Teammate Apart Podcast

Hey there and welcome to the season 3 finale of the Teammate Apart Podcast. I just want to quickly thank everyone who participated in the show this season, both guests, and listeners who have been willing to share the good work we’re doing here with their friends, families, professional networks, and hopefully anyone who could benefit from the perspectives and knowledge shared by our contributors. Hot off the heels of COVID, I think this show, and others like it, and the individuals who have joined us here to share their great wealths of knowledge have done a real service to a world experiencing drastic change, and I am thrilled to add the voice of today’s guest to the soapbox from which we’ve been shouting.

Today’s special guest is the incredible John Riordan. John is the director of support at Shopify, chairman at Grow Remote, and a figure with a well-documented history of making impactful contributions to the world of remote work.

John’s prior employers are a veritable whose-who of progressive companies with whom he has been wildly influential in their integration of remote work strategies. From US Airways to Virgin Atlantic, to Apple, and now Shopify his experience as a results-oriented international customer service leader has proven invaluable in showing how remote work works at scale.


John joins us today for a much needed — and much anticipated — conversation about intentionality and how it can make or break a company’s approach to remote work, developing a culture of trust on distributed teams, how the role of remote-team leaders have evolved, rapidly in recent years, and so much more, please join me in welcoming to the show, John Riordan.

Hey there, and welcome back to the Teammate Apart Podcast. This week’s special guest is Head of Business Development at Doist and host of the About Abroad podcast, Chase Warrington.

After calling a half-a-dozen countries “home”, Chase, an American ex-pat now living in Spain, is well-known for his passion for making location independence the new norm — and helping others step into a life beyond their borders. He is a major contributor to nearly every major remote-centric publication, podcast, and blog, and can often be seen collaborating with some of the most prominent companies in the remote work space.


Joining us today for a discussion about the role remote leaders play in protecting the mental health of their teams, how distributed team members can set themselves up for success when working from home — or anywhere — now and as we move beyond the pandemic, making a case for remote as the world “returns to the office,” and so much more, please welcome to the show, Chase Warrington.

Hey there and welcome back to the Teammate Apart Podcast. Today’s special guest is Daphnée Laforest. Daphnée is a Distributed Workplace Consultant and host of the Remote First Podcast, who is on a mission to help executives, people ops, and team leaders drive company-wide shifts toward remote-first ways of working.

In more than 10 years of working with fully distributed companies, she has a long history of playing key roles in establishing scalable workflows for growth, facilitating business decisions remotely, and building internal products dedicated to supporting remote-first teams. Daphnée believes that understanding that the way we work plays an essential role in creating successful, distributed-by-design, workplaces and is a key element in creating memorable employee experiences.

For an exciting conversation about how we can most effectively support our teams in their return to the office, in a hybrid-way; improving employee wellbeing through flexibility, empowerment, and trust; asynchronous and transparent communication; and how we can coach and educate our teams to be better facilitators, please join me in welcoming to the show, our guest, Daphnée Laforest.

Hey there and welcome back to the Teammate Apart Podcast. Today, I’m thrilled to have to join my special guest Tony Jamous. Tony is a software entrepreneur and investor, and presently the CEO at Oyster, a mission-driven HR company that makes it easy for companies to hire, make locally compliant payroll, and offer great benefits to their full-time employees around the world. They accomplish this via their distributed talent enablement platform that allows growing companies to tap into the global talent pool and offer their distributed teams worldwide a great employment experience.

We have a lot of ground to cover so let's dive right in, joining the show to discuss the myriad of issues involved when trying to hire across borders, the right way, insights and trends that remote companies and leaders should be aware of, what it means to really build a purpose-driven company, and making it possible for people in developing parts of the world to engage with global economies, please join me in welcoming to the show, the incredible, Tony Jamous.

Hey there, and welcome back to the Teammate Apart Podcast. Today’s special guest is Molood Ceccarelli. Molood is the founder of Remote Forever, a consultancy that officially challenges the premise of collocation as a prerequisite to agility. Her company teaches geographically distributed teams how to work and communicate more effectively using Agile thinking and design methodology. In addition to her work as a remote work pioneer, for more than a decade, she has been working as a developer, strategist, agile coach, international keynote speaker, and host of the wildly popular Remote Forever Summit which has seen more than 10,000 people in attendance. She has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, and The Huffington Post.

Joining us today for a conversation on how remote teams can work better together by employing agile methodologies, the challenges of mastering great communication on distributed teams, the state of remote work as she sees it, and what the future has in store for remote teams as the pandemic subsides, please join me in welcoming to the show Molood Ceccarelli.

Hey there and welcome back to the Teammate Apart podcast. Today’s guests are Microsoft master trainers, international keynote speakers, and training and education consultants Alberto and Mario Herraéz — AKA the eTwinz.

