Dr. Gleb Tsipursky – The Office Whisperer
Nirit Cohen – WorkFutures
Angela Howard – Culture Expert
Drew Jones – Design & Innovation
Jonathan Price – CRE & Flex Expert
About This Episode
In this episode of The Future of Work® Podcast, we sit down with Chase Warrington, Head of Operations at Doist, the company behind Todoist and Twist, and a pioneer in managing distributed teams. With over 15 years of experience scaling remote operations across six continents and 45+ million users, Chase offers a behind-the-scenes look into how Doist creates high-performing teams across time zones and cultures. From asynchronous workflows to values-driven leadership and radical transparency, this conversation explores how modern companies can build scalable, human-centered cultures without ever requiring an office. Whether you’re a leader navigating hybrid models or a startup going fully remote, this episode is your playbook for the future. Thanks to our friends at Running Remote for connecting us with Chase.
About Chase Warrington
Chase Warrington is a global operations leader and one of the world’s leading authorities on distributed team management. As Head of Operations at Doist, creators of the award-winning applications Todoist and Twist, he leads global service delivery and operational strategy for 45+ million customers across 19 languages worldwide. With over 15 years of experience managing distributed teams across six continents, Chase has driven over $1.5B in revenue generation while pioneering innovative operational solutions for remote-first organizations.
His expertise spans international expansion, business development, and the modern employee experience. His playbook for planning and facilitating team offsites and events for Doist’s 100+ employees in 35+ countries has become a blueprint for global organizations. Chase is a regular contributor to leading business and remote-work organizations, conferences, and publications – earning him recognition as one of LinkedIn’s Top Voices for Remote Work and one of the Top 50 Remote Accelerators in the 2024 Remote Influencer Report. He has been featured in Forbes, BBC, Fast Company, Harvard Business Review, Running Remote, World Economic Forum, and Fortune. He is also the host of his own podcast, About Abroad, which is ranked in the top 2% of all podcasts worldwide.
What You’ll Learn
- Why location-agnostic hiring unlocks stronger talent pipelines.
- How Doist structures cross-functional “squads” to fuel async collaboration.
- The four core values that guide Doist’s culture — and how to implement them.
- How operational rituals and distributed systems keep remote teams aligned.
- Why “independent decision-making” is a non-negotiable in distributed teams.
- The human cost of relocation — and how remote work is the ethical alternative.
- Why strong culture doesn’t require a central office.
- How remote flexibility drives global talent retention.
Transcript
Chase Warrington [00:00:00] One of the most exciting parts of the shift that we have seen is just the optionality that exists. And it’s, you know, I talk to people all the time who they absolutely love the office or they love a hybrid environment or they loved completely location-independent work. And the great thing is that I think that access to flexibility, despite this resurgence of the return to office mandate that’s happened, I think, that’s a bit of a bubble. And then that will pass. And the access to flexible work, I believe all data that I’ve seen shows that this will continue to be on the rise, maybe not at the rapid pace that we saw during the COVID years, but also, you know, I think inevitably over the next 10, 20 years, you’ll see more people valuing their flexibility, both in terms of location and access to their own calendar and time.
Frank Cottle [00:00:50] Chase, welcome to the Future Work Podcast. Really great to have you here. Gosh, you’re from Valencia, the home of one of my favorite impressionist painters, surreal.
Chase Warrington [00:00:59] Oh, wow.
Frank Cottle [00:01:01] A pleasure to be here. Muchas gracias. No, it’s a beautiful, they say it’s the most Spanish of all cities. Is that true?
Chase Warrington [00:01:11] A lot of people would say that. I think it being the birthplace of Paella and Paella being so, you know, connected to the Spanish culture and what people think of from abroad. And Valencia is still a city that’s not overrun with tourism. It still feels very local in a lot of ways. So yeah, a lot people would would say so.
