Off Mute Season 2 showcased some of the brightest minds in global remote work. Enjoy this recap as we reminisce on the conversations we’ve had together.
Barbara: Hi, I am Barbara Matthews, the Chief People Officer at Remote, and this is Off Mute, the podcast that explores managing distributed teams all across the globe.
At Remote, we believe that wherever you are in the world should not dictate the opportunities which are available to you. And so, throughout this series of Off Mute, we've spoken to those who are tackling the challenges of managing distributed teams, whether that's payroll, compliance, taxes, or introducing new technologies, or simply new ways of working, we’ve tried to inform you.
I've brought you episodes which have centred around managing people, and Job van der Voort, the CEO here at remote, hosted episodes in this series which are focused towards the procedural aspects of distributed teams.
He started the series by speaking to Tara Vasdani. She's a managing partner at Remote Law Canada and has been nominated as Canadian Lawyers 25 Most Influential Lawyers in Canada.
Job spoke to Tara about how people can work from anywhere and asked what she's now having to factor in.
Tara: During the COVID-19 pandemic, many schools closed down, so all of a sudden, you had children's toys all over the floor because you don't wanna be in a situation where all of a sudden, they have a trip and fall, and now they're claiming short-term disability.
Barbara: Sam Matthew is a lawyer who specialises in distributed teams, and he himself has worked in over 20 countries in the past three years. He joined Job to talk about why lawyers really enjoy representing distributed teams.
Sam: The Department of Labor in the U.S. requires you to have a work and safety poster in your office if you have over a certain number of employees. And so, what do you do if you don't have an office? How do you make sure you're compliant or at least attempting to be compliant?
Lawyers, especially labour and employment lawyers, like it because it's a lot of complex, unique, novel questions that they get to explore, and they get to make money off.
Barbara: And Lorraine Charles, she founded Na'amal in 2019 with the core focus to help prepare refugees for the global workforce.
Lorraine: By having this money coming into the community, it has a much larger ripple effect. And this means that this person who is earning significantly more could open a business and hire people. Their families do better, their communities do better, but also, they act as role models for others to do the same.
Barbara: The topics then turned towards people. And as a mother of three myself who works a hundred percent remotely, I spoke with Maria Colacurcio about the challenges she sees as CEO of Syndio.
Maria: There are rates of burnout that I think are exacerbated by being in a home office 110% of the time. So, if you're at home and you have young kids, for example, I have a five-year-old and a three-year-old — you're constantly facing interruptions that require code switching.
We used to talk about how we keep work out of our home life? And now, I think the challenge, and it's just as disastrous for mental health, is how do we keep home out of work?
Barbara: Then Kandi Gongora from the Goodway Group spoke about encouraging women to just go for it and believe in themselves.
Kandi: I think everybody is really just lifting women up to be like you are good enough, go for it. Where before, there've been so many times where you're looking at a job description going, “Yes, I can do that.”
Barbara: Can't do that, can't do that.
Kandi: Right. Like, let me just go try and see what happens. And I think that's what I'm really seeing out of a lot of the groups of women who are coming together to support each other. It's, “Go for it. You've got this, you can do it. What's the worst that could happen?”
Barbara: Exactly. That's such a strong statement. I love that.
Ze'ev Rozov, the COO at HiBob spoke to us about flexibility and aspirations.
Ze'ev: For us, the key point is recognizing that you need to support flexibility. You need to help maintain, build that culture regardless who they are, where they are, how you onboard them, how you continue to enrich their experience in the company, share information with them, make them feel welcomed, make them feel part of that organisation regardless of who they are, where they are, where they're from, and where their aspirations to live down the road are going to be.
Barbara: Joel Gascoigne, the founder and CEO of social media management tool, Buffer, is celebrating 10 years of making the company fully remote, and he had one secret, which he put down to their success.
Joel: Being transparent helps significantly with being effective as a remote organisation, and so that just enhances and improves how remote work happens.
Barbara: And finally, Josh Reeves, the co-founder, and CEO of Gusto, left us inspiration towards the future.
Josh: This thing you spend so much of your time and hours of your day doing called work should not just be a transactional activity. It's a chance for a group of people to come together, hopefully with a shared goal and create something of value.
[Music Playing]
Barbara: Series two of Off Mute has been a real ride through all the topics that matter to people who either work remotely or as part of a distributed team.
Thank you for listening to this series of Off Mute. You can find episodes at remote.com/podcast or at Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. Catch you next time.