The State Of Work

This week we’re joined by freelancer Sandra Redlich, a copywriter, marketing consultant, and translator based in Melbourne, Australia. Originally from Berlin, Germany, Sandra relocated abroad to Australia just before the start of the global pandemic. She chats to Maddie about the joys and challenges of freelancing and what it’s like to relocate your freelance business abroad, as well as tips for creating routines, avoiding burnout, handling difficult clients, and celebrating successes.

with Francesco Carbone, Chief Operating Officer at Kenjo. 

Joining Maddie on The State Of Work is Francesco Carbone, Chief Operating Officer of Kenjo, a SaaS company that specialises in digitising and automating HR processes for small and medium size companies. Kenjo’s main objective is to automate HR administrative tasks, which allows HR people to really focus on growing and nurturing the professional and personal development of their employees.

Maddie and Francesco discuss the importance of measuring employee engagement, what employers can do and are doing to create a positive company culture, employee-driven team building events and how Kenjo is using technology to facilitate these processes across Europe and Latin America.

with Sebastian Gellwitzki, Head of Partnership Management and Production Hub at simpleshow.

Welcome back to Success Stories, our new regular feature on The State Of Work. Maddie chats to individuals and their experiences about working in a remote or distributed team. This week we’re joined by Sebastian Gellwitzki, Head of Global Partner Management & Production Hub, simpleshow. Sebastian joins Maddie for a discussion about how simpleshow are using Lano to manage their globally distributed team of creative freelancers and how the Lano tool supports them with project management, invoicing and payments in multiple currencies and onboarding their global team of talent.

with John Lee, Co-Founder of the Work From Anywhere team.

We've seen companies advertise ‘work from anywhere’ as part of their recruitment marketing campaigns. And as potential employees, it’s an incredibly appealing perk. But many workers and independent contractors are simply unaware of the impact it has on their taxes when it comes to where they reside, do their work, what their nationality is, and complications of double taxation laws.

On this episode we meet Irishman John Lee, co-founder of Work From Anywhere. He joins Maddie on The State Of Work to discuss the implications and obligations of everyone’s favourite topic… tax! In his research when starting Work From Anywhere, tax often came up as the number one pain point for employees and employers and so they developed a tool to help remote workers to facilitate their tax risk and provide them access to a global marketplace of tax advisers.

Maddie and John discuss the many risks involved with tax, from digital nomads, business travellers, and of course, remote workers. The good news is that with planning, strategy, awareness and the right risk-assessment tools in place, remote workers are becoming more aware of their tax obligations as they navigate this changing world of work. Join Maddie and John for an enlightening discussion about the complexities of “working from anywhere”

with Halley Bennett, Head of Marketing at Lano. 

Introducing Success Stories, our new regular feature on The State Of Work. Maddie will be chatting to individuals and their experiences about working in a remote or distributed team. This week we’re joined by Halley Bennett, Head of Marketing at Lano.

"It has changed my life tremendously to be able to work from the location that is well suited to the lifestyle that I want to have, but also helps me be a more productive and successful member of a team."

with Stefan Palios, writer and entrepreneur. 

The pandemic changed the way businesses, companies, and other organizations view remote workers, particularly freelancers. When COVID-19 arrived, freelancers were seemingly ahead of the curve, all set up to work from home. Typically entrepreneurial and used to uncertainty, many freelancers are now seen as an integral part of business expansion, including both a long and short term growth strategy.

In this episode of The State Of Work, Maddie is joined by Canadian freelancer and remote work advocate Stefan Palios. As an experienced writer and coach, Stefan joins us on The State Of Work to share his best business practices when it comes to hiring, onboarding and working with freelancers and independent contractors.

As an experienced freelancer, Stefan believes that the best relationships between businesses and freelancers are a partnership, with each stakeholder playing their key role. He draws on his experience of successes (and failures!) to coach other freelancers on sales strategies, the value they can offer their clients and how to navigate this new business economy.

With Shensi Ding and Gil Feig, co-founders of Merge.

At their weekly catchups, friends Shensi Ding and Gil Teig discovered they were facing similar integration problems across their respective industries. Combining their various expertise, they joined forces in 2020 to found Merge, a developer-friendly integrations platform that utilizes one API to integrate with all HR, payroll, recruitment, and accounting platforms.

B2B businesses can partner with the Merge API to offer a full category of integrations to their customers, allowing Merge to handle the full integrations lifecycle - from an easy initial build, to hand-held end-user onboarding, to fully managed maintenance.

Joining Maddie on The State Of Work to discuss their founder journey and how API integrations are helping their customers with their HRIS, ATS and accounting integrations, we welcome co-founders Shensi Ding and Gil Teig.

The State Of Work is brought to you by Lano. Lano makes it easy to build and manage your global team.

with Sarel Tal, VP EMEA at Rapyd.

The rise of remote work has created significant market development in the global payments industry. Companies and individuals are looking for efficient payment solutions that span multiple jurisdictions and currencies, and that can also be deployed at scale.

Founded in 2016, Rapyd is the world’s largest local payments network and is on a mission to “power frictionless global commerce”. Most recently, the API-based Fintech-as-a-Service platform raised $300 million in funding, after quadrupling their revenue in 2020. Raypd’s accelerated growth has expedited payments and created global opportunities for businesses to enter new markets. They serve a current client base that includes over 5000 businesses including eCommerce, tech companies and marketplaces.

The State Of Work welcomes Rapyd’s VP of EMEA Sarel Tal to the podcast. Maddie and Sarel chat about global payroll trends, the technology behind Rapyd and why commercial and financial interactions have grown exponentially as a result of COVID-19.

with Bhagyashree Pancholy, lawyer and remote work compliance consultant.

Maddie and Bhagyashree take a deep dive into what is and what isn’t remote work (and why words matter), as well as the broader compliance risks businesses face when building and managing remote teams.

The State Of Work is brought to you by Lano. Lano makes it easy to hire and pay employees and contractors in over 150 countries in compliance with local laws and in over 50 currencies.

With Johnny Quach from Hostelworld.

Product management requires a unique combination of strategy, technology, design and the ability to find opportunities that will create impact—a crucial role that drives the success of modern companies.

In 2020, the global travel industry was hit heavily by COVID-19. Legacy travel booking company Hostelworld saw this disruption as an opportunity and used the time to get to work, mobilising their remote offices and teams in order to accelerate all the things they wanted to improve about their OTA product, an immense effort which resulted in one of their most productive years to date.

At Hostelworld, Chief Product Officer Johnny Quch leads a distributed team of over 150 people and chats with Maddie on The State Of Work about the importance of distributed team alignment, why strategy is so crucial for product managers, and how his multitude of external hobbies inspire growth and iteration across the board.