Frank Cottle [00:01:32] Yeah, no, that’s great. Well, you know, that brings some of the, you’re in Spain. I’m in Fort Worth, Texas, in spite of my non-Texan accent. And we’re both remote workers. We both have made our, a big part of our careers working remotely and that sort of thing. One of the big challenges I see today, in fact, a major US CEO from a major financial institution said, I’ve got to get everybody back to the office so we can preserve our corporate culture. And, you know, my little responsibility to have a culture to begin with if you have to do that. How does a company like yours, like ours, like any new company today intentionally build a strong culture when everybody’s working in such a variety of formats, remote, hybrid, third workplace, all of the things that are going on today? You guys are experts at that. Tell me, what do you think?
Chase Warrington [00:02:39] Yeah, you know, when I hear those quotes from the CEOs of the companies that are doing the whole return to office mandate, I’ve always brought back to that now cliche meme that just shows, you now, we’re here for the culture and the culture is the picture of the most boring cubicle you’ve ever seen in your life. And that might be a little bit overused at this point, but it is, you we see it as an opportunity. I mean, we’ve been remote first. Since the day the company was born back in 2012 and built the company intentionally, completely distributed from the beginning that way. And part of the reason our CEO wanted to do that was he saw it as an opportunity to build culture, building it in a different way, but building culture nonetheless. And so we’ve got a very diverse team of people from 35 different countries that are collaborating from every single time zone. We’ve got incredible employee retention. We have. Wonderful calendar full of events that people engage with both virtually and in person and a culture that’s got a very flat hierarchy that’s full of transparency and innovating in a very creative and meaningful way. So, I would love to ask that CEO how he defines his culture.
Frank Cottle [00:03:59] Well, I can tell you right now, he defines about firing 30% of the people and bringing in.
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Chase Warrington [00:04:04] Ouch, okay.
Frank Cottle [00:04:07] There we go. Which is always the flip side of, we’ve got to preserve our culture. Oh, by the way, we’re letting 10,000 people go this month. I think the challenge when we talk about culture, you just hit on a whole bunch of points. You said, retention, productivity, hiring itself. We work with a large human resources company and they tell us globally. That they get a five to one applicant return when they include the words remote, hybrid, flexible workplace, et cetera, in the job description. Five to one. And that’s if you’re hiring for talent and trying to win the war for talent, that’s massive.
Chase Warrington [00:04:55] Yeah, there’s no doubt about it. I mean, we receive, we’re a pretty small company by other standards. I mean we have a hundred people. I wouldn’t say Doist is a household name, but yet when we put an application, when we’ve put a new job out there, we get about exactly the numbers that you represented right there, about five times more than we would if we were trying to do that for an in-house, in-office role. And so that’s because we’re hiring globally, we have access to. Talent around the world, but also, I mean, even just the fact that we’re also looking at things like allowing people to work asynchronously, allowing people control their calendars. It is about the locationless aspect, but it’s also about the way that we define work at Doist. I think sometimes that gets missed in the whole conversation about remote work. There’s a lot of different ways to do it. And we’ve chosen one that’s pretty attractive to our applicants.
Frank Cottle [00:05:52] You know, it’s funny, we formed a large business center network years and years ago, and it was a global organization. We had facilities in 54 countries. And we used to say that our diversity was our strength because we would find that somebody in Japan, let’s say, was doing something differently than we were doing in Los Angeles or Texas or London or whatever else. When you sat down, you really looked at they were doing. It was much better than anybody else was doing. So when we talk about business culture, the first thing to me that’s the most important is the open sharing of ideas, the capacity to translate those ideas from people that are in other geographies, other languages, other national cultures, we’ll call it. Yeah. Sometimes that… Adds quite a bit to the mix. It doesn’t homogenize you into something that’s bland, it actually accelerates you into something that has got a lot more flavor.
Chase Warrington [00:07:03] That’s beautifully said, accelerating you into something that has a lot more flavor. One of my favorite books, and I’m sure many of your listeners have read it, so it won’t be anything new to them, is The Culture Map. That really gets down into how we, from different parts of the world, solve problems differently. We work in what we call cross-functional squads, shortened for squads at Dueist. Every quarter I’m working with a new group of people on a new project. It’s people from different functional domains around the company, but also from different cultures around the world. We solve problems in very different ways. A lot of times I’ve found the way that I think I should solve a problem is challenged by somebody from the other side of the world who knew a way better way to build that mousetrap. I’ve learned a lot from working with people from around the world, and I think it’s another one of those things that goes a little bit under the radar when we’re talking about distributed work.
