The Great Resignation & The Future Of Work: Xenios Thrasyvoulou Of TalentDesk On How Employers and Employees Are Reworking Work Together

An Interview with Karen Mangia

People used to do off-sites, but that’s all changing now we’re working remotely. Now it’s the other way around: the on-site is the new off-site. You spend a couple of days in a room together, you strategize and come up with what you’re going to do in the next quarter and you leave invigorated.

When it comes to designing the future of work, one size fits none. Discovering success isn’t about a hybrid model or offering remote work options. Individuals and organizations are looking for more freedom. The freedom to choose the work model that makes the most sense. The freedom to choose their own values. And the freedom to pursue what matters most. We reached out to successful leaders and thought leaders across all industries to glean their insights and predictions about how to create a future that works.

As a part of our interview series called “How Employers and Employees are Reworking Work Together,” we had the pleasure to interview Xenios Thrasyvoulou.

Xenios Thrasyvoulou, CEO and Founder of TalentDesk.io, is on a mission to empower businesses and individuals to make the shift to remote work, whether that’s freelance or full-time. In 2007 he founded PeoplePerHour, building a global community of businesses and freelancers. With TalentDesk.io, he takes that idea a step further, championing the “locationless” job and providing technology for recruitment, onboarding and payment.

Thank you for making time to visit with us about the topic of our time. Our readers would like to get to know you a bit better. Can you please tell us about one or two life experiences that most shaped who you are today.

Since I was about seven or eight I started questioning situations where I was just told that things should be a certain way. My instinctive response was always: “But why?”. Of course, inquisitiveness is second nature to kids, but unfortunately we’re often pushed to outgrow this, which I proudly rebelled against. I hated rules that didn’t make sense and that just made people’s life more difficult for no reason. That’s why I knew I wanted to create my own business and be my own boss — and I always knew I wanted to do something with the mission of breaking boundaries.

Because I always knew I wanted to be my own boss, I understood why most people would want the same. A few years ago I would’ve said “in a perfect world” everyone can be their own boss, but that’s no longer the case. Now everyone can be their own boss, and that’s why the Great Resignation is happening today. Both my companies serve this grander purpose: of enabling people to live and work as they choose, and similarly, enabling businesses to not only embrace this, but to flourish because of it.

Let’s zoom out. What do you predict will be the same about work, the workforce and the workplace 10–15 years from now? What do you predict will be different?

Ten years is a long time and it’s very hard to predict the future. But I think we’ll definitely see the world becoming flatter. Without a shadow of doubt, we’re seeing the benefits of hiring across borders and that’s no longer just driven by cost. Now it’s about finding good talent. It’s about creating multi-cultured teams, embracing diversity and bringing people with different educational backgrounds and different cultures into one environment.

Companies have become comfortable using Zoom during the pandemic and now they can also get together on site occasionally, even if they’re still working from home. I think the benefits of remote working are super clear to companies that have adopted it — and TalentDesk.io is one of them. We have people who are based all over the world — whether that’s in product, sales or any capacity — and they’re from very different backgrounds.

The good news is that great minds don’t think alike and we know that diversity is super important. Remote working is becoming the norm and it’s here to stay. We’ve seen a shift over the last two years and I think that it’s going to accelerate, particularly as hiring and collaborating across borders becomes easier.

What’s going to be different? I don’t think we can predict what tools and technology are going to be around in ten or 15 years’ time, but the fundamentals are not going to change. The driver for this kind of new way of working has been building for years, so I think COVID was a catalyst and we won’t go backwards — instead, it’s only going to accelerate.

What advice would you offer to employers who want to future-proof their organizations?

Don’t be afraid of change. Change is always hard in any capacity and it’s natural for some people to fear it. But what happened during the pandemic was unthinkable and it forced change, but also proved that we all adapted and it was fine in the end.

A lot of companies grew massively and more opportunities came about, so I think if we got through the unthinkable that’s a real positive — and the world evolved to become a better place. I see that as proof that change is healthy, even though people wouldn’t put themselves through this transition if they weren’t forced to.

What do you predict will be the biggest gaps between what employers are willing to offer and what employees expect as we move forward? And what strategies would you offer about how to reconcile those gaps?

