“78% of remote employees globally are willing to take a pay cut to continue working from home”
We recently caught up with the awesome Arnaud Devigne, Co-Founder of Jobgether, about the rapid rise of Workplace Flexibility, the concept of Freemote and how flexibility is quickly becoming the biggest currency in the job market .
Arnaud, thanks for joining us! Can you give us a brief intro to you, your role and your background.
I am a Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Jobgether with 25 years of experience in Tech and Digital. started my career as a strategy consultant with Accenture and Capgemini Consulting Telecom & Media. After having managed the marketing of the classifieds activities of SoLocal, I joined Google France in 2009 to develop the marketing team before devoting myself, as CEO, to the launch of marketplaces for Rocket Internet/Jumia in Africa. In 2016, I joined Indeed as General Manager France where I established the brand and made the job search engine the leader in the French market.
Convinced of the need for tech players to contribute to the development of the economy, I have initiated several #tech4good digital awareness programs for the general public, students, and businesses, in partnership with public authorities and giants of tech such as Google, and Facebook. In 2019, I contributed to the Min. of Economy and Finance, to define the “talent” initiatives from which French Tech players benefit today before co-founding HRTech Jobgether.
If someone has not heard of jobgether, what is the platform and how does it work?
Jobgether was “born and raised” during Covid times based on the strong belief that the future of work will be flexible and remote.
We are the first global search engine to give access to all remote and flexible jobs at the global level. We help talents from all over the world find a job aligned with their lifestyle.
For us, flexibility can be split into 3 dimensions: I decide where (location), when (days/hours) and how (type of contract/relationship with an employer) to work. These flex criteria are reflected in our product - search filters, job descriptions and “flex score” that provide talents with the ability to evaluate a company and job offers and instantly decide whether these opportunities manage their expectations and aspirations.
We decided to build Jobgether to address 2 major difficulties that talents face when searching for a remote job:
Lack of a single place to search across all jobs available globally: most job boards and search engines mix traditional and flexible jobs and are not designed to get access to jobs that can be performed from anywhere. Remote specialists only cover a small percentage of the offers available. None is truly global.
Lack of transparency and details on flexibility conditions: remote…but full remote or hybrid? Flexible hours…really? Can I be a slasher? Can I work only 4 days/week? Can I be a freelancer?
Our product addresses these pain points by giving talents access to all flexible/remote jobs worldwide in 1 click through a simple search engine and providing all the details they need to find the one that is fully aligned with their lifestyle. To do so, we aggregate all flexible job offers and moderate and enrich them to make them meaningful for talents. One of the key exclusive features we offer is the “flex score” that we dynamically calculate for every job and company and reflects how flexible they are based on more than 30 criteria.
Jobgether was “born and raised” during Covid times based on the strong belief that the future of work will be flexible and remote.
We are the first global search engine to give access to all remote and flexible jobs at the global level. We help talents from all over the world find a job aligned with their lifestyle.
Talk to us about the term 'freemote'
We believe Freemote - a word we invented - will be a major trend in the coming years.
It relies on the following assumptions regarding the Future of Work
We are moving towards a flexible and highly customized contract
It is our conviction that the employment contract based on the dual model “open-ended contract vs short term contract” will gradually disappear to make way for more flexible and modular contracts, giving more freedom and less subordination to the employer (or even eliminating them altogether). Many contracts will no longer be linked to a function within a company, but to a specific project or assignment which, of course, can be long-term and endlessly extendable/renewable. More and more companies are organized and structured in project mode. The advantage of this model is that it brings a lot of extra freedom and reduces control from the company.
2. We will work shorter hours
35 hours/week, 5 weeks of holidays/year... the concept of "metro...work...sleep" 5 days a week will also be progressively abandoned by many to give way to a more flexible mode with variable hours according to the missions, longer holiday periods. In short, we will work less and when we feel we are the most productive. Hourly income will increase but the total number of hours worked will decrease. Offices will reinvent themselves
The Covid-19 crisis has accelerated the twilight of business centers (like La Défense). This tells us a lot about what the future will look like, at least for executives and "white collar workers": no more fixed offices, we will work from home, from a "flex-office", a meeting room rented by the hour, a café, a residence in the countryside... The concept "I leave home at 7 am to find myself in an hour and a half of traffic (and the same on the way back)" is over! It is no longer inevitable that we all have to be in the same workplace to be productive.
3. Fewer managers...
The concept of the boss, who gives orders and instructions, is less and less adapted to today's jobs. Automation has made it possible to delegate the most repetitive and time-consuming tasks to algorithms. Creativity is one of the most sought-after skills today (even in the more operational functions). Indeed, we are now asked to do what a machine or a computer cannot do. We are therefore increasingly independent, working on specific missions, with precise objectives. 80% of yesterday's jobs will no longer exist tomorrow, these new jobs being created no longer require (or almost no) supervision. The role of the boss will be reinvented! There will be fewer "Managers", and more "Doers" and group leaders!
Is flexible working starting to rival salary as an offering to attract top talent?
The demand for flexibility is undeniable and the data from numerous surveys speaks for itself. 78% of remote employees globally are willing to take a pay cut to continue working from home.
The recent Future Forum survey shows that:
80% of all knowledge workers now want flexibility in where they work, including a majority (53%) of fully in-office workers.
94% of employees want flexibility in when they work, a continuing trend from Future Forum’s previous quarterly survey. However, 57% of employees say they have little to no ability to adjust their hours from a preset schedule.