Frank Cottle [00:08:01] You just said something. First, you said two things. First you said Dueist isn’t exactly a household name, but I will say in your favor that your business model should be a household business model. We believe that strongly. The other thing that you just mentioned that you said that you’ve learned a lot from cross-cultural thinking. What is a lot? What specific thing can you say? I learned this because of the culture.
Chase Warrington [00:08:37] Where do we start? I’m at the very top. Using the top is a very interesting word there because our CEO was raised in Denmark. Denmark is notoriously a very egalitarian society. There’s a very flat hierarchy. There is not a lot of top-down decision-making. Me coming into this company, I walked in nine years ago looking for a lot of direction, looking for permission, asking for permission instead of forgiveness sort of thing, but we take the opposite approach at Dueist. We’ve got people working from around the world. We have to have a very flat hierarchy. People need to have an action, a bias for action, and to move forward on things without asking for permission. I stepped into this world where you were encouraged to fail, make mistakes, move forward. We learn from them and move on. This whole new way of working for me is there’s so many ripple effects to that. Now in whatever I’m working in, I’m in a very transparent system. I’m always trying to share as much about my work so that everyone around me has the ability to jump in, take action, move something forward if I’m not available. There’s so many little micro learnings in there that I’ve taken outside of work and even into my everyday life that I don’t think I would have had if I had stayed in a very homogenous type of workplace.
Frank Cottle [00:10:07] You know, it’s funny, and this may sound mean-spirited, but we give a little speech to everybody when they join the company. I imagine you do too. You have a little opening comment or two. The first thing I tell somebody is, here’s the one thing I will fire you for. It sounds kind of rough. It’s not making your own decisions. If you can’t make decisions, you slow everybody down. And you basically stop learning on your own. And if you don’t learn on your own, you won’t be of much value to us ultimately. So we will fire you if you will not make decisions. They go, well, what about this? We’ll make the decision. We’ll stand behind you. We will stand behind you because we know that not all decisions are good. God knows I don’t make good decisions all the time. That one thing impressing upon people seems to make a difference is forcing them for their own survival to have to make decisions rather than telling them they’re allowed to. We have found that to be very beneficial. And I think it’s critical to speed. It’s not the big that eats the small. It is the fast that eats the
Chase Warrington [00:11:27] small.
Frank Cottle [00:11:28] Speed in business, getting rid of the clutter, that all comes down to that independent decision-making.
Chase Warrington [00:11:36] Absolutely. I love that way of framing it from day one and really making that the thing that a new employee focuses on. For us, it’s one of those… We have four core values at Doist and one of them is communication. Communication is important in every business aspect, correct? But in a distributed world where you’re not sitting face to face, you lose all of the contextual… Gestures and facial expressions and the non-verbal communication, the way that we communicate in a distributed environment has to be very intentional and done very well. Within that core value, we have some communication guidelines that every single new employee is given on day one. One of those is you have to have a bias for action. You cannot sit back and ask and wait for permission to do something. That unlocks a lot. Not only does it give that person power to move forward on something, but it also creates an environment where you have to arm everybody with all the information that they possibly need to be able to take an action. It pushes that thing forward.
Frank Cottle [00:12:47] How do you take that though? This is a challenge that we have. If we get everybody taking action, sometimes it could look like a mob all running in the same direction, more or less, kind of, sort of almost. It still looks a little bit mob-like as opposed to everybody in lockstep marching to exactly the same tune as you were saying is necessary with your communications focus. How do narrow that mob a little bit at least? Still has the energy, hopefully positive mob, the energy and yet stays in that same direction.
