 Hey everyone, happy to be here, it's a sunny and warm Helsinki, coming in from Portugal is a bit of a shock, I'm still recovering, mostly in denial. So managing distributed teams, I always find weird to create a title for talking about what we do and how we build the company that we build. Remote, as the name goes, it's done a gimmick, it's fully remote. We started in 2019 and today we're 1,200 people across the world. Still no office, fully remote, and as I said, it's no pun intended. This is me, I'm co-founder and president of this organization and what we do is very quickly I won't bore you with it, we're HR backbone of companies, we help companies hire and find managers and pay people across the world. So today I'm going to talk to you about managing distributed organizations, teams and how we did it, what has been our journey up until now, and one that I'm very proud of, but also a very, very, very fun one. So within the past few years, we've seen a huge change in the landscape of remote, of distributed organizations. Up until I'd say five, six years ago, there are two kinds of distributed organizations. Super small teams, small companies, you know, one founder is one country, the other is like maybe same country in another city or a different country. And the other side were massive corporates, big organizations that would pay huge amounts of money so that a big consulting firm would come in and tell them how to expand internationally. So you would hear talking about international companies, not so much distributed organizations and they were not really distributed. They had different offices, almost different culture, different impact, almost different product all together. And we see a massive, massive change in this. Of course, you know, our colleagues already spoke about the catalyst that was the pandemic that taught the world that a new form of labor was possible, a more distributed one, one that would bridge the gap between talent and opportunity across the world. Now the problem we faced when we wanted to build our company is that we had to build a solution, one that we would suffer from ourselves. And of course, on one side it's very hard because you have to go through the emotions, but we go through it so that, you know, the people that we help across the world don't have to. And these are the learnings that we got from it. There are a few stages in order to build and manage a distributed team. You have to find people, hire them, manage them and pay them. So we're going to cross these topics and I'll speak a bit about them. If my clicker works. Okay, I made this really, really nice slide. It's really cool, but I'm seeing something different than you. There you go. And so most companies think that, you know, distributed organization is, you know, either all across the world or, you know, people taking the typical pictures from the beach. Today is a lot, lot more than that. It's not the typical and proverbial digital nomad, but we're talking different functions, different organizations all together. Some companies have multiple offices. Some companies have one office and a lot of distributed people through co-working spaces or actually their places. And so this makes it for a completely different structure than what you'd find five years ago, if that. You know, the intricacies of having something like this, like this, is that the way you go to the market, the way you find and you hire your talent is different. You don't just land in a city. You talk to the other companies, try to poach people from them. You actually have to, you have the ability to attract the best talent across the world and has slightly different flavors to it. Of course, you can interact with a workforce or build a team that is, you know, in large part just your usual team of people that you hire full-time. But taking advantage of the full talent, the pool of talent across the world, you can interact with people in different ways. You can have, work with people full-time, part-time, or just freelancing if that works for your business. So you don't necessarily need to be bound to the limitations that the local geographies offer you from a pool of talent. And of course you can today avail yourself of all these platforms that enable you to find the best people across the world. And of course we can now do that as well, but the idea behind it is that instead of just landing, try to expand naturally, you're really focusing on what is best for your business. What kind of employment, what kind of relationship with the people will benefit your organization? So you can plan completely different. Rather than having it centered on the people that you can hire because of the local pool, you can reverse the search process and find literally the best person in the world that matches the role that you're hiring for. And of course, after finding the best person or the best people for the roles that you're looking for, you have to pay them, employ them. And in most people's minds, yeah, employment, it's been, it's an old story. Employment has benefits of labor laws that exist for hundreds of years. Now in a distributed setting, it's not really the same. Why? Because you have different models. One of the models, and I'm going to walk you through the main models of hiring people across the world. I won't bore you with a lot of the details. Just quickly going to speak to you about them. But these are ways in which you can completely interact with the different kinds of employment across the world. It will enable you to plan and hire these people across the world. One of the ways very directly, right, you have your entity, your company in a country, just find