asynchronous, really working together. It really was only a handful of companies. Now it’s thousands.

Brendon: [00:10:05] And in terms of what’s going on in this space, I’m guessing we’re always all learning about how we can do things better. Is there a trend at the moment that you’re particularly excited about in the field of remote work?

Job: [00:10:18] Yeah, it’s a good question. There’s a lot of different things that I’m excited about. The first thing is like, there’s so many cool tools, right? There are so many cool tools, and I think there’s still a lot of big space to improve them. I still feel like there’s… we’re just at the start of it. The announcement that Facebook made and then Microsoft a few days later about their focus on the metaverse and everything that comes with that. I think it’s a step in this direction where we’re saying we’re no longer bound by a particular physical location. We’re more thinking about, presence in the abstract, presence in a digital world. As you know, we shipped everybody VR headsets at Remote since very early days, and it’s basically because of this reason. It’s like, how can we create some sort of form of presence without being present in person? And so, I think those are things that excite me. They’re not necessarily things that are here today, right? They are here if you work at Remote, but even with us, like we’re not actually working inside of VR yet, but it is exciting to look at that and it’s moving really fast.

Russ: [00:11:14] What are you doing with the VR headsets? How are you using them?

Job: [00:11:17] However we feel like, that’s basically the answer, which also implies directly that we don’t use them day to day, like it’s not a part of like doing our work. It’s not possible yet unless you do a lot of effort, and even then, you will be less productive. But it’s not possible yet to do actual day to day work on them, but you can use them to hang out with each other, to play games with each other and to get a taste of the future. And I think that is the main point of this, how to get a taste of the future.

Brendon: [00:11:44] We’ve done some good team golf, you know, team building, which is great. It’s kind of like you’re on the fairway, you’re having a chat, you know, unwinding and hitting a few balls and things. It’s really good team building. I’m guessing… you’ve talked about Remote’s expansion, how you’ve opened up the possibility to employ people in all over the world and know you’re very passionate about distributing opportunity and opening up opportunities for people. When you look across the world, which countries do you think if you were buying shares in a country, so to speak, you know, which countries do you think are going to do really well out of this in terms of, you know, expanding the opportunity to recruit people from different places?

Job: [00:12:27] I don’t know about particular countries, but I can think about regions. I think South America and Africa are both booming immensely because of this, right? Like traditionally, it’s been very hard to have access to great opportunities there. Bay has been incredibly low, but the quality of people is, of course, the same as everybody else. And so, you know, I put a lot of money on Africa, especially in the regions that have been very underserved by opportunities in that sense. But the same in South America. I think this is, you know, if you live in an economy that is suffering from hyperinflation, if you live under a government that is very restrictive in what you can do and now you suddenly have access to very great opportunities while not necessarily having to move, right? Like you might still love the place where you live, even though there’s not a lot of opportunities, that’s very powerful, and I think that’s going to change a lot in the world.

Russ: [00:13:14] A key part of what we talk through in this series of unicorn interviews is looking at communications and culture within the business. Just starting on the comms side, obviously, given the rise in remote working, there are other companies out there that do similar to what you do. So, what would be great is to just understand how you’ve sort of raised awareness of the company in such a short space of time and how you’re differentiating yourself in that crowded market?

Job: [00:13:39] Well, working with Brendon! That’s been one way. I think we try to be authentic about what we care about, about who we are and what we do. We built a company in a very particular way, which is we say we want to do things right. And I think that it’s like the image that we try to share with the rest of the world. We care about what we’re doing, we care about the opportunity, but also about the impact that we’re having. We care about doing things right, which is another big one. I think those have been the most important ones. We’re not trying to make a quick buck, although admittedly getting to a billion dollar within two and a half years is a lot of money. But we’re not trying to make a quick buck and we’re not trying to just jump on something and grab the tailwinds, let’s say, but we’re trying to do things right, and I think that is what we’ve been focused on.

Russ: [00:14:28] And what about building the culture of the company? How have you achieved that?

Job: [00:14:32] That’s a whole different thing. It’s starting with the values in the organisation. We wrote our values – kindness, ownership, excellence, transparency, and ambition – very early on. And then we built our team on top of that, everybody that was hired knew about these values and they knew that this is how we run our company, according to these values. Your performance, the way we think about what is good and what isn’t good, it’s all aligned with those values and that’s where everything starts and where everything ends. And then on top of that, yeah, one of our first values is kindness. If you’re kind to each other, it’s that’s a pretty solid foundation to do other things on top of, right? And yeah, just make sure you hire people that match that and address it if you make mistakes.