Chase Warrington [00:13:25] Admittedly, we’ve had to iterate on this. This has also been a challenge for us as well. I don’t want to get overly tactical unless you really want me to, but we have this system that we use internally that we call the Do system. It stands for Doest Objectives. It is essentially the way that we move cross-functional work through what we call cycles from idea to execution. Eventually, to shipping to the public or whatever the end user is. We do this in a very, I mean, we’ll probably overuse this word intentionality in this conversation, but we do it in a intentional way. It flows through this very strict set of rituals. The whole idea is that, yes, we’ve got 100 people out there all making their individual 100 decisions every single day, but those people come together, quote, unquote, through this system. Collaborate in small groups. A big key of this whole system is we break it down. We have as few stakeholders and every group is possible. We call them squads. Every squad has as few people as possible. Those people are empowered to work together, make decisions, and move work forward through this very ritualistic set of processes that we have. That’s been our secret there.
Frank Cottle [00:14:48] In our company, we call them crews rather than squads. I’m an old sailor, so I think it’s crew. We like a group of four to six people. That’s perfect. Anything over that we find gets too cumbersome or somebody is always left out, which is the more critical issue is that you really don’t get the integration of the group. Is that about what you guys do as well operationally?
Chase Warrington [00:15:17] 100%. Yeah, we’re shooting for that same four to six in a squad. Those squads work within what we call streams of work. You’ve got a lot of jargon. That’s about the extent of it there, but we do have these two layers. We have a hierarchy up to the senior leadership that’s pushing some initiatives down. Generally speaking, this is where we want to go, but it’s up to those squads to really get to the end goal. They have the autonomy to do that, which I think is really nice.
Frank Cottle [00:15:54] Chase, you mentioned communications. You also mentioned you have four values. What are the other three?
Chase Warrington [00:16:02] The other three are mastery, ambition, and independence. Independence we’ve already touched on a decent amount, but that is one of our core four values.
Frank Cottle [00:16:12] I would agree with that. We’re a simpler company. We only have two. I think there are more philosophies than anything else. The first one is members first. We think of our customers as our members. We serve it like you are a global customer base. We make every decision. We’ve been doing this since we started the original company in 1980. That same philosophy that says, if it’s not good for the member first, we shouldn’t do it, period. If it is good for them, it will be good for us, so long as we plan it correctly. We really sit down at every board meeting, every strategic meeting, and we say, is this the right thing to do? The flip side of that is in our internal philosophies, it’s family first. Family is all of us together. We think of ourselves at maybe an old-fashioned way of looking at it, but we think of everybody as part of extended family. If it’s not good equally for everybody, we shouldn’t do it. When you’re working remotely, that becomes to us very, very challenging and very important, is to have it just as good for someone that’s a continent away. Seven times the zones, as it is for the people in the proverbial home office.
Chase Warrington [00:17:44] Mm-hmm.
Frank Cottle [00:17:45] If it’s not, then you should bring everybody to the home office like JP Morgan or somebody and say, we’re going to prairie dog out of our cubbyholes all day long, and that’s your culture. I think you’ve got to have those two things.
Chase Warrington [00:18:03] I love the simplicity there. I talked with someone recently who was coming from a company that had 16 core values. It’s like when somebody says they have four top priorities today. I said, wow, you can only have one top priority, but I think that’s really interesting. I think we have this mantra at Doist. It started with our tool, Todoist, which is the tool that we’re actually building. Rolled over into the way that we work, and we kind of use it for everything. It’s simple yet powerful. Our mission is to build simple yet powerful tools, but we also apply the simple yet powerful to everything else that we do. At one point, we had, I think, six or eight core values. We said, what’s the simple yet, powerful version of this? We need less is more in a lot of ways. Whenever we’re trying to build a process or a new perk or compensation package, or whatever it is, it’s … What’s the simple yet powerful version of this? That’s been a nice guiding light for us, because there’s lots of bells and whistles out there that you can chase down to try to make work better. We found when we go back to the core of things and really try to boil it down to the most simple version that we possibly can find, it usually actually turns out better for our team.
Frank Cottle [00:19:25] This is something I think we all should have learned. Take Twitter as a good example. We learned to communicate well using Twitter with 140 characters.
Chase Warrington [00:19:37] Mm-hmm.
