RWL063 Dee Coakley on Building Effective Global Teams and Streamlining Payroll

Speaker 1

0:01

All right, okay. Okay, here we go. Hello everybody, it's Alex once again from the Remote Work Live podcast, and I have a very special and important guest with me today. I have the co-founder and CEO of Boundless, Dee Coakley. Now Boundless is removing the barriers to growing teams internationally, allowing employers to employ whoever they want, wherever they are. They're building a platform that allows small and medium-sized innovative businesses to quickly and easily manage multi-country payroll and HR compliance. So, Dee, I really want to say thank you so much for joining us today and you're very welcome.

Speaker 2

0:53

Thank you so much, alex. It's really great to be here. I'm delighted. I know you've had some awesome guests on the podcast previously, so very happy to join and hopefully, with what little I do know about remote work, hopefully it will be of some help to your audience no, I'm sure it will, because you, you enable remote teams and remote businesses to to do things complitely.

Speaker 1

1:17

so I think it's, it's, it's a it's imperative that, um, the the audience understands what, what you do and what bound the great work that boundoundless is doing and you're going to really, I suppose, in this instance, help us to really answer a really important question, which is what do you do if an employee asks to move back to their home country, which you know it's a question that has many sort of intricacies within it, but before we kind of delve into that, what I want to do, dee, is find out more about, about you and how you got to where you are today.

Speaker 2

1:52

Yeah, sure, yeah, would love to have a chat with you about that. So I suppose my background, my background's really varied, really, really varied. I was definitely one of those people earlier in my career who used to worry a little bit that my cv was all over the place and, um, you know, I used to think when I'd apply for for roles I I would worry that, uh, perhaps there wasn't this very straight line, the straight straight path. But actually that's proven to be my, I suppose it's. My strength really is that I've been involved in so many different things and Boundless is very much the culmination of that.

Speaker 2

2:33

So way back when I studied business studies at university and specialized in marketing, and I always knew, you know, I had this burning ambition to work in the music industry, so very different to what I do today. I had this burning ambition to work in the music industry, so very different to what I do today. And I guess, from when I was a teenager I knew that's what I wanted to do. I grew up in a really musical family. I was interested in business, I wanted to work in business, but music was my passion and followed that path. Did my dissertation on MP3 all those years ago. Mp3? Gosh, that's from the past. Gosh, you were asking what I was doing my dissertation on, and I'd have to explain what mp3 was, explain what a digital music file was. Uh, it's that long since I went to university, um, so I I worked in record companies and in artist management for many years in commercial planning and marketing roles, um, which was so much fun. I did that throughout my 20s, uh, and left the year I turned 30, which is it's such a cliche. It's an industry where so many people leave the year they turn 30. It was loads of fun, um, got to meet loads of amazing people, do interesting things.

Speaker 2

3:42

Um, and I do often say there are parallels between the music industry and the tech space, because fundamentally, tech's creative, it's about people building something, creating something. Design is very much at the heart of everything that we do when we're building products in the music industry or in tech. But in the music industry, you know, I worked in marketing quite a lot and design was such a key part of what we did. So a lot of parallels, people who are really passionate about what they do. You know it's not it's not a nine to five type of sector. So a lot, a lot of parallels between the two things, but also very different, different worlds. So I spent seven years doing that and then transitioned into tech and that was a big leap. It was a very different world.

Speaker 2

4:28

It took me a little bit of time to get into the tech space but I was really fortunate that I joined an amazing company called Masabi. They do ticketing for the mass transit sector. So at the time I joined, the iPhone had just launched and the guys there at Misabi have been building mobile apps for about seven years before that, so they were super early. You know, we were one of the few companies in London building mobile apps at the time and they had amazing, amazing credentials, amazing experience and we were able to do very cool things. We were one of the first companies to take in-app payments, which again sounds like the dark ages, but you know, at the time that was that we would meet with vcs and they'd say what you can take the payment. You know it was, it was, it was um, quite amazing at the time and uh, yeah, they were looking for someone to come in in.

Speaker 2

5:23

It wasn't defined what the role was, but, you know, in a kind of a commercial role or ops role. You know I was the person that did all the stuff that wasn't building the product or selling to the customers, and, yeah, they took a chance on me. I took a chance on them. They were super early stage and it was a brilliant opportunity opportunity. So I really learned so much in that role and that really, you know, I suppose, gave me the access to all that I've done since then. So I was responsible for finance, legal HR, fundraising, and that then led me to a couple of other COO roles.

