Working in a globally distributed workforce is nothing new for Barbara Matthews. She spent 12 years at Google and seven at tech company Stripe—at both, working in an office across the Atlantic from Silicon Valley.

“I have a lot of experience doing things in a different time zone,” says Matthews, who became chief people officer last year at Remote, an HR tech platform designed to help businesses manage and pay global workforces. Remote’s mission and its culture collide intentionally, Matthews says—as the company prioritizes the flexibility and work/life balance that its globally distributed employees need. At the same time, the product team is in the throes of developing its suite to include ATS, LMS, reference-checking, performance management tools and more to enable seamless and efficient management of globally distributed workforces.

“We’re deep in the process of building that, which is one of the things that most interested me about Remote,” says Matthews, who works from home, based in Dublin, Ireland. “Here at Remote, we’re genuinely interested in making HR tools better.”

Matthews recently spoke with Human Resource Executive about the HR strategies that can help employers reap the benefits of having a globally distributed workforce.

HRE: What is the greatest challenge of managing the globally distributed workforce at Remote?

Matthews: At times, you do just want to work with everyone in the same room. There’s just something to be said for getting together, which is why we give budgets to people for getting together. We do working sessions, meetups in local towns. As a leadership team, we try to enable our people to build those connections—providing guidance and training to managers on how to be really deliberate, really intentional about communicating so nobody’s missing out on that water cooler conversation.

As an example, from a training perspective, up until I arrived, all our training was asynchronous, so people could develop and grow themselves, which sounds amazing—1,500 training courses that you could do what you like, build your own adventure. But actually, when I looked at completion rates, we were looking at maybe 4.5%-5%. When people are given the option of growing themselves, they tend to just get all the stuff off their list, all the stuff off their desk, and they’re not actually dedicating time to training.

So, now we have developed a suite, almost like a buffet of learning—your bite-sized learning that’s just in time, you have your asynchronous learning and then we’re doing these virtual sessions as well, where we have, for example, 50 to 60 managers, in the session at once. There were six sessions we launched, and within 30 minutes, they were all full. That tells you what people want: They want that connection.

You can still have that connection while building a globally distributed workforce that does enable flexibility for everyone. But it’s about having a lot of options for people depending on how they learn and how they want to engage.

HRE: What would you say to CHROs whose leaders are pushing for a return to office?

Matthews: It’s a really challenging job for CHROs at this point. What I would encourage them to do is be curious—figure out exactly why the execs are asking these questions. What is the problem they’re trying to solve, and can it be solved another way? The majority of these companies, I imagine, have people working all over the world anyway, so they don’t all have everyone in one office. Is the challenge intensity? Is it collaboration? Is it connection? Is it influence? Figure out the challenge and then build proactive strategies to overcome that.

I do think people will vote with their feet. We have 15,000 inbound applications every month for about 60-80 roles, and I think a big part of that is that we are completely remote. It’s a testament to the value people see in working for a remote-first, globally distributed company. After COVID, people just have different priorities.

We’ve been hiring a bit on our people team, and a lot of the people I’ve been speaking to about their reasons [for applying] talk about how amazing Remote is and all the things you answer in an interview—but they also say, “My company is forcing me back to the office, and I don’t want to go.” I think companies are going to be bleeding their top talent by taking a really rigid approach as opposed to a more flexible one.

HRE: How does flexibility fit into your broader employee value proposition?

Matthews: Enabling people to work from anywhere in the world, bringing economy to smaller villages, less-developed countries, is really important—and then the flexibility is totally genuine. Honestly, when I was interviewing, I was like, “I think this [commitment to flexibility] is kind of not true.” But I was interviewing with the CEO and he said, “I’m sorry, I have to pause to take this call.” Few people would interrupt a CEO so when he came back in and said, “Sorry, that was my daughter’s daycare,” that was honestly a turning point.

It really showed me the type of company this is and the type of ways we want to work. Culture always evolves but our values are quite static, and we weave them through everything and are really upfront with them. They’re not just on a virtual wall. We tend to live and breathe all of our values, and I think that’s a really strong foundation for the company.

See also: Are managers ignoring return-to-office policies?

HRE: Remote recently revamped how it thinks about candidates’ experience and education. What prompted that?

Matthews: It was really about prioritizing skills over experience. We have people who are relatively early in career who are occupying really important, critical jobs. What that tells us is that you can’t determine somebody’s value based on the number of years they have under their belt. By prioritizing skills and knowledge over years of experience, it really did do a lot with regards to tapping into diverse talent pools and promoting inclusivity.

For example, with women, we’re not just looking at a certain number of years of experience because they may have been paused due to childcare or whatever personal decisions they might have made. It’s really about thinking about the skills they have. When we took away the years of experience, we did replace that with really clear expectations for roles and making sure to ask candidates to demonstrate the abilities they have. Our evaluations are quite specific and relevant to each role and focus on those real-world skills we believe will directly contribute to our environment, which is quite fast-moving and dynamic.

HRE: Given how Remote sits at the intersection of HR and technology, how are you incorporating AI into your people processes?

Matthews: If my team reads this, they’ll all roll their eyes because I keep saying this to them! I was at an HR event in February and the whole day was AI. One of the lines that really stuck in my head was “AI won’t take your job but somebody who understands AI will.”

When ChatGPT first came out, Job [van der Voort], our CEO, and Marcelo [Lebre], our co-founder, were really, really enthusiastic about encouraging all of our employees to integrate it in some way into their workflows. They were really focused on removing any fear and stigma about failing when you’re messing around with the tool. We had hackathons, we had competitions, all that sort of stuff. And a lot of things within the Remote platform are being built on AI, and we are working with a ton of our team members around using chatbots, Notion AI.

I’m spending a lot of time encouraging my team to think about how we’re going to scale and work more efficiently while still maintaining a lean workforce. That is really around tooling and AI: What can we automate, deprecate or give over to AI? It’s a constant mantra. We’re failing a little bit, and we’re testing things. We’re building apps to scrape all of our tooling and give us the answers that we need. For example, we’re currently thinking of an employee relations library where we can look at all of our previous cases to try and determine precedent. We don’t necessarily have people who’ve been here from the beginning, so we have to get that institutional knowledge somehow and build that into a repository for the HRBPs.

HRE: Looking back on your decade at Google, what experiences did you have there that helped shape how you approach HR leadership today?

Matthews: I was a baby when I was there. I was exposed to a lot of the senior HR leadership there. Liane Hornsey was a manager of a manager of mine, and I learned from her to take a business approach [to HR]—making sure you’re coming as a business leader and a business partner, not like the pen pusher in the background. You have to think about the business as a whole, as opposed to looking at one HR initiative that will affect the employee population. It’s a mindset I’m really trying to drive into the team here as well.

You have to be very proactive, see around corners, try to think three years ahead and about what we need to put in place for that to happen. At Stripe, I was working really closely with Claire Johnson and doing an interim people leadership role while I was reporting to her. I learned a ton there about how to think about a business really—how to scale and how to operate honestly within an organization.

HRE: Outside of work, what is most important to you?

Matthews: I have three little people in my life—an 8-year-old, a 6-year-old and a 3-year-old—so I’m focused on spending time with them, which this job really helps. Previously, I would have been home after bedtime. Now, they can run in and out [of my office], and they know that if the door’s closed, they’re not allowed in.

I moved back to Dublin as well—I had been in London for a while and Paris—so there’s a lot of family around me now, which is wonderful. My non-negotiable is the gym three times a week; I do that at 6:30 in the morning before the kids go to school or wherever they’re going. That’s my time. It’s good brain space for me and puts me in the right mindset to work.

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