Frank Cottle [00:19:38] We hope with as few abbreviations as possible, but we hope that we could communicate a single complete thought or action with 140 characters, and that is darn hard to do. Read a long paragraph sometimes and say, give me a short sentence instead. It’s very, difficult. Revene in communications is the … Gives you the mastery. Of course. It’s funny. We don’t use mastery, but we tell everybody that they have to be the best student of their industry. They really have to a good student. Applying a lot of education and training to help people be the student has always been important to us. How are you doing something similar? I know you do off-sides, you do a whole variety of activities, but how are you doing something similar?
Chase Warrington [00:20:38] Yeah, we’re really invested in … We know that we need to keep learning and growing as individuals for our company to keep up with what everyone else is doing in the world. If you look at the tools that we create and the companies we’re competing against, it’s some of the most valuable, powerful companies in the world that have products that we’re trying to go up against. If our little team of 100 people … Doesn’t stay at the very forefront of the technology that they’re using or the mastery of their craft, then we’re not going to be long for this world. We take that pretty seriously. We bake education and learning into our quarterly cycles. We’ve got time set aside for people to be invested in mastering their craft. We, at one point … We’ve experimented with a lot of different things. At one point, we used to give everyone one month per year. Invest themselves in some project that would advance their skill set and also, hopefully, help the company, but not by default. It didn’t have to. We’ve gone as far as that to … Now, what we do is we try to give people half a day a week to invest in their education and mastering their craft. Going a little bit beyond that in a slightly different direction, but alluding to your question, we also believe that we have to keep … Connected around that. For example, we just hosted a weekly AI, what we called AI lightning talks. This was essentially people at the company showing how they were using AI in their everyday work and how that could be applied to people across the company. These are virtual activities people can join, but it’s showing how people are iterating on their own profession and sparking interest amongst the team. We do those kind of things in person and virtually all throughout the year.
Frank Cottle [00:22:36] If I was part of that, I would have just had my own AI assistant attend the meeting.
Chase Warrington [00:22:42] A few of us did. I couldn’t make it, but my bot could.
Frank Cottle [00:22:47] How in your environment or in the environment you seek? I know you guys see a lot of stuff. How do you see companies building a culture that is dueist, if I could use that term, without defaulting to top-down control like is critical a lot of times for high-level decision-making? Basically, how high level does your independent decision- making go? How do we keep people strategically moving the same direction?
Chase Warrington [00:23:23] We experimented with something last year for the first time that I think will become a pillar of how we handle this going forward. Every year, we host a leadership retreat. Funny enough, it was the thing I was working on planning right before we hopped into this interview. Last year, our leadership team gathered in Paris. We spent a week together mapping out the 2026 plan for the company. But before that, we crowdsourced ideas from across the company. We set a goal, and we said, this is the goal that we as a leadership team have decided we want to get to, but we need your input on how to get there. We got ideas from across every team and every single individual at the company, and then we took those ideas, boiled them down as a leader team and built the roadmap. The buy-in and investment that we got from the rest of the company on that plan was incredible. Then again, we empower the high-level goals, quarterly goals and things like that. Then we empower the individual squads, which are made up of individuals from across the company, to move that work forward towards the goal. That level of autonomy is pretty massive. The squads are checking in on a monthly basis, but aside from that, we’re leaving them to really do their job. Reach out for help if you need it, but we’re expecting that if you think you’re not going to get to the goal, you’ll speak up. Otherwise, we’re trusting that you’re moving forward.
Frank Cottle [00:24:53] Trust is one thing. Metrics and data are quite another.
Chase Warrington [00:24:59] Yeah.
Frank Cottle [00:24:59] I live in a trust but verify world. I trust people will make the best decisions they’re capable of making, but in order to run an organization where they can depend upon us to make payroll, we need metrics. We need data. How are you structured or how do you believe others should be structured to accomplish this? Because it’s not just your company or our company. The world and everybody that we talk to and touch is the right way to accomplish the balance.
Chase Warrington [00:25:35] I’ll give you an example. Right now, we have 26 squads that are working towards about three collective goals, which are all data driven. Really, there’s one overriding goal at the top of that. Those are all metrics-driven, data-driven goals. Each squad, each team, has trickle-down goals that they’re shooting for to impact those numbers. We say that the leadership team is accountable for those high-level goals. We set them. We think that the initiatives that we’ve pushed to the rest of the company will get us there, but then each squad and each team is going to have their own set of data-driven goals that are going to help us know if we’re on track to get to those high level goals. There’s a level of data informed at Doist. I wouldn’t say we’re completely data-driven, but data is certainly important. I would say it’s actually part of our evolution as a company. We’re getting better at using data to help us drive our decisions.