Speaker 2

6:03

So I spent 10 years in COO roles in B2B SaaS companies and in those roles, you know, I learned a whole lot about running businesses, raising funding, deploying capital, you know, building and deploying product, albeit that I you know nobody would ever pay me money to you know build their product with my own hands. So I've been fortunate enough to work with amazing product people over the years, but in the COO role, really getting insights into all aspects of the business and very much focused on planning a you know strategy and planning for the future, and that's that's the part that I really love, I guess, and through that I ended up having to, in a very hands on way, at the coalface, solve the problems that Boundless is now solving. So the last company I was with the company called Axonista, an interactive video tech company. We built a co-located team, but over time we have people request to move back to home countries. So you know, as you said, that's something we'll focus on today and when people were asking us to move back to their home countries, that worked really well for us in terms of communication and collaboration and having people being focused on building the product.

Speaker 2

7:21

Where it all fell down was operationally, and I had to figure out how are we going to employ these people and pay these people through the local tax system in these countries that they were going to, where we had no established operations. I had no network, I had no previous understanding of the employment laws of the country or the tax regime, and it it wasn't easy. It was. It was a huge, giant pain and that was really what led me to founding Bandus.

Speaker 1

7:51

And would you say. I mean, it's a great story and I think it just goes to show that it's like you said, you, your, your career is hasn't taken a sort of a straight path. Obviously I guess whose does? But you've, you've had a lot of different experiences which have shaped who you are now, in the sense that you're, that you've taken those experiences, and I suppose when you have so many different experiences, it enables you to solve different problems and look at things from different perspectives and, like you said, add a creative um sort of come from them from a creative point of view, creative standpoint um, and also as well, I guess it's having all those those different uh, skills, I guess, is it. Do you think it's shaped you as an entrepreneur as well, would you say?

Solving International Payroll Headaches

Speaker 2

8:39

110 percent. Yeah, totally and absolutely. Um, I think I've always always probably from from a young age, but definitely throughout my career I've always been really conscious that there was a value in being able to do lots of things. I was never going to go on that career path where I was very focused and I worked at a very large corporate and I did one very narrow thing very well. I went very deep on that one thing. I was just never going to be that person.

Speaker 2

9:12

I want to know how all the things work. And you know I did work at large corporates a couple of times when I was younger. I did work placement at IBM and I did a brief stint at UBS, investment Bank and KPMG. So I've seen the inside of those organisations. But you know, I always would have been like what's that? What does that person over there do and why are they doing that and how does this work? And you know it's probably infuriating if you're managing a large corporate and that's their approach, because you want to focus them on. You want them to focus on the role that they were hired to do.

Speaker 2

9:50

But yeah, I've always always been interested in in all of the things and I think I've definitely in my earlier in my career grabbed things and was very much self-taught.

Speaker 2

10:08

Grabbed things and was very much self-taught. Um, so you know, I I knew very, very early on that it was going to serve me really, really well if I was very financially numerous. And I, you know, I've done some accounting qualifications because I just knew that would be helpful later on and I knew that if I taught myself how to build financial models, that that's a skill that would just pay off again and again and again. So you know, 10, 12 years ago, when there wasn't the wealth of information that there is on the internet right now, I learned how to build financial models from Google, you know, and there wasn't the wealth of YouTube videos and sources of information then that there is now. But there I was able to do that. You know, there was enough information out there that I could do that, but most, most of it was just trial and error. It was like I'll give this a go, I'll see if I can figure this out.

Speaker 1

10:57

Yeah, so that's that's definitely been an approach I've taken and it's essentially led you to really understanding where your your strengths are and building the. The boundless platform and I might I say it might add, the boundless platform is very much more than just a platform. It's, it's obviously driven by the great people behind it, d being one of those people, um, and if you go over to boundless hqcom, you'll be able to have a look and see exactly what I mean. It's very much more than just a platform, and you've built the platform based on a challenge that you've had to overcome. Would you say that that challenge was your biggest challenge in terms of the hiring aspect?

