HRchat Podcast
Listen to the HRchat Podcast by HR Gazette to get insights and tips from HR leaders, influencers and tech experts. Topics covered include HR Tech, HR, AI, Leadership, Talent, Recruitment, Employee Engagement, Recognition, Wellness, DEI, and Company Culture.
Hosted by Bill Banham, Bob Goodwin, Pauline James, and other HR enthusiasts, the HRchat show publishes interviews with influencers, leaders, analysts, and those in the HR trenches 2-4 times each week.
The show is approaching 1000 episodes and past guests are from organizations including ADP, SAP, Ceridian, IBM, UPS, Deloitte Consulting LLP, Simon Sinek Inc, NASA, Gartner, SHRM, Government of Canada, Hacking HR, McLean & Company, UPS, Microsoft, Shopify, DisruptHR, McKinsey and Co, Virgin Pulse, Salesforce, Make-A-Wish Foundation, and Coca-Cola Beverages Company.
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Podcast Music Credit"Funky One"Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/
HRchat Podcast
Rethinking Workplace Connection in a Remote World with Marina Farthouat
In this episode, Bill Banham talks with Marina Farthouat, the new Vice President, People at Oyster - the global employment platform that enables companies to hire, pay, and care for distributed teams.
Marina brings a refreshing perspective to the HRchat Show about transforming workplace norms through remote and distributed teams. Drawing from her diverse background spanning investment banking to startups, Marina shares why her most connected workplace experiences have consistently been in remote organizations.
"Talent doesn't have a nationality," Marina asserts, challenging traditional location-based hiring approaches. She makes a compelling case for distributed teams as both a talent strategy and a resilience measure. When recent blackouts hit Spain and Portugal, Oyster's globally distributed workforce demonstrated exactly this kind of operational continuity—shifting activities seamlessly to unaffected regions.
What makes Marina's perspective particularly valuable is her holistic view of remote work benefits. Beyond the usual flexibility talking points, she highlights how remote arrangements positively impact families, especially children who no longer lose parents to long commutes. She dismantles the myth that remote workers feel disconnected, explaining how digital platforms actually create more egalitarian access to leadership and information than traditional office environments where proximity matters.
The conversation tackles economic concerns head-on, addressing fears that global hiring simply shifts jobs to lower-cost regions. Marina offers a more nuanced view: global talent acquisition isn't about replacement but expansion and resilience. She emphasizes that startups particularly benefit from access to diverse talent pools while managing burn rates effectively.
By the way, if you enjoy this conversation and want to learn more about Marina’s team and some of the people challenges they tackle, check out episode 338 with Oyster Co-founder Jack Mardack.
Marina leads the company’s people strategy with a focus on building a human-centric, inclusive, and sustainable culture across a global workforce.
She brings a wealth of experience leading People functions in remote organizations, most recently at ClickHouse and Elastic. Marina has developed deep expertise in employee engagement and organizational development, as well as in building strong cultures and scaling global com
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Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom. And visit hrgazettecom.
Speaker 2:Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello, listeners, this is your host today, bill Bannum, and joining me on the show today is none other than the wonderful Marina Fafua, the new vice president of people at Oyster, the global employment platform that enables companies to hire, pay and care for distributed teams. By the way, listeners, if you enjoy this conversation and want to learn more about Marina's team and some of the people challenges that they tackle, check out episode 338 with Oyster co-founder Jack Mardak Gosh. That was a while ago now. Marina leads the company's people strategy, with a focus on building a human centric, inclusive and sustainable culture across a global workforce. She brings a wealth of experience leading people functions in remote organisations, most recently at Clickhouse and Elastic. Marina has developed deep expertise in employee engagement and org development, as well as in building strong cultures and scaling global companies at speed. Hey, marina, welcome to the show today. How are you doing?
Speaker 3:Hey, bill, I'm doing well. Thank you for inviting me.
Speaker 2:So, beyond my reintroduction just a moment ago, why didn't you start by taking a minute or two and telling our listeners a bit more about yourself and what gets you up in the morning?