someone, get them on payroll, and that's it. You need a few tools to manage the people on a day-to-day basis, but it's a common relationship. One that became more prevalent with the naming of digital nomads and people moving about is more the contractual relationship, where you don't necessarily need someone full-time or you have a project that you need to be delivered. And so you engage with them on a limited experience, be it on time or in scope. You have more of the freelancing, where often you have someone that is not dedicated to you as a bit of a contractor as well, but they engage with you in a more sporadic situation. At the same time, they're also engaging with other customers. Now with this setting, the biggest difference is that you don't necessarily, you're not necessarily able to come with a person a home percent of the time. And you don't know, in many cases, if that a lot of time is sufficient for your work. But in several cases where budget is tight or scope is very small and well-delineated, this works very well. Especially in certain parts of the world, where you can find great talent that is more focused on tasks and quick deliveries rather than an overall project. It also limits your exposure to all the legal requirements without avoiding compliance, of course. And then in some countries of the world, you have this thing called PEO, which is a form of co-employment. You don't necessarily handle the payroll, but you find a local partner that helps create the contractual relationship with the person you want to hire. And so this avoids you having to run all the bureaucratic parts of the employment side of the relationship and still have an employee and a team member with you. And then an area that became more apparent and more visible in the last few years is the EOR, the employer of record, where you don't run your entity in the country and you hire whoever you want to hire across the world. And this relationship is done through a partner, live remote, and they will handle payroll, all the benefits, all the management of all the intricacies of the day-to-day from a platform, Standpoint 2. See when you end up building your workforce and manage a fully distributed team managed by your company, of course, has a multi-part relationship. It's never just the PEO, it's never just the direct, never just the contractor, never just the EOR or the freelancing. It's often and very prevalently so a mix of all. And this, of course, has many benefits. It exposes you and your team to a world of diversity, to a world of opportunities, to a much more efficient way of allocating your budget, but also creating an environment that is inclusive and that fosters equality across the different geographies. Of course, from a hiring standpoint, it's much better. The talent pool is the world and not just the city you're hiring at, but it comes with a few challenges. And these challenges are mostly about how do you manage all this, how do you handle all the compliance, how do you handle all the payments, the different currencies, the time off, the holidays, the fact that some countries have completely different way of conducting business than what you're used to, meaning that one country may work on a Saturday or a Sunday rather than on Mondays. And in today's labor market, you could say, well, maybe I don't want to be exposed to this, but the competition that you face out there in terms of the search for the talent, the hiring process, the kind of people that you manage to hire is so fierce that we find that most of our partners and customers cannot afford to not hire distributedly, to not hire globally. And so even though it stands somewhat of a complex scenario, of course, there are platforms like Remote that help you optimize and simplify all this. But to the core of our talk today about, okay, but let's think that you sort out all the details of the employment side, of the payment side. How do you go about your day-to-day? And as we build a 1,200 people organization, there are a few things that are core tenets to what you do. We go from a mentality where people are just available at a moment's notice in any office to being able to interact with people across the world. Now, when I wake up, some of my colleagues may be going to bed. When I'm having lunch, some of my colleagues may be having the most important discussion for that quarter in the business. And so you're faced with physical differences that in some cultures or in some structures of organization can be a problem if you try to fit a triangle into a square shape. And that is the biggest problem, is that managing a distributed organization is not done in the same way that you manage office-based or co-located organization. And of course, you can always have an hybrid approach, but it defaults to the most complex element within the organization, which is people that are spread out. So the first tenet is async work. Async work is a big, nice word. But what essentially states is that the way that you conduct yourself and your tasks should be done in a way that it fosters, that does not depend on someone being online or available at the same time as you are. This enables you to be much more efficient rather than sitting idle, for instance. And of course, it doesn't work just in multiple time zones. It works in people that are almost next door. Because we all have different routines, motions throughout our day. And maybe I'm, you know, all fired up after my two coffees and tea at 11 a.m. Hey, my colleague is taking an app. And what matters is that productivity is not impacted by this. And so having within these organizations flexible working schedules also adds challenges to