Speaker 2

11:43

So definitely the problem that B boundless solves is definitely the biggest pain point I had encountered as a coo. To the extent that I know that that, claire, who was the, the ceo of um axonista, where I, you know, dealt with this problem, and jenny, who was on my team there, they both think it's hilarious that I now do this all the time, they, every time I meet them, they, they laugh about it because they say you, you hate international employment and multi-country payroll, it's the bane of your life. Uh, and it really really was. I mean, you know, I I always say it was the thing that made me curse the loudest and it did believe me at first. Um, yeah, just just enormously frustrating and slow and painful. So it was a very you know, for me it was just such an obvious problem to solve. I was, I was a reluctant founder of boundless.

Speaker 2

12:40

It. It was such a pain and the challenges are so huge and so complex. I knew there was a business opportunity, but at first I didn't really want to solve that problem because I thought this is so difficult and so challenging. I wasn't, there was. No, I wasn't under any illusions.

Speaker 2

12:57

There was no naivety coming to solve this problem. I knew how chunky it was. But I knew that the pain point was so enormous for the people who were dealing with this, I knew it was worth giving it a go. So it was. It was a case of kind of incrementally trying things out early on, you know, trying to set up our infrastructure in the first few countries, testing workflows, and yeah, you know, quite, quite quickly we figured out, yeah, we can actually do this and we can do this again and again for multiple countries and we can do it really really well. And doing it really well is difficult and delivering a really great customer experience is difficult in this space. But yeah, I decided to take the leap and give it a real go and it's been so satisfying knowing that we can solve those problems.

Speaker 1

13:48

It is a beautiful thing because the best business ideas come from solving problems and, like you said, you've done that. Boundless now is essentially. I guess when you look on the Boundless website, it's essentially four steps, which is signing up, activating countries, adding employees and then approving and processing payroll. So it's kind of it makes it sound simple, it takes a headache away from well, it is simple.

Speaker 2

14:18

I mean from a customer perspective. So you know my experience of doing this across multiple countries. It was taking many, many, many months. It can take up to 18 months for some countries just to register as an employer, just to be in a position to process payroll through a country, and you know you're at the mercy of local government. There is no way to speed that up. No amount of money speeds that up. It doesn't matter how good your lawyers are. It takes as long as it takes.

Speaker 2

14:50

But for our customers we can and we have set up customers same day and got employees onboarded. We can set up a customer company in about 10, 15 minutes. An employee can self-onboard in about five minutes. So taking something that previously was taking 10 months, 12 months, and turning it into something that's minutes, that's pretty powerful. And my favorite favorite customers are customers who have tried to solve this problem themselves or who have set up operations for a couple of countries. And then they find us and they're like take my money, take my money. You know there's no, no, negotiating hard on price with those customers because, um, you know they, they know how hard this is, and there's no, it's a quick and easy sales process. You know that they. They understand what it is that and there's no. It's a quick and easy sales process. You know that they understand what it is that we're doing, understand why we're doing it and understand why they would not do this again for another country if they never have to.

Speaker 1

15:49

Yeah, the reason I said it's a beautiful thing early on is because I come from the side of recruitment and when you're hiring I mean I've hired people myself, I've worked in recruitment for the past, god knows how long you want those flows to go as smoothly, not just for you as a business, but for you as well from the employee's perspective, to get them feeling as though they're part of the team, get them on board, get them.

Navigating International Remote Work Challenges

Speaker 1

16:18

You know you don't want those kinds of things hanging over your head because it kind of doesn't create a good impression of your business. And so, yeah, that's why I said it's a beautiful thing to have such a mechanism in place where you can do things in minutes rather than, you know, weeks and months sometimes. Minutes rather than weeks and months sometimes. But the question that we were going to talk about today, dee, is really how to continue to employ people, because I mean, especially given the situation that we're in now, are you coming across Well? In fact, let me read the full question out. It says how to continue to employ people who have moved to a different country. Is this particular question more poignant now than it has ever been, or is it just something that's generally come across your desk quite a lot.

Speaker 2

17:07

It is far, far more common a challenge now for businesses. I mean that you know this was how I came to founding Bannas. This was the problem that I was solving at the last company I was with. We did have people it was it generally was people relocating back to home countries. Occasionally it was people looking to move to somewhere new. We were, we were co-located out of Dublin, so we did get people who'd say the weather sucks, I've done two years, I can't do any longer. You get a bit of that, uh, when you're in these these rainier, darker countries, um, but uh. So it's always been there, but I.