Speaker 3:Yes, so a bit about myself. I was born in France, raised partly in France and the UK. I studied law at university and then business, and I specialised in finance and economics actually. But I was very interested in the HR topics when I was at university because it felt to me like there were many questions but not always with clear answers when it comes to this discipline. And so my first role in HR straight after university was in an investment bank, actually an employer of about at the time, 100, uh, with like banking income of about 22 billion. So it was a huge employer, as you can imagine, lots of interesting topics. And then, since then, my career has taken me in different directions. I've worked in league in the legal industry, in insurance, fintech and, more recently, startups in technology okay, very good, I didn't realize.
Speaker 2:You lived in the UK for a while. Whereabouts were you? Just out of interest.
Speaker 3:Yeah, I actually lived in the UK for most of my life, so in Folkestone, south of England, and then afterwards West London, ealing area kind of. I don't know if you know Ealing Common.
Speaker 2:I lived in Ealing myself many years ago. There we are, small world. Okay, let's continue through and let's talk about hybrid organizations. How are hybrid organizations, marina, leveraging global talent and what's the key to engagement in this environment?
Speaker 3:Well, I think that it's really only hybrid organizations or remote organizations that can fully leverage global talent, in the sense that we know one thing is for sure talent doesn't have a nationality. Therefore, the only way to get the best talent quickly into companies that are growing fast, or even companies that are more mature than startups, is to employ globally. Now, that doesn't mean necessarily employing in very many countries. Some employers might just choose to employ in five different countries or 10 different countries, depending on their analysis of talent pools, but I really do think that hybrid or remote is absolutely the way to leverage the talents that we have globally.
Speaker 2:Regular listeners of the show will know that for many, many, many years, I have worked remotely and I'm a big proponent of hybrid and remote workforces. Uh, it is the future, so get on board. If you are one of those companies that are saying you know what, actually we've got to pull all our employees back into the company these days, um, you're wrong. Um, the talent can be anywhere, as long as you can manage them anyway, that's just my take. In a recent LinkedIn post, marina, you shared the following London Mayor, sadiq Khan has raised concerns about the impact of remote work on the city, suggesting it is hollowing out London and advocating for a return to office approach, which goes completely against what I just said. What's your take on the benefits of remote work for employees?
Speaker 3:well, first of all, I just want to acknowledge the point that you made, bill, about being a a proponent of remote work yourself. I think that, um, it is the future, and when it comes to the future, it's always wiser to embrace it than to fight it. So there you go. That's. That's going to be my opening for this. But to your question about this LinkedIn post, I wrote about the London mayor and his his arguments around. You know, remote working is making London hollow.
Speaker 3:So here are the benefits of remote work, and they extend far beyond employees. They extend to society as a whole. It offers flexibility for employees, as we know, to work in the way that they can combine with their life. They can go to a doctor's appointment without taking holiday out of their balances. They can see their children. We know all of this, and it really doesn't make sense to impose rigid rules on people when we know they can do so much better in a flexible environment.
Speaker 3:But what we don't talk about is the society at large when it comes to remote working, because there's another group of people that are really impacted by this that we talk about much less so when it comes to remote work, and that's children, because obviously some children just don't get to see their parents because they leave very early in the morning.
Speaker 3:Typical family, basically, will commute into a big city. Parents will leave before the child is awake maybe, and maybe even return after they've gone to bed. I know I'm talking from experience. It happened to me after my first child, when I was still going to an office. I did not see my daughter until the weekend, for example. So I think it's really important to realise that remote work impacts society at large. It allows employees to have the flexibility that they need to live their life in a way that doesn't feel completely constrained by work, but also it allows children to see their parents and, again, children to perceive work as not the thing that's taking their parents away from them, which, by the way, does have an impact on they then perceive the workplace in the future, which we should, I think, very much care about.
Speaker 2:Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at hrgazettecom. And now back to the show. A bit of a follow-up to what we were talking about just a moment ago is the flip side, connectivity Maybe. Connectivity is a challenge for many organizations when workers are remote. So, for example, you join a company, that company is fully remote. How on earth do those new employees get a sense of that company culture? You know so how can hr and people leaders ensure that global remote employees still feel integrated, supported and part of that company culture?