I think it’s transpiring that what people want is meaningful work. If you look at what’s going on now, everyone is talking about The Great Resignation, whether it’s true or not.

Big companies have huge budgets, but the days of commercially attracting people with financial bait or very attractive packages are over. Obviously money still matters and you’ve got to pay people competitively, but I think the world is moving to a place where people want more from their jobs. We’ve gone through the pandemic and people realise that life is short, so they’re more attracted to doing work that’s meaningful to them. It might be a job they’re inspired by, maybe because it’s fun, or it serves a mission that they’re aligned with. People want to do jobs that are in tune with their passions and in line with their lifestyle and no amount of stock options can replace that.

What people want out of life has changed, as their circumstances and socio-economic lifestyle shifted. There’s no question that the pandemic caused an awakening, so it’s important for companies to create an atmosphere of meaningful, fun work that people enjoy doing that’s compatible with the life they want to live.

We’re seeing it all the time at TalentDesk.io when we interview people. There are candidates we could never have attracted for roles saying: “I want to work from home, I want to live in the countryside, I want to have this lifestyle… and I’ll take less money for that.” Recognising and reconciling those factors is going to be key for employers.

We simultaneously joined a global experiment together last year called “Working From Home.” How will this experience influence the future of work?

It will influence it greatly. Remote working is here to stay — and that’s a positive thing. Teams will become more diverse, more creative and happier because this new way of working allows them to live the life they want. I’m very optimistic about the future.

We’ve all read the headlines about how the pandemic reshaped the workforce. What societal changes do you foresee as necessary to support a future of work that works for everyone?

Life has changed. In the past, the majority of people would do a boring nine-to-five job where they couldn’t wait to get out of the office and go to the pub with their mates. Everyone just accepted that was life. People might not have been super happy, but that’s just what you did because there was no alternative in the mass market.

Now that’s changed and people don’t have to stay in a nine-to-five job if they hate it. They can work as contractors, they can be freelancers, they can live where they want to — and a lot of people have moved out of cities because they don’t want to be there so their cost of living has dropped. That allows them to work a four-day week, maybe with a couple of days in one place and the rest for someone else.

It’s a massive shift and employers and society need to embrace this if they want to find the best staff.

What is your greatest source of optimism about the future of work?

There are so many, but the biggest one is that jobs can be “locationless”, which promotes diversity and gives quality candidates a chance they might not have had before.

Remote working is here to stay. Cost-saving and flexibility are often cited as benefits for both employers and workers, but that’s just the start. Once we remove the location, we open up jobs to larger pools of talent, build truly diverse company cultures and offer different perspectives which make teams even better.

Our collective mental health and wellbeing are now considered collateral as we consider the future of work. What innovative strategies do you see employers offering to help improve and optimize their employee’s mental health and wellbeing?

I think workers have already been proactive in taking steps to improve their own mental health and wellbeing, so employers need to build on that. And that doesn’t just mean looking after them while they’re in an office. Real work-life balance comes from the opportunity to work remotely, with your employer trusting you to get everything done. At TalentDesk.io, if you need to take a three-hour break in the afternoon to pick your kids up and make their dinner, then work late into the evening, no-one even questions it.

But remote working doesn’t rule out physical interaction. We had a company meeting a few weeks ago where we met, we gelled, we made plans and then all went our separate ways. It was snowing in London and one of our team members was on the beach the next day. That’s what gives people pleasure.

It seems like there’s a new headline every day. ‘The Great Resignation’. ‘The Great Reconfiguration’. And now the ‘Great Reevaluation’. What are the most important messages leaders need to hear from these headlines? How do company cultures need to evolve?

​​With every trend, there’s a lot of conflicting rhetoric and opinion out there. Some of the CEOs of the top FTSE companies say they can’t measure the shift and they disregard The Great Resignation. There’s no validation, so we don’t really know what impact it has.

What we do know is that people’s circumstances, what they want out of life and their expectations of work/life balance have changed. Personally, I think company leaders shouldn’t put too much emphasis on these headlines. For every opinion, there’s a conflicting one. We don’t know whether any of these trends are real, or here to stay. But digging underneath all the rhetoric, you’ll find the fundamentals are real: people want to work in ways that please them, much more than they used to in the past.