Speaker 2

17:45

The big shift this year is the frequency with which companies are getting requests for this and I think, historically, you know, the company I was with was just really supportive of our team and we really valued our team, so we were prepared to jump through hoops to make that work for them. But some companies have historically had an approach where it's firmly no international remote. We don't support that and the reasons that they don is is because of these challenges. So so those companies have been faced with a situation where workers have been coming to them and everyone has had an existential crisis in the last year, right, everyone, wherever you're based in the world, whatever your life is, everyone has stopped and paused and reflected on how they live, what their living conditions are like, so the property they live in, what kind of space they have, what kind of community is around them. Everyone's been thinking about these things and asking these questions of themselves in their own lives. That has led to a flurry of people looking to make changes. People want bigger properties. They want gardens. People want to move out of cities. Big numbers of people want to be closer to family. People want to be closer to their elderly parents. In many cases, people need to. You know, it's not simply an easy choice or a fun choice about having a nicer life For some people. Their parents need them nearby or other members of their family need them, um, so people are coming to their employer and they're not. You know they're saying this has to happen. It's also happened.

Speaker 2

19:30

We've spoken to people who are are stuck in countries that they were visiting during the first lockdown.

Speaker 2

19:36

Some people who were on vacation or some people where the company they were working for, their line manager, said it was fine for them to do a working holiday during the first lockdown because it was only going to be three weeks, right, yes, but three weeks became six weeks, became five months and you know, here we are in 2021. Some of those people are kind of stuck where they are because there are limitations on travel in and out of so many countries. So companies are now in a position where they have to not just consider this, they are having to make changes and they're having to support this. That's the big change this year. So we, we reckon, you know, when we look at market size and we look at the, the numbers, we reckon that everything that's happened in the last year has accelerated the market by about 10 years in terms of adoption of international remote work wow, yeah, you do get the feeling from my perspective, as somebody who's has a lot of conversations around remote work that there is an acceleration.

Speaker 1

20:38

but that puts things really into perspective and I mean it's something that's it's here to stay as well. You know we're in a situation where, if you are hiring for your team, you know even if you are used to having worked in a co-located situation, that you're probably going to have to have somebody like Dee in your back pocket should your employees make these sorts of requests. And you know you never know what's. Unfortunately, right now we're in a situation where we don't know. We can't really plan too far ahead, but at least if you have the capacity and the right people within your network, you can move relatively quickly if this does affect you. But whether you are, I guess, having to adapt to the situation on a short-term or long-term basis, there are implications, aren't there, Dee? Long-term basis, there are implications, aren't they? D? Um, what are the implications of?

Speaker 2

21:44

employees working in another country on a short-term basis. So so you know this all comes down to how short is exactly short. You know, if if someone goes somewhere for a few weeks and they bring their laptop and they're working from there, that's a a working holiday, that's not a problem. I mean, what companies need to bear in mind is any individual is entitled to the employment rights of wherever they are at any point in time. Now if someone's going on a working holiday and they don't have any form of residency in a country, first of all, it's highly unlikely they would ever take any legal action against your company under that country if they're not established there. But secondly, your risk is far lower if they're very temporarily in a country, if they're just there for a few weeks. So generally businesses don't need to worry about that. Where it starts to become an issue is if someone is residing in a country. If they're spending many months in a country, really they are entitled to the employment regulations of the employment rights of that country Once they are over six months, and it's based on the number of nights. So if someone is over one hundred and usually it's one hundred and fifty three nights in any rolling 12 month period in a country, then they will have a tax obligation in that country. What that means is you, as their employer, have a tax obligation in that country. You need to be reporting, processing pay in a way that's compliant with that country. You need to process pay through that country's payroll system. You need to be paying taxes paying employer taxes and processing the individual's employee taxes through that country's tax regime and filing returns and making payments to the local tax authorities and that what we talked about a little earlier.

Speaker 2

23:43

All of this stuff that takes so much time getting set up in a country. Really that that's that's the challenge you're facing is that you know, a company can't just rock up to a government in a country and say we're processing payroll here this month, where do I make my payment? There's a process that you need to go through to register as an employer in that country, and that's the bit that's really painful and really slow. And there are lots of countries where payroll must be paid through a local bank account and it needs to be an old school, traditional bank account. Setting up bank accounts in foreign countries is not much fun. We do a lot of it, it's, it's painful, it's slow, um, it takes time.