Brendon: [00:15:14] One of the things I think as a CEO thinking with regard to internal communications, you’ve got this constant challenge to be able to communicate with a lot of people with your entire company, but then also key individuals and key teams. How do you get that balance right? How do you distinguish between how you communicate with the entire company and more smaller groups and are there any particular unique challenges or opportunities that being a remote business present?

Job: [00:15:45] Yeah, that’s an interesting question. For one, I do almost everything out in the public or at least internally public. So even if it’s communicating with a particular team, anybody could read that if they would want to do so, let’s say like the company is so big and the amount of things that are being sent across that go so incredibly fast that you can’t keep up with everything. I stick to a few very simple things. One is I try to make it accessible to everybody, whatever it is that I share, and it means that it’s very rarely like synchronous. It’s usually asynchronous. I usually require a loom to send the people or sometimes just write something. And especially if it’s to the whole company, I just make sure that it’s very short. It’s very digestible. Whereas if you work with very particular teams, it’s almost the other way around where sometimes you really want to get in deep and you want to do. It’s a very different kind of way of communicating with each other. Yeah, I’m not sure if that answers your question, but I do think a lot about this. But there’s not really a straightforward answer to how do you do it. I think it also depends on the stage of the company and what it is actually do that you’re hoping to achieve.

Brendon: [00:16:44] Totally agree with you about that point, about trying to communicate as openly as possible because it really helps to bring everyone with you, doesn’t it? You know, when you when you do that. Maybe it’s kind of slight tangent, Job, but in terms of kind of working productively in your business and some of this obviously relates to communications, you mentioned Loom. What are your kind of favourite tools that you use to do that?

Job: [00:17:08] Yeah, I think one trick is to stay away from too many tools, right? And so, we have several tools that as a company, everybody uses. We use Notion for documentation. We use Slack very intensively and Zoom very intensively and try to not use too much around that like other than that. Personally, it’s a whole different story. I have a million gazillion tools. I have this really crazy set up just now. I set up a thing so that if I call out to Siri, I can turn on my scanner automatically and like scan a thing. So that’s a very different thing altogether. But from like a company perspective, we try to keep it really, really simple, not do too many crazy things. I think one of the best ways to make people productive is to teach them how to avoid meetings, which has nothing to do with tools, right? Like, you can avoid meetings by having, you know, just communicating well and like wondering, do we actually need to have this meeting? Trying to keep your calendar clear.

Brendon: [00:18:00] Yeah, I think that’s a real thing we’re grappling with, actually. Is that killing meetings, you know? Have you discovered what the secrets of that then? Is it simply having that mental discipline of saying, do you need this meeting?

Job: [00:18:13] I have the best blog post ever for you, Brendon, and I’ll send it to you.

Brendon: [00:18:16] All right. Okay, well, I’m going to check. Yeah, I’ll check it out.

Job: [00:18:18]. But the trick is, is that you can never have a meeting to share information. That’s useless. Useless. There’s no point. If you’re not having a back-and-forth conversation like we are having, you should not have a meeting. Like there’s no words, there’s no point you’re just wasting everybody’s time with the overhead of communication. You should never avoid direct communication. You should not say to each other over Sack like, ‘Oh, we should have a meeting about this.’ Why don’t you just have the conversation right there? Like, if this is so important, why don’t you, never defer to the future discounting, but which is cognitive bias, but it’s also adds to the overhead of the scheduling and coordination. And then there’s a place in your calendar and, you know, everything that comes with that. And then if you are having meetings, you have to have an agenda that is prepared and done in advance, and everybody should be able to contribute to it. If there’s no points on the agenda, nothing to discuss, you should not have that meeting. But the main thing is just not have the meeting like, don’t even try to have the meeting, don’t even try to kill it. Just literally just delete the event off your calendar. Say, ‘Let’s do this asynchronously.’ It almost never hurts. It’s almost always a blessing for everybody involved because you can just figure things out writing to each other, like if you’re if you have something to discuss, you create a shared document and you comment on it and you work it out there. The only real good reason to have a single big meeting is to see each other, to enjoy seeing each other and to talk to each other and to enjoy doing that or to enjoy collaborating. Not necessarily because it’s more efficient, but sometimes it’s nice.

Russ: [00:19:45] If you send us the link to the blog post, we’ll put it in the in the notes for the podcast when we publish.

