Someone who aligns with our values trumps someone with an edge on hard skills | Future of Work Club

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In a world where many companies claim to uphold strong values but are plagued by toxicity and egocentric management, TheyDo - Journey Management stands out as a refreshing exception. In our latest interview, ? Charles Beaumont , founder and CTO of @TheyDo, reveals how they genuinely walk the talk.

Charles shares TheyDo’s journey in creating an inclusive, ego-free, and collaborative remote work culture. Learn how TheyDo’s values-driven approach ensures they attract and retain top talent, foster true leadership, and build a thriving remote team. Unlike many, TheyDo doesn’t just use buzzwords — they truly understand and practice what it means to lead.

??? Meet Charles Beaumont???

Charles here, one of the founders and the CTO at TheyDo. I support the team in building a delightful and scalable customer experience. Unusually for a CTO, the People team reports to me. I’ve always been as passionate about building the company as the product. As clichéd as it is, our team determines our company's outcome.

With TheyDo, we’re building a category-defining platform that revolutionizes business processes by bringing data together around customer journeys to uncover insights on what to do next and why.

As a startup, one of the first lessons you learn is to talk with as many customers as possible and learn from them, building solutions for their problems. However, large organizations struggle with this customer-centric approach for various reasons.

This is where TheyDo comes in — our platform enables organizations to engage with customers at scale, gathering insights to drive their decision-making. Using TheyDo, they can overcome their struggles and put the customer at the heart of their business.

What is your recipe for creating a dream team?

It starts with attracting and hiring world-class talent for our team. We embraced being a fully remote company to tap into the diversity and talent found globally.

Our hiring process is core to building our team, where we believe we make a significant difference in the candidate experience. We accomplish this by nailing the basics: maintaining a clear process, with clear expectations, transparency about progress, encouraging questions, and following up as fast as we can. This approach is not only respectful to candidates but also ensures top talent remains engaged throughout the hiring journey.

We believe culture will evolve as our diverse team grows, but we stay true to our company values. We assess candidates against them and have a separate Values Interview to ensure they understand and are excited about the behaviours and mindsets we care about most. This enthusiasm translates into engaged employees who help strengthen our values.

There is an open, inclusive, collaborative mindset with minimal ego. The team feels safe expressing concerns, gets help when they need it, and is empowered to make decisions to achieve business goals. This ensures we perform to our maximum potential. This team culture is not a manufactured directive from leadership, but a natural result of our thoughtful and values-driven hiring practices.

What was the hardest challenge for you in managing a fully remote team?

Next to having access to top talent, another reason to be remote is that it allows us to create a more inclusive and flexible work environment where team members can thrive in their professional and personal lives.

It is not up to us to determine where and how they live. However, we believe in-person interaction is crucial for a successful remote culture. Balancing remote work and in-person interaction has been challenging. We've implemented several initiatives to strike this balance effectively.

We have a bi-annual company retreat, where we bring together our whole team. The last time was in Lisbon with 80 TheyDoers, an incredibly energising but also exhausting week. In addition, we sponsor team meetups if they’d like to work on a hard problem together. Part of our team recently built solutions to two of the most critical projects for this year during a 2-day hackathon in Vilnius.

A game-changer for us is using Gather. It is a virtual office that looks like a 90s video game, but our team loves it. We use it for all our internal meetings, and it is great to have those unexpected encounters when you stumble upon someone in the hallway.

Being a fully remote company is not a cost-saving strategy, but we strongly believe in the benefits it provides for our team members' well-being, work-life harmony, and ability to do their best work from wherever they thrive.

Who would you hire - a person with strong hard skills but lack of emotional intelligence or a person with high emotional intelligence but without a 100% position match? and why?

I once fell into the trap myself and hired someone with all the hard skills we’d ever need, but was difficult to work with. I would never make that same mistake again. Someone who aligns with our values trumps someone with an edge on hard skills.

Although I assess hard skills indirectly and our talent team knows how to source for these, my scorecard as hiring manager is focused on other areas. I look for two things: do they have a bias to action, and are they great communicators? Both are critical in a fast-paced remote environment.

Of course, we still have a technical interview afterwards, but many engineers have already proven to easily adapt to our coding style and stack without any prior experience simply because they have the right drive and mindset.

How do you see the future of work? What skills should we start developing to stay relevant in the job market?

I don’t believe AI will replace us anytime soon, but it will be a massive leverage for our team. In our company, we have set up an AI Committee responsible for driving the adoption of AI, surfacing and implementing opportunities across the company. They actively encourage our team to experiment, and we sponsor any initiative they come up with that allows them to disrupt their own workflow.

This mindset of self-disruption will be critical for everyone in the workforce. As has been often said since the advent of ChatGPT, “you will not be replaced by AI, you will be replaced by someone using AI”.

What books/podcasts will you recommend for tech leaders who are managing fully remote team?

The book that most people in our team have read is Smart Brevity written by the team of Axios. It is about concise and effective communication, which is crucial in a remote culture.

One of my favourite resources right now is John Cutler's musings [disclaimer: he is an angel investor] [https://cutlefish.substack.com/ ]. This is not specifically on remote culture but highly inspiring about cross-functional product development.