Speaker 2

24:24

So for a company, unless you're really establishing operations in a country, there are quite big hurdles to jump, but these are not optional, you know, you don't. You don't get to choose. Um, you know how you handle employment. For an individual, there is legislation that exists and, as is the case with all companies, you, you, have a fiduciary duty to comply with the law of of wherever your, your people are based or wherever you're doing business. Um, so, so short, short term, probably not such a problem. The obligations, the obligations change when it's a long term arrangement.

Speaker 1

25:03

Yeah, and I was actually going to ask you that. Next I mean long term obligations. Then what are the implications of employees working in another country on a long term basis?

Speaker 2

25:13

Yeah. So once you know that someone is going to be based somewhere, you are obliged, and feigning ignorance is never an acceptable defense, never, ever. There is no country where you know claiming that you weren't aware. First of all, you can't claim you didn't know the individual was in the country, and there have been situations. I heard a story from a specialist advisor in the UK a while ago where they had supported a client who had a salesperson. It was a UK company. This individual was a salesperson. They were never in the office anyhow, they were always out and about, unknown to the company. The individual had married someone in Ireland and moved to Ireland and was living in Ireland permanently and they just never mentioned it. It didn't come up in conversation. They weren't open about the fact that they'd relocated. I you know. I don't know how aware the individual was of the implications of this, but I'm guessing the fact that they never mentioned to their employer where they were living they knew it probably wasn't okay so they never said.

Speaker 1

26:19

By the way, I'm in ireland never said.

Speaker 2

26:23

Three years into this arrangement, three years later, the irish tax authorities of course you know this individual is living in ireland, they probably have a car, they maybe have a mortgage, they probably have kids at school. Of course the irish governmentises this individual exists and the Irish government says where is your income coming from? You know, you seem to be living the life of someone who has an income, but we have no record of you. What's the story? So the company gets letters from the Irish tax authorities saying you have three years of arrears here. This needs to be sorted out. Wow, have three years of arrears here. This needs to be sorted out. Wow, this, this.

Speaker 2

27:06

This advisor was was tasked with kind of unpicking all of this and putting it right, but you know it took took about eight months to resolve the whole issue. There was a huge amount of unpicking involved. Of course the company was issued fines, but they had no idea, they genuinely didn't know this person was in Ireland. But you know the the tax authorities said well, they, this person was in Ireland. But you know the tax authorities said well, they, this person was in Ireland and there's plenty of evidence of the fact that they were resident there and they were working for your company full-time and your company was paying them throughout this period. So there was all of the back tax to pay, plus fines. But the really awkward thing was it you know it took up management time to resolve this they had to pay the fees of this external advisor. It was just all a bit of a mess. So that's the kind of thing that can happen if this stuff isn't resolved long term. So when companies look at solving these problems they take a couple of different paths.

Speaker 2

27:59

Companies will often set up people as independent contractors. It's really really common. Independent contracting is so commonly used by very early stage businesses. I think most in the tech space. Certainly most companies will have legitimate contractors working for them. You know we do from time to time and that's fine when it's a discrete project, when it's fixed term, when the person really is an external person doing a discrete piece of work for your company. But the regulations vary in each country. You know every country has different worker classification regulations, but generally broad brushstrokes if someone works full time for your company, if your company is their sole source of income, if you pay them the same amount each month, if they have a company email address, if they attend internal meetings and if you're directing their work, like that's usually a key thing. If you give someone a project, they go away. You don't talk to them for a few weeks. They come back with the results of the project. That usually looks like an external contractor, but if're directing their work, you know if they're in internal meetings, if they're doing really regular check-ins with you.

Speaker 2

29:05

Um, most governments say that individual is an employee, not a contractor, and in some countries you can have people working as a contractor. 12 months is is one that you see um quite commonly. But once you go beyond that time period and there are some countries where you know there is no acceptable minimum minimal time period if those criteria are met, the person's always an employee. Um so long term, you just need need to be aware of that and aware of supporting employment.

Speaker 2

29:34

And they're also the ethical implications.