this. And with the asynchronous way of working, you're able to break down the chunks of work, document, and talk to people, pass it over so that you don't miss out on anything. There's no water cooler conversations that you miss out on. You default to tools and services that are much more asynchronous like writing well-documented messages, creating well-documented documentation. And what we use a remote as well is a lot of async video recording. So we pass a lot of messaging through video. And that helps convey not just the idea, but also the context and the emotion side of it. And when you do this, you're able to plan along a day or several without having to be worried if someone's going to be live to work with you or not. And then at the center of all this, there's a documentation. And I already spoke about it a few times and mentioned it a few times. But the idea behind documentation is not just to say, well, yeah, everyone should document things. No, you cannot depend on any sync culture and distributed. You cannot depend on someone to tell you how things are. Maybe this person is asleep is on the other side of the world. Maybe this person is on time off. And so you avoid a lot of inefficiency by having all the things documented. Before a meeting, you have an agenda. When you wake up and you're facing a problem and a task, before you reach out to someone, you document it. It's much more easy to collaborate. And then ultimately, this all leads to culture. Culture is not a physical place. For a lot of people, culture was a pizza party. It's like a ping-pong table. And that is conflated with the idea of an office. And culture is not a physical place. Culture is a set of behaviors that are instilled and fostered in an organization that either promote efficiency, productivity, or to be honest, becomes a detractor. And so culture has to be deliberate, especially in distributed organizations. Even if you're having a great banter time or you schedule a coffee time with the team, if half of your team is not available, is on the other side of the world and your culture is based on that synchronous moment, you're excluding someone from being part of the team. So it's important to think through what is culture for you and what is culture for the organization. And with us going from two people to 1,200, it didn't mean that we built one culture. It meant that every give or take six months, we have to review, update, and up-level all the things that we assume to be our culture. Things like how do we provide stipends for people to work in other places? How do we allow people to learn and build connections that work? And so these are the three top items that we highlight mostly in the things that represent the tenets of distributed teams. And then lastly, but the last important, pay. So of course we talked about already how do you hire people, how do you find people, how do you manage people. But ultimately, how do you pay people? You can have all the remainder aspects sorted out. If you don't pay well or consistently, you're screwed as an organization or as a team. And the intricacies of a distributed organization usually come in three big flavors or three big buckets. Organizations that pay locally, meaning that they optimize for what the local market is paying. This means that you respect the boundaries of the organization based on the geography and you don't go above it. And if there are side or lateral movements, someone moving from country A to country B, you change the salary. Or you have a global approach. And some of the more customers use this where you define what jobs look like across the world. And it doesn't matter where people apply from or work from, that is the range. And those are the career paths that people can benefit from. Now, of course, this has a bit of an upside because it is much more predictable. It's less depending on the country. But of course, it limits some parts of the globe. And then ultimately, there's a mixed approach that is based on bands. It's also almost a mix between local and global, where you're going to manage people based on an internal defined band of pay that is often above what the local pay would pay, but much more fair at a global scale, meaning that if you have someone that is in San Francisco or in Hong Kong or in Portugal, rather than just pay local rates, you have a range, a band that your business decided or discussed that allows people to either have a comfortable salary or if they decide to move, they can also benefit from not necessarily just have to move into a country and have a huge reduction in salary. And so, which all these three work for any organization, there's no right way to say it or no right way to implement it. The only thing that is paramount in these structures of payments is that you do it in a way that is consistent, that enables you to engage with all the team members, all the employees in a predictable way because maybe the company is not able to pay top dollar in the market. As long as people know what the expectation is and what the career path looks like, that removes 80% of the burden, especially when discussing career paths. And so, demystifying a bit of what we spoke about today this is how we built an organization that today is fully distributed, fully remote, not a single office in the world and as long as I'm part of this leadership, probably never will. Unless for compliance reasons, if any single country requires us to have an office, disclaimer. It was great to be here. If you have any questions, thoughts, comments, if you wanna know more about how we distribute, build and manage this team and company across the world. Rachel, thanks for having me.