Brendon: [00:19:50] I think that’s a really good idea.

Job: [00:19:51] Yeah, will do, will do.

Brendon: [00:19:52] And sort of going back to this thing about, you know, communications. So, think about your role as an external spokesperson and representative of the company, how do you see that, what do you kind of see your responsibility as?

Job: [00:20:03] I think in part, it’s truly being representative of the company, both present and future, right? I want to set a certain tone for the company as a brand, as what we care about, as what we are thinking about, as how we are. That’s one. And I think that’s really important in almost every possible way, right? But both of them represent us as a brand to our customers, also to all the employees that we employ. Also, to future people that want to work directly for us. I think that’s the most important thing. And then I try to stay true to who I am. I don’t really have two personas or more than two, so I’m just me. I’m the same person when I walk out of the room and I talk with my wife, it’s the same person. I think it helps a lot because one, I don’t become this magical CEO person, which I don’t really enjoy. And on the other hand, people enjoy just listening to someone at this talking normally and not it’s not too far up their own ass.

Brendon: [00:21:00] And have you always been a natural communicator or is it something you’ve had to make a plan to get better at?

Job: [00:21:08] No, I never really thought about it. I’ve been reasonably good. I think my most vivid memory has been doing presentations in high school and enjoying doing that, so I think I’ve reasonably enjoyed that. Yeah.

Brendon: [00:21:19] What would you say has been your biggest communications challenge that you’ve had that you faced in your career?

Job: [00:21:25] I have no idea.

Brendon: [00:21:26] Nothing stands out?

Job: [00:21:27] Yeah, I think I think in terms of like public and like public communications, nothing really, like it’s never been really challenging. I’ve definitely had to deal with people that were just blatantly unfriendly, unfair, or rude to me many times, like this reason there’s a few days ago. It’s kind of part of the job, but I think I do reasonably well with those kinds of situations. I think the trick in all of this is to just be kind to each other. That’s it. That’s all you can do. And then if someone is unfriendly to you, you feel bad and you go do something fun.

Russ: [00:22:00] Just picking up on what you were saying about doing presentations at high school. The most recent interview that we did on this series was with Kabir Shahani of Amperity, and he was talking about being really thankful that his parents pushed him into doing drama classes and things like that, speech at school… How important do you think that is for an entrepreneur to get those skills so early in life?

Job: [00:22:22] Well, I mean, by the time you’re an entrepreneur, you can’t make that decision anymore to go back to your childhood?

Russ: [00:22:26] Exactly. Yeah.

Job: [00:22:28] Yeah. So yeah, you have to be lucky to be lucky, I suppose. But I do think that if you’re not able to present, right, if you’re uncomfortable with presenting, that is something to work on. And actually, it’s one of those awful things that the best way to do it is to just do more of it, right? I used to be really nervous. Like I was good. I know I was a pretty good presenter, but I used to be quite nervous before getting on stage and everybody still is. You know, if you’re presenting at a big conference, of course, everybody, literally everybody, no matter who you think about, everybody’s a little bit nervous. But now much less. And the reason it is much less than it used to be is because I did it a lot. At one point, you start to get used to it, you start to get comfortable. It helps to be confident about what you’re talking about. This is another one of those things. It’s like if you’re just confident, and in confidence, can come not just from being, you know, self-absorbed, but it can also come from the fact that you’re just true to what you want to say, if you’re just honest and open. That is basically been my life’s hack, which is I’m just very open and very honest about everything. And so, if you ask me something that I’m not prepared for, I don’t know or I’m embarrassed about, I’ll literally just say that rather than trying to avoid it, and that makes you much less nervous because it sort of takes away all the worries of like, I have to perform and translates it into, I just have to be. That’s sufficient.

Russ: [00:23:43] Brilliant. Well, we’ve just got a few more questions, so let’s hope for some honest and open answers to those. These are just, you know, quick fire ones to finish off the podcast. The first one is what’s the initial decision do you think is most vital to building a successful business?

Job: [00:24:00] Committing to it, you need to make a commitment that you’re really going to do it. You can’t half ass building your business.

Brendon: [00:24:06] You mentioned earlier in the chat, Job, that your first business didn’t go to plan, but so maybe it’s connected to that I don’t know. But what’s the kind of the biggest mistake that you’ve made along your entrepreneurial journey? And you know, how did you deal with that?