Navigating International Employee vs Contractor Dynamics

Speaker 2

29:36

I mean if someone is living in a country and they're not contributing to the local tax system there, there are a lot of ethical questions there. You know if, if they are um utilizing the infrastructure in a country and um you know spending time in a country but not participating in the local tax system. There's a question there around how, how appropriate that is. And then if that individual and this is the one you know I always used to to worry about when we were going through this process of getting set up before, before being set up, the if the individual is not contributing to the local social security system, local health care system, what happens if they need to avail of the local public health care system and they have not been participating? Um, you know, I've moved between countries before. I know, as someone who lived in the uk for years, despite being um an irish citizen and born here, I had to be back here a few years and contributing to the tax scheme a few years before I get full benefits on the public health system and the.

Speaker 1

30:46

What I'm seeing quite a lot is, um, because you were touching on the the difference between somebody who is an independent contractor and somebody who is employed. What I'm tending to see quite a lot is people or businesses who are hiring people will give somebody a three month contract but have them as a contractor and then onboard them as an employee after that. Is that something that is advisable? I would always say you know, if you want to integrate somebody within a business and make them feel like they're part of the furniture and part of the team all those sorts of things you would hire them from the get-go as an employee, but it seems that a few businesses are doing the opposite.

Speaker 2

31:39

Is that something that you're seeing and would recommend or not? I know I myself have joined companies before as a contractor and then converted to an employee, and I have hired contractors and converted them to employees. I've definitely seen that happen. Where I've done it it's tended to be with senior roles and with very kind of specific skill sets. Where I mean, where I've been joined as a contractor, converted to an employee, I've often been brought in to solve a discrete set of problems.

Speaker 2

32:03

So it is a contracting arrangement or sometimes it's been a few days a week at first and then become an employee. So it legitimately has been contracting. You do see it. You know again, there are country-specific restrictions or limitations around that. We have a lot of content on our website. We have country guides on our website. We have country guides on our website. If anyone wants to go to boundlesshqcom and have a look at our country guides, you'll find information there around the limitations of contracting in different countries. But it's definitely something that happens a lot.

Speaker 2

32:39

What we also hear of is companies and it's often companies that are a little bit further along, where there are people quite focused on culture in the organization. So you know, a ceo or a head of people, ops where they'll say to us we've this has happened organically, but we've built out our team where our international people are contractors and all our say people in the us are all employees and this has happened very organically and without us noticing. But now we have a them and us situation and the employees get all of the perks and benefits and the stability and the contractors. You know whether how this pans out in reality. You know it depends.

Speaker 2

33:26

I mean, you know, if people are employed in the US and some US states, they actually don't have a lot of stability, certainly not compared to most European countries. But there becomes this culture and this sense that the employees are stable and the contractors are unstable and you have this two tier system where the contractors feel like second class citizens. And that terminology, second class citizens is actually terminology that we hear on sales calls quite often and it's often heads of people, officers, coos, who say we feel like we've created this system and we need to fix it. We want these and sometimes these independent contractors internationally have been working for these companies for years, built the company's product genuinely. The senior leadership at the company really do value these people, but the people don't feel so valued and and at the time we talk to to leadership, they really want to sort this out. They, they want to fix this problem.

Speaker 1

34:23

Yeah, and it's certainly something to be cognizant of, isn't it? Because you want, because you can only get the best out of the people in your team if they feel as though they're part of something and part of the actual the same thing.

Speaker 2

34:35

Yeah, you're not an employee, you're an external service provider and I know maybe just on paper, maybe just you know words on a contract, but that is meaningful to a lot of people definitely.

Speaker 1

34:49

I mean, how are they resolving those situations? Are they just trying to engage with them more? Are they trying to have you sort of experience to try to rectify that particular scenario at all?

Speaker 2

35:01

Yeah, so companies will usually. I mean, it's usually a multi-stranded approach, as it is with most forms of problem solving. There isn't one silver bullet. So at the time they're talking to us, they're talking about employment and conversion to employment and figuring out how that works. Usually, they are also doing other things. Often they will look at benefits and look at how they can harmonize benefits.

Speaker 2

35:24

Harmonization of benefits with global teams is an area I'm really really interested in and you know, at Boundless we do support a number of different benefits. We have some benefits across all countries and we're adding more and more over time. But it's an area we'll be really focused on as we grow countries and we're adding more and more over time. But it's an area we'll be really focused on as we grow.