Speaker 3:yeah, I think it's a very interesting question because, um, people often put a label on remote working. There's a few things that get said. For example, if you work remotely, people can't socialize anymore because they don't have access to an office. Well, it's like. No, actually, some people can sometimes purchase access to a WeWork and they do see people. Working remotely doesn't mean that people have to only be in their house doing their remote work, so there is a lot more freedom than maybe it sounds like when people think about remote work.
Speaker 3:And the other myth is people are not connected if they work remotely. Now I can understand why people would say that, but the most connected cultures I've ever been a part of have been remote, most connected by far. And I think the reason for this is, if you think about it at the end of the day, the minute where people are in an office together human nature, all of this good stuff, politics arise not because people want to, not because people are political that's not what I mean but because all of a sudden, it matters which office you're in, or if you're on a certain floor, or if you get to see the person who makes decisions more frequently than someone else, or who has lunch with whom. I mean, I'm just, you know, it is human nature. The thing about remote working is and hybrid is different because you have a combination of some interaction in office, some interactions remote, so that again brings it some challenges. But the thing with remote working that's fascinating is you have a lot of tooling now that allows people to be connected socially and in terms of work, in terms of project management and task management, and we can get into the actual tools if we'd like.
Speaker 3:But, for example, if you're on Slack and you're socializing and you're also talking about work and you're going to social channels at the same time, everybody in the company globally, whether they're in Washington DC or Berlin, has the same access to the CEO. It's one Slack message away for everyone, basically. And of course, in practice it's different because people have different roles and whether they feel comfortable approaching decision makers is different. But there is no limit to how people can communicate At the same time. If you're on a G meet, everybody's the same again, the same access to the call. You see that little window with people's face.
Speaker 3:There isn't someone who's in an office sitting next to someone and someone else who is actually dialing in remotely, like we used to have, like maybe in you know, 2014, 2015, at the beginning, when you had these big dial phones and you had some people in the room, some people somewhere else, um. So the beauty of remote is really that it's more egalitarian and the connectivity happens because with the right tooling, you can onboard people very socially. You can get them onto the right calls. You can use um things like lunapark to do games online. You can use slack to have all sorts of slack channels for jokes, for uh news, for information, for people who share things like pets they share their, you know, we have question of the week, for example. I always tell when people have a lot of fun having social time. So, in effect, you can actually be very connected in a remote company okay, there you go.
Speaker 2:Technology means that you can actually connect. There. We are listeners. Uh, in another linkedin post. So there is me doing my own work, going all over your LinkedIn, ahead of our conversation today. In another recent LinkedIn post, you wrote the following Forgive me, it's a long quote, followed by a question. Here we go. In light of rising tariffs, it's clear that economic uncertainty is here to stay. The best way to create resilient companies is to distribute talent globally For people, teams. Crisis management isn't just about reactive measures. It's about building resilient organizational structures. So the question is why isn't modern crisis management just about having a plan B, ie why is it about building geographically diverse teams that are resilient to global challenges from the outset?
Speaker 3:Well, we know what the problem is with the plan B. I think it's called plan B for a reason. It's not called plan A. It's called plan B because it's not actually what we had intended to do and therefore it's usually something that's less than ideal by design. Right, it's not something that we necessarily wanted to entertain. Now it's okay to have plan B for crisis management, but the reason why I think teams should be built, distributed by default, is because we know from experience now that it is more a much more resilient way to do business.
Speaker 3:I mean, take even today, like two hours ago in the news blackout in spain and portugal. So many workers don't have access to uh electricity right now. They're trying to kind of struggling to get online some companies. I mean, we have many team members in spain and portugal, so we have this emergency channel now where we're coordinating, but we have many team members in many other countries too, and so you can easily shift activity to a different location and the impact isn't felt as badly as it could have been. Same with COVID.
Speaker 3:When COVID hit, I was working at a company called Elastic and of course, in some countries where the lockdowns were in place, I know people didn't think about selling then, but of course companies still continued activities and the sales cycle in countries where you close deals face-to-face. The sales cycle came to a halt in those countries that had lockdowns. But then if you're in so many countries, even as a startup, you realize that in that particular example lockdown dates varied and so you had some countries kept going and some countries had lockdowns and then you kind of shifted. If you really have only centered your operations in one or two countries, it does make the company more vulnerable to any force majeure or any unexpected events and crisis management. Then it does become reactive, not proactive, which I think is a missed opportunity.