Mario and Alberto were born in Salamanca, Spain arriving in America as student educators in a Spanish language immersion program in Syracuse, Utah. A suburb of Salt Lake City. Shortly after completing their internship, both returned home to finish their education and just one year later returned to Utah as full-time teachers in the same program.

Taking advantage of all America had to offer, the twins continued their education, mastering the implementation of technology in education. Along the way, they picked up numerous awards and accolades and have since become master trainers and partners with Microsoft and numerous others, which has allowed them the ability to offer their students a 21st-century education on the bleeding edge of technology.

This mastery of technology in communication has led to numerous keynotes and workshops where the eTwinz have adapted their teaching techniques to train corporate clients around the world how to leverage technology and communication skills to thrive in the future of work. Joining us today to speak about digital transformation, developing “future-ready” skills, leveraging technology in remote training, and the power of global communication please join me in welcoming to the show, Alberto and Mario Herraéz.

Welcome back to the Teammate Apart Podcast. Today’s special guest is Hassan Ghiassi. Hassan is an entrepreneur, TEDx speaker, consultant, master dialog facilitator, and founder of Aristotle’s Cafe. Coming from an American-Iranian background, from a young age Hassan was always fascinated by cross-cultural communication taking a deep interest in how different cultures and people communicated.

That passion led him to develop a communication framework and host community discussions that would bring people together and allow them to make meaningful conversation. Since then he’s made major waves and immeasurable impact having facilitated more than 1,000 discussions himself, speaking with thousands of people the world over about some of life’s most important subjects. Additionally, he’s trained a small army of more than 300 facilitators worldwide to share this framework and facilitate discussions that matter.

Along the way, Hassan has been given the opportunity to hone his skills in diversity & inclusion, digital marketing, organizational culture, and so much more now bringing that combined expertise to his facilitated discussions, and to the board rooms of those he consults. Joining us here for what will surely be a podcast that matters to discuss his perspective on empathy, trust, and leadership communication on remote teams please join me in welcoming to the show, Hassan Ghiassi.

Welcome back to the Teammate Apart podcast. Today’s special guest is thought leader, storyteller, and CEO at Radious, Amina Moreau.

Amina is an athlete, entrepreneur and challenge seeker who has established a number of companies with a couple of successful exits in her wake. Her latest venture, Radious, is a work from home office solution for remote workers on the go looking for a place to work whenever or wherever they are. Think airBNB for Work from Home.

More than a successful business leader, Amina is also a master communicator who believes in the tool of storytelling as an integral part of remote team leadership. After all, people make decisions from the heart — not from bulleted lists or powerpoint slides.

Here to discuss the role of storytelling in remote leadership specifically, but in communication at large, the importance of strong communication when leading a team, also how we might commit to a safe and reasonable return to the office — or not, please join me in welcoming to the show the amazing, Amina Moreau.

Welcome back to the Teammate Apart podcast. Todays special guest is Kaleem Clarkson. Kaleem is a husband, father, remote work advocate, people operations professional, and speaker. He is the Chief Operating Officer of Blend Me, Inc a remote employee experience consultancy that helps startups and small businesses onboard, engage and retain their remote teams. Further, he is the founder of Remotely One, a members-only community for remote work professionals which is fighting to end remote work isolation by connecting with other location-independent professionals.

With more than 20 years of people ops and event planning experience, Kaleem has become a well-known personality in the remote work space. In addition to his routine appearances on the pages of well-known publications — from Harvard Business Review to Forbes — his various podcast interviews, and keynotes, he hosts a popular weekly program, Remote Work Wednesdays, on the new Clubhouse App featuring some of the best and brightest in remote work discussing a topic of the day.

Here to chat about the importance of trust and how to foster it on remote teams, how to build meaningful and sustainable relationships when working virtually, and how to use both of those things to build a diverse and inclusive company culture, please join me in welcoming to the show, our guest, Kaleem Clarkson.

Today’s special guest is author, speaker, and CEO at PeopleG2, Chris Dyer. PeopleG2 is a fully distributed company of more than 30 people — and 3,000 independent contractors — focused on pre-employment screening helping clients find better employees. On the heels of his book, The Power of Company Culture: How any business can build a culture that improves productivity, performance and profits, Chris established his authority in the remote work space becoming a sought after public speaker and keynote, coaching top companies on how to develop company culture on remote teams. His new book, Remote Work: Redesign Processes, Practices and Strategies to Engage a Remote Workforce arrives in the summer of 2021 and continues to serve Chris’s mission to teach others to how to build great remote company cultures.

Here for an insightful conversation about the different types of remote work — including the latest on work from home and hybrid teams — the keys to building an amazing company culture, and to discuss the so-called rush back to the office post-COVID, please join me in welcoming to the show, the incredible, Chris Dyer.