Speaker 2

35:44

I ran a round table a few months ago with heads of people upset many tech companies that you'd be really familiar with um companies with up to a few thousand employees, and these are the companies you know. Some of them are remote first it's they're really high profile as being awesome remote companies. You kind of assume that these are the companies that have everything figured out. We got these people around the table and we went around one by one at the start and said okay, I want to say around the table, I mean virtually, but I went around and asked everyone what they wanted to get out of the call and everyone said oh, like you know, I saw you were on the call, or you were on the call.

Speaker 2

36:22

I'm guessing you'll have this figured out, so I can't wait to hear what you have to say With the end of the call was there is no magic solution to harmonization of benefits globally. Because the value? If I'm a worker somewhere in the US, I highly value health insurance and it's going to cost my employer a whole lot of money to provide me with decent health insurance. In the UK I mean a bells and whistles health insurance policy is like 50 pounds a month and if I'm a worker I don't. I have access to free health care. I've lived in the UK. The NHS is amazing. It's just not a priority. When I'm looking for a job in the UK I'm not like and I need the awesome health insurance package. So you know how benefits are perceived in different countries is quite different and it's a really interesting area. But companies will often look to use benefits as a way to try and make people feel more engaged. But there are some benefits that it's difficult to offer if people are not employees.

Speaker 1

37:17

Yeah, benefits is definitely a conversation. I'm hearing about a lot and maybe we should invite you back on to have a conversation. I'm hearing about a lot and maybe we should invite you back on to have a conversation about it another time, but it's been really um, it's been really insightful and, as d was mentioning, please go across to boundlesshqcom and have a look at those country guides. Have a look at how boundless can make, simplify things for you and your business in terms of onboarding uh employees internationally, nationally, wherever they may be. Uh, definitely worth having a look. But before you go, d, I just wanted to ask you just a different kind of question, I guess away from the work and all that sort of thing. So the question I usually ask, but, um, I wanted to know was is there been an unusual, unusual or exotic place in which you've worked and you know?

Speaker 2

38:09

yeah, just just generally speaking uh, not in the last year hasn't varied very much. Um, yeah, ordinarily I. So, since COVID is my first time working from home full-time, I've worked for myself a couple of times and I've always worked from a co-working space. You know I I love the office. Ironically, despite being an advocate and promoter of remote work, I actually love the office. I'm a real extrovert, um, so ordinarily I'm I will be out and about all the time and I know I will be. You know, post COVID, I'm sure I'll probably not be traveling as much as I used to. So I've, I've worked over the place. You know, I'll always be be doing a bit of work on my phone or my laptop. Um, yeah, probably the most unusual place I've ever done a stint of work I was traveling.

Speaker 2

39:01

I went on a? Um a long trip. It was, I think, 11 weeks, uh, after, when I was, before I moved back to Ireland, when I left, um, a company I was working with called Masabi and I went on this really long trip and I consciously didn't bring my laptop because I was between jobs. So I was was like, right, this is a proper break. So I brought an iPad and I do remember doing I was talking to someone about some consulting work and doing a piece of work on this really rickety train going across the Rajasthani desert on this iPad, and I didn't bring an external keyboard for the iPad. Top tip, don't. You can't work on an iPad.

Speaker 1

39:43

On a rickety train.

Speaker 2

39:44

And lengthy writing, so that's probably the most exotic place. It wasn't very comfortable.

Building Connections With Boundless

Speaker 1

39:51

Well, it beats mine and my most exotic has been well, no, I'm not going to share mine because it doesn't beat that at all, but I can't compete with that. Dee, it has been wonderful speaking with you. We're going to be looking and keeping an eye on you, and Boundless as well, to see what you're doing in the future and, like I said, hopefully have you on the podcast again in the future. Wish you all the best and thank you for joining us today.

Speaker 2

40:16

Thank you so much. It's been great and we're always happy to help anyone that has questions about this space, even if they're not interested in working with Boundless, and we're always happy to answer questions and help people out. They can email us at ask at boundlesshqcom or just reach out to me on social.

Speaker 1

40:32

We'll do it. I'll leave your details in the show notes as well. Brilliant. Thank you, Dee.