Frank Cottle [00:26:45] It’s funny. I’m kind of a data freak. We have a little mantra that we use is get the data. Data becomes information, which allows for knowledge, which means you can take action. Get the data always. Always make data-based decisions, if you will. You have to make the decision based on the information and knowledge from the data, not the data itself. That’s a critical element. Most people look at a number and they make the decision based off the number, but not off the information and knowledge. So those are additional steps I think are important when you start using metrics, especially on a distributed team. If you’re broken into that many individual squads, each of them throwing their own metrics towards, you’ve got to have an incredibly challenging funneling. All that data and activity from those groups. The metrics of one group has to match up and drive the metrics of another group, etc., etc. Are there any specific challenge or trick you’ve found to doing that? That has to be quite extraordinary.
Chase Warrington [00:27:56] In our case, it’s a big part of what I do. As the head of operations here, one of the core functions of my role is overseeing what we call strategic planning, which is creating those quarterly cycles, all the squads that are going to work within them, setting the goals, and moving those squads towards the direction of the higher level goals. So I would say, yeah, there’s definitely challenges baked into that. I had a conversation one time as a leadership team saying, are we all on one boat rowing in the same direction or are we on a bunch of little boats rowing the same direction? Are we a fleet or are a ship? I would say I don’t know that we have a great answer for that sometimes. I’ve seen companies that are fleets and companies that are ships and both can succeed. The cool thing, maybe one of the most exciting things about the whole evolution of work that’s happened, especially during the last handful of years, is that it doesn’t feel like there is just one way to do things. I feel like there are more options available to us with the tooling and tech and information that’s out there. There’s been an explosion of knowledge that’s been shared with people about how to get work done. One of the things we pride ourselves on at Doist is we get really excited about doing things the Doist way. It’s not even something that we think would maybe work. Other places sometimes, but it works for our culture and the way that we want to run things. We mix and match and take things from other companies that have built in public and shared what they’re doing and created our own mousetrap that we enjoy. We know it’s got room for improvement and we’re always iterating on it, but that’s what makes work fun for us too.
Frank Cottle [00:29:42] I think when you said the words right there, we enjoy. If you can’t enjoy what you’re doing, just don’t even bother. Don’t do it. Go do something else. So when you can get a company that finds joy in working together, that in itself is a major benchmark and a major breakthrough. On your crews, or excuse me, your squads. Four to six people, sounds like. And are they geographically distributed? Might a squad have somebody, six people from, four people from four different continents? Or might it is a squad primarily North American or European or Middle Eastern? How is that set up?
Chase Warrington [00:30:39] It’s completely location agnostic. So yeah, that’s the short answer. Basically, we don’t hire based on location, not even really just out of principle. I mean, it’s just never been something that we’ve done and we’ve never constructed squads based on location either. Admittedly, to a fault. I don’t think it would be flawed to do that. It’s just that in our case, since we never hired, strategically, geographically that way, it would be, it’s better for us to construct squads based on function, functional expertise than it is location.
Frank Cottle [00:31:16] No, I get that. We had a simple approach in doing the same thing with something very similar. Our approach was real simple. We just want the best person we can find and we don’t care where they live.
Chase Warrington [00:31:29] Yeah, that’s it. We have a similar mindset.
Frank Cottle [00:31:32] Then we broke it down and said, well, how’s that going to, why would we do that? Then we looked at costs and we said, well, if we hire a new person and we have to move them. There’s a cost there that we can’t spend doing something else, providing better service or growing the company to give everybody more security. Then we said, there’s their family involved, their kids. The person is going to be employed has to break it down to the family. Oh gosh, I got this really great job. Unfortunately, it’s 2000 miles away in a different country. How does that sit with the family and the extended family, the grandparents and the The human cost of movement and mobility for a lot of people is massive, which means either you have huge costs as a company, and higher turnover because a lot people don’t like the change once they’ve made it, or you end up just limiting yourself on the people that you can get. So we just said, no, wherever they are is where they are. We’ll deal with it. The technology allows dealing with it and we’ll deal with it. From the human point of view, I think that’s the way companies have to go.