If you want to attract those people, you’ve got to think about what culture you create in an organisation — not just in terms of embracing remote work and the need for flexibility, but also redesigning your entire recruitment process, team-building and the whole strategy around that. Your people are your strategy, so if you don’t factor that in you’re building on quicksand.

I don’t believe that people should obsess over headlines. Instead, they should look at the fundamentals. What do people want? If you’re recruiting as we are, you talk to people and find out very quickly what they want — straight from the horse’s mouth, not from the press.

Let’s get more specific. What are your “Top 5 Trends To Track In the Future of Work?”

​​1. The growth of distributed teams.

We’re an example of this. In my previous company, PeoplePerHour and now at TalentDesk.io, every team, from sales to product engineering, is completely distributed — and we’re better for it. We have people who come together with different mentalities and that makes a great team.

It’s easy to forget that your education and experience are not just your hard skills that you’ve acquired over the years. They’re also shaped by where you live, the exposure you’ve had and how you grew up in your culture. That’s a big part of what you bring to the table, along with your mindset. If you bring people from these different cultures into a room (or a virtual room) there are multiple benefits. That’s a trend to track and adopt.

2. Small companies can work globally too.

The world is flattening and that’s a great thing. Historically, big multi-nationals were the only ones that could afford to work across borders, but now you can be a company of 35 people and do that because of the tools we have. It’s amazing how we can bridge those boundaries.

3. Your company culture is human, not financial.

If you can track people’s satisfaction at work, which you should, you’ll find out what drives them. You might look at how well they’ve done and if they’ve hit their bonus, but then there are the deeper, more value-driven elements such as: “I enjoy what I do, I love the people I work with, I love this diversity in the company, I love to work from home.” These things are more important than ever before.

4. On-sites are the new off-sites.

People used to do off-sites, but that’s all changing now we’re working remotely. Now it’s the other way around: the on-site is the new off-site. You spend a couple of days in a room together, you strategize and come up with what you’re going to do in the next quarter and you leave invigorated.

5. Technology and tools will grow.

Tools such as Slack and Zoom have been going for a long time and now they’ve been adopted by everyone. People will say: “They’re just a pandemic thing,” but that’s not true. We were forced to use them in larger numbers and I think in the future we’ll see the adoption of more tech tools, whether that’s TalentDesk.io for contract workers or accounting software.

In a world where you’re working across borders, both in terms of your team and clients, life does become more complex, so you need tools to make it simple.

I keep quotes on my desk and on scraps of paper to stay inspired. What’s your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? And how has this quote shaped your perspective?

Embrace your low moments and the challenges you’re thrown in life. I think those are the defining moments that make you stand out from the crowd.

A lot of people don’t realize that everyone comes across challenges in the journey, but some people just fall down and never get up and others do. It’s the same in business as it is in sport. The difference in capability between the top athletes in any sport is very little because they’re all so well trained. The difference in the end is your heart, your stamina and your mental capacity to keep going.

We are very blessed that some of the biggest names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US, with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch, and why? He, she, or they might just see this if we tag them.

I would say if I had to pick anyone it would be Warren Buffett. There are very different kinds of success stories: someone might create a widget and see it take off, but not have a real strategy. There’s an element of luck and that’s great.

But I admire people who have a very strong vision and strategy from the beginning rather than those looking for a quick flip. Warren Buffett had a clear vision of what business should be and he went for a very long game. When people ask him: “How did you become the biggest, most successful investor in the world doing just the fundamentals?” his answer is amazing because no-one wants to get rich slowly.

I really admire people who have that patience and value the long game, sticking with it because it works in the end.

Our readers often like to continue the conversation with our featured interviewees. How can they best connect with you and stay current on what you’re discovering?

You can find out all about the company and what we do at TalentDesk.io, connect with me on LinkedIn.

Thank you for sharing your insights and predictions. We appreciate the gift of your time and wish you continued success and good health.

About The Interviewer: Karen Mangia is one of the most sought-after keynote speakers in the world, sharing her thought leadership with over 10,000
organizations during the course of her career. As Vice President of Customer and Market Insights at Salesforce, she helps individuals and organizations
define, design and deliver the future. Discover her proven strategies to access your own success in her fourth book Success from Anywhere and by
connecting with her on LinkedIn and Twitter.