Speaker 2:You mentioned in your previous answer that it's important to, for example, diversify workforce locations to mitigate some of those regional economic impacts. What other practical tips might you have for leaders on the back of what you just mentioned there? So, for example, perhaps optimising workforce costs through global talent acquisition is a good idea, maybe building flexible team structures, maybe employing folks that are frankly more adaptable, that they're more ready for changes that could happen at any moment.
Speaker 3:Yes, I think often people think about the topic of global work through the lens of fear and they will say things like oh, this is about moving really well-paid US jobs away from the US economy and to cheap labor locations and this is not good for anyone. And let's not fool ourselves. Actually, so far, we haven't seen evidence of that at all, because, ultimately, here's the thing about people and skills and talent. Companies need what they need. They need certain skills, a level of skill and talent that they will always find in the existing economies, like the US, for example, except that you can also get other talent from other countries in addition to so, for example, I think educational systems offer very different strengths based on countries. We can't, of course, generalize, because talent really, at the end of the day, varies from individual to individual, but there are some countries around the world that are very well known for producing amazing engineers, for example, or very creative talent engineers, for example, or very creative talent, and so it does make sense to really tap into those talent pools, knowing that I personally don't see talent shifting away from the existing markets where we are, you know, mostly in the US and Western Europe, where we still need very much the profiles that we've needed for a long time, except we need to open up opportunities to more markets so that we become more resilient.
Speaker 3:And it is also true that for companies at startup stage to survive and to preserve their burn rate, a strategy around cost base for salaries is important. So from that perspective, absolutely, if you have two co-founders and they have a startup and they need to preserve cash and make sure they have enough time to be successful and seize the opportunity ahead of them, yeah, of course, they're going to have to think of how and where to hire. And this is where you know, oyster, like you know, is super, super helpful because it gives people access to talent in a global way, so you get the best people. You can also manage budgets. So the cost aspect does come into play, but it isn't about removing opportunities and like shifting them all to other areas of the world. I don't see that happening.
Speaker 2:Marina, we're almost out of time. I can't believe it. I feel like we've only been chatting for a few minutes. We're definitely going to have to get you on again soon. Before we wrap up, though, two more questions for you, uh, the next one's a giant question. It's kind of a ridiculous giant question, and I'm going to make it more ridiculous by challenging you to answer in 60 seconds or less. But uh, give it a go. Why not, uh, in 60 seconds or less? Marina, how do you see the future of hr shaping up, and where does Oyster fit into that vision?
Speaker 3:For too long, work has felt like a cage to many people, something that restricts their freedom. For me, the future of work is to review and create working practices through one simple lens, and that lens is to give people as much freedom in the workplace as possible, because you can do great work in an environment that is a lot more free than what we see on average. And remote working comes into play here, and that's when a company like oyster really helps, because it allows companies to employ remotely and to know how to do it well excellent, you had 10 plus seconds to spare.
Speaker 2:mar Marina, very, very good Did I.
Speaker 3:Oh goodness, I didn't realise.
Speaker 2:I should have made a 30 second challenge. I'll know for next time. Ok, just finally for today. How can our listeners connect with you? I'd urge them to, for example, connect with you on LinkedIn, because you do share a lot of interesting content. I just want to say that. So, maybe LinkedIn, maybe your email address, maybe other socials such as Instagram and, of course, how can they learn more about Oyster?
Speaker 3:Well, thank you so much for having me on this episode and that was really brilliant. So the way to connect with me is mostly LinkedIn. I'm actually not that great at other social media, although I've been told that I need to get my act together and be on other platforms, so I need to work on that, but linkedin is the best place, and following the oyster page on linkedin for more news as well excellent, and I think the url is oysterhrcom, and we'll have a link to all of that stuff, uh, in the show notes listeners, so fear not if your pencils broke when you're trying to write all of that down.
Speaker 2:uh, that just leads me to say for today, marina, thank you very much for being my guest thank you so much, bill.
Speaker 3:It was great to talk to you and listeners as always.
Speaker 1:Until next time, happy working thanks for listening to the hr chat show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work? Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit HRGazettecom.