Job: [00:24:24] Yeah, it’s a good question, but I don’t think I really made big mistakes. As in if you if you want to start a business, you’re going to make a gazillion mistakes and it’s going to be really painful along the way. It was in the past and it is still a Remote, like you make big mistakes all the time. It’s more about like, how do you deal with it? How do you move on? In my first business, we didn’t know what we were doing. Same co-founders, Marcelo Lebre as well. We didn’t know what we were doing, but I didn’t have any personal runway, like had no money. Like money ran out every five months and it was not sufficient time for us to build like to make money, to start making money as a business. And so, what was the mistake? Well. It’s not a mistake, it was a good move, like I tried something, it was really difficult, and I learned the hard way that, yeah, there are situations where you have to think of some fallback or try to make money in a different way. At the time, I simply didn’t have the money, I didn’t have the connections. But I don’t regret it. It was a good experience and it set me off this path on which I’m now at Remote. And I think I think the biggest mistake that you can make is not following up, not fixing things. If you feel like I did something wrong, it can be anything. I made the wrong decision. I took the wrong turn. I hired the wrong person. I bought the wrong thing. The worst thing you can do is just sit with that and let it be. I think in that situation, you should always deal with it as fast as you can.

Russ: [00:25:40] Well, this final question kind of leads on from that, because if you could go back in time and speak to your old self, what guidance would you give about communication specifically? So, in terms of what steps would you encourage yourself in order to take you and your company and the business, to enable them to excel in communications?

Job: [00:25:59] I have no idea. I would say do as you feel like you’re doing it right now. I think everything worked out really well. Be confident. Be yourself. Don’t worry about those things. I think that is the most important part. Just be yourself.

Russ: [00:26:12] Brilliant. Good place to finish, Job. Thanks so much for taking the time to join us online today and recording this. Really appreciate it.

Job: [00:26:19] Thanks for having me.

Russ: [00:26:22] So, Brendon, obviously, and Job kind of alluded to this, you guys already work with Remote, but that’s another great unicorn interview that we’ve recorded. What were your thoughts on what he had to say?

Brendon: [00:26:34] Yeah. Well, I mean, I think we’ve obviously… remote work has been a big theme of a lot of our conversations over the past 18 months because of how companies have had to manage with the pandemic. And so having an authority like Job who is one of the foremost experts in this area was great. And I thought that what he had to say about a hybrid work and his concerns about companies may be getting that experiment wrong and being unable to or not really taking the right approach is how they manage their employees when they’re split between office based and not-office based. I thought that was really interesting, and I share his view that you really do need to go all in. It doesn’t mean that everyone needs to work from home, or everyone needs to work from any particular location. But you have to treat everyone equally. Otherwise, you’re going to create some serious frictions and serious communications issues. So, I thought that was the thing that really stood out for me.

Russ: [00:27:39] Yeah, it was interesting. It’s the first conversation I’ve had where that opinion was quite strong. And the more you think about it, there will be that, like you said, even if you’re doing a few days in the office, those couple of days when you’re not in the office, there’s that almost fear of missing out, isn’t there? It’s like, Oh, what’s happening at the office today that I’m not involved in? And that will be a challenge. Definitely. 

Brendon: [00:28:00] Definitely.

Russ: [00:28:01] Ok, well, listen, if you want to find out more about Remote, then their website is very simply, it’s remote.com. And of course, we’d love to hear your comments about today’s chat, and you can share them on our Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, or Twitter feeds or in the comments of the YouTube version of this podcast. And those are all linked from the top of our website at csuitepodcast.com, where you’ll find all our previous shows and supporting show notes, plus links to where you can follow us for automatic downloads of each episode via the likes of Apple and Spotify. And if you’ve liked what you’ve heard, please do give us a positive rating and review. We’re, of course, available on all podcast apps. Just search for the csuite podcast and hit follow or subscribe. You can also subscribe to the Without Borders podcast from our partners at Tyto. All the details for that are on their website. Just head to TytoPR.com and click on the podcast link in the top nav bar. Plus, you can also download a copy of ‘Growing Without Borders: The Unicorn CEO guide to communications and culture’ from Tyto’s website, and that is a great overview of the first 15 of our unicorn interviews. If you are a unicorn leader yourself and you’d like to be part of this series, please do get in touch via the contact form on the website at csuitepodcast.com. Plus, of course, anyone can get in touch too with any feedback you may have. And finally, you can also reach me via Twitter using at @RussGoldsmith, or you can find me on LinkedIn. But for now, thanks for listening and goodbye. 

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