How to scale distributed teams

In the latest entry to the UNLEASH podcast network, we listen in on the PeopleTech podcast, host Mark Feffer‘s look at the HCM Technology Report and beyond.

In this episode, he chats to Madhu Chamarty, CEO and co-founder of BeyondHQ. If you ever wondered what a company that cross-pollinated the scale of Zillow with the functionality of Glassdoor looked like, well, BeyondHQ might be it.

As Chamarty says, if you want to know “…how many backend software engineers with Python are in Atlanta, and what are they roughly getting paid, and who are the top employers of these software engineers in Atlanta, and what is the demographic breakdown of this talent pool?”, this is what BeyondHQ can do.

And besides their utility as a “decision support tool”, the company has reams of data, both qualitative and quantitative, around where organizations are recruiting and why. It paints a pretty detailed picture of post-pandemic US business and its country-wide challenges.

Charmarty continues: “What the pandemic has done, and this is a common narrative we’re hearing from companies, it has accelerated the consideration of remote work, among other trends, with companies that have already been thinking about it.

“For the companies that never really thought about it, for instance, we are talking to a 100,000 employee insurance giant headquartered in Europe and in the US, and they mentioned they had a global HR and real estate, meaning real estate rolls into HR in that company, and they mentioned, “For the first time in the history of our organization, we’ve got directives from the C-suite that we…can’t just have everybody sitting in one city where we’re in today.”

From BeyondHQ’s anecdotal evidence, Madhu Chamarty pulls some more quotes: “More companies are now thinking, “In order to be competitive, in order to be increasing our retention, we need to think about workforce planning and location strategy for the organization, whether it’s physical location or virtual location, in a much more agile, continuous manner.”

The whole notion of productivity and indeed, showing up (both physically and mentally) has shifted for the better, towards outputs and infrastructure. Organizations are asking some fundamental questions, not just about the future of work, but also the nature of work.

What does it mean to have an office? What does it mean to have people that are remote? What does it mean to enable more flexibility for employees to be able to come in sometimes, and not come in sometimes? What does it mean to allow them to travel and work?

But the question UNLEASH is asking is, why aren’t more organizations leveraging geographical data in this way?

Check out the podcast above for the full conversation.

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