Chase Warrington [00:32:49] There’s another hidden cost there for the companies that try to take this. I don’t mean to use the term hybrid in the sense that we’re talking about it here, but when you try to create a situation where location does suddenly matter, but you’re living in more of a locationless type distributed type company, there’s this challenge that you find where it’s again the simple yet powerful thing for us. It’s very simple for us when we just say everything is location diagnostics. So all of our workflows. All of our tools, everything that we do just removes location from it, and therefore it makes it very simple for us to say, this is the way we communicate. Not this is the way you communicate in this situation, but it’s different in this situation or this is the way we work. It’s always going to be the same and it’s set up to be distributed first from the get-go. So in a way that just makes it easy on us.
Frank Cottle [00:33:45] It’s funny because in China, they’re dealing with their work structure of 699, right? And from a practical point of view, you and we, our number is 247. But it’s not forced, but we’re able to respond. I find the companies that are in different time zones with people working on the same projects, as long as their communications, which you indicated was so critical. They’re actually able to move faster because the work never stops and starts. It’s just continuous. And if you’re organized right, that can be quite an advantage.
Chase Warrington [00:34:28] Absolutely. I’m working on a project in a squad with a group right now. And we’re essentially keeping work running 24-7. When I wake up, that project kept moving. It didn’t start and stop with me and my teammates. So I find a lot of value in that. I wake up and this thing has moved forward rather than stayed still.
Frank Cottle [00:34:50] I love that about this structure. You know, remote work isn’t a trend anymore. It’s not a fad anymore. It is a trend. It’s a trend that’s growing. The workplace shouldn’t be geopolitical. It seems like it is a little bit these days, but it shouldn’t. Cultural strategy and synergy can be developed. We know in companies. Where do you see the future in 2030? How do you see everybody coming together in the future on this?
Chase Warrington [00:35:26] I kind of referenced this a few minutes ago, but one of the most exciting parts of the shift that we have seen is just the optionality that exists. I talk to people all the time who they absolutely love the office or they love a hybrid environment or they love completely location-independent work. And the great thing is that access to flexibility, despite this sort of resurgence of the return to office mandate that’s happened, I think that’s a bit of a bubble. And then that will pass. And the access to flexible work, I believe all data that I’ve seen shows that this will continue to be on the rise. Maybe not at the rapid pace that we saw during the COVID years, but also I think inevitably over the next 10, 20 years, you’ll see more people valuing their flexibility, both in terms of location and access to their own calendar and time. And so I think all of those things will push us into a more flexible workspace.
Frank Cottle [00:36:30] No, I would agree with that entirely. And again, I think it comes back to that battle for talent. We were seeing in 2016-17 that you couldn’t hire a particular type of technology employee without having flexible work program. Pandemic sort of sealed the issue. It forced everybody to see it as. Necessary rather than an optional, but it was already rising as an optional and building pace before the pandemic. It slowed down certainly as a result of the pandemic ending, the forced requirement by government and large corporates ceased. But in the future, by 2030, I think that we’ll see. Half the total workforce that’s able with their job description is able being in a remote or highly flexible work environment. I can’t see that. Genie’s out of the bottle, baby. It is not going back home. Well, Chase, thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. What you’re doing at Doist is revolutionary and evolutionary at the same time. Grateful for the time you’ve created for us and now. Look forward to speaking again someday.
Chase Warrington [00:37:56] Thank you very much. I really enjoyed it. Thanks for all the work you’ve done and leading in this space also. We learn a lot from the companies that have been out there doing this a long time. Just always encourage people to build in public, share what they’re doing, and we can all get better together.
Frank Cottle [00:38:13] Sounds good. If it’s impact.
Chase Warrington [00:38:16] In the future of work.
Frank Cottle [00:38:18] It’s in the future of work podcast by all work dot space.