55% of employees surveyed are open to looking for a new job in the next year. But among those who say they are dissatisfied with their level of flexibility, 70% will look for a new opportunity.
However, forward-thinking companies or businesses that were remote from day 1 and are value-driven realized much faster than the rest that it’s not about where your employees work from, but it’s more about empowering and inspiring people to work where they feel the most effective based on the work activities they have to perform and ensuring they are rewarded in accordance to their contribution to the business.
It’s counterintuitive and inequitable to offer different salaries for remote workers and those who are working from the office. You will never attract top talent if you trade pay cuts for more flexibility. Top talents tend to work for businesses that empower rather than restrict, and for employers that care for the happiness, productivity, effectiveness, and loyalty of their people. And here both - flexibility and paychecks play important roles.
By moving to a flexi-first approach will businesses become more attractive to potential hires?
For employers to attract and retain the talent it’s no longer enough to have endless coffee, cookies, and ping-pong tables.
These days, the top priorities for talents when choosing a job are flexibility, work-life balance, compensation and benefits, culture, and colleagues. The Great Reshuffle is proof, showcasing record numbers of employees leaving their jobs, and persuading employers to better align their cultures to what employees want today.
According to Global Talents Report by LinkedIn, employees’ happy workplace is the one they choose. They tend to be 2.6x happier and 2.1x more likely to recommend working for the company.
Flexibility doesn’t mean working one or two days from home, employers need to move away from the concept of 9-5 working from the office because 80% of employees want flexibility in WHERE they work and 94% want flexibility in WHEN they work.
Thus, the answer to your questions is yes. And we have already seen a spike in the job descriptions offering attractive incentives and flex conditions. Companies understand that being flexible will enhance the employer's brand, make them more attractive to potential candidates, increase the adaptability and productivity of the company, and help them to differentiate from their competitors.
For example, Traffic to the AirBnb careers site spiked to nearly 88,500 visits on April 29, the day after the company announced a liberal “work from anywhere policy,” compared with under 25,000 daily visits a few days before. For the month of May, traffic to careers.airbnb.com was up 162.5% year over year to nearly 860,500.
What are the initial steps a business will need to take if they want to offer remote/flexi roles?
It seems certain to us that there will be no turning back to the old order. Remote & flex work is already the new normal. Because it represents a central competitiveness issue for companies today, it is essential to encourage the transition to remote working and to vacate the doubts that keep arising within companies.
For us, the essential steps for companies when switching to remote & flexible mode could be:
1.Develop a culture of freedom empowerment
Old-world surveillance practices are to be banished. On the contrary, you have to trust a priori, give clear objectives and let employees achieve them in the way that suits them, and not compensate for the lack of daily control by setting up time-consuming reports.
2.Embrace complete flexibility with working time and schedules
This means both accepting the personal constraints of workplace hybridization and adopting an “unlimited holidays” policy.
3.Invest massively in team onboarding
In remote, writing becomes essential and the essential documents intended for the onboarding of newcomers must be accessible in 1 click.
At the same time, a mentoring system must be put in place. Finally, and this is the most important, physical immersion in a team must be organized the first month following recruitment.
The method, which has proven its effectiveness, was inaugurated in the 1990s by American consulting firms, such as Andersen Consulting, which took the habit of sending newcomers to their St Charles University in Chicago for 3 weeks. For the youngest, and inexperienced, this is a particularly important step.
4.Use the communication tools that suit your business the best
Keep it simple: avoid the Christmas tree effect with 20 pieces of software needed to accomplish everyday tasks. Conversely, a single collaborative work tool will be more beneficial. As an example, it could be Google chat or Slack... but not both.
5.Prioritize asynchronous work
Avoid useless, unprepared meetings, as are “slide-beauty contests”. Internally, only the content and ideas matter, not the packaging. You should also define a default communication language and stick to it. For obvious reasons, English is preferred, with some exceptions. In remote work, the written record plays an essential role. It is also a bulwark against the “culture” of chatter, which is particularly tempting in a fully remote model.
Flexibility goes with diversity. Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Have any industries/verticals been early adopters of this approach?
Historically, IT, finance, and healthcare were the early adopters of the remote. Such companies as GitLab, and Zapier were present on the market for a long time and are operating on a fully remote setup without physical offices.
In the finance sector, accounting, bookkeeping payroll advisory, and financial analysts are roles that have been performed remotely for many years. And the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) reported that 14 million finance professionals worked remotely, in 2018.
In healthcare many clinical and non-clinical roles, such as occupational therapy, sports physiotherapy, and administrative recordkeeping have been performed remotely. With the steady growth of virtual healthcare, it’s likely that doctor-patient relationships will take place in a distributed working environment.
As Jobgether is AI based, how to check that the jobs your listing are genuine flexi opportunities, as we see a high number of organisations essentially using the terms remote or flexi as clickbait
The flexibility in 3 dimensions (where, when, and how) is reflected in our Flex score that we calculate for each job and company.
We manually check each company and their job offers to make sure they correspond with the remote and flex criteria so that when talents come to our platform - they see exactly what they were chasing.
Additionally, job seekers can use flexibility criteria to find the exact job offers they want to go with. For example, if you’re a single mother and need a part-time job or freelance - just tick the corresponding box, if you’re a digital nomad - there is such a filter for you, want unlimited holidays - choose this criterion from the list.
We also have Top flex companies filter to provide talents with access to the best employers that carry the same mindset and values, making the right match between company and employee much higher.
We love the company 'flex score' element of the platform, how does that work?
Each job offer on our platform has a flex score that is calculated based on the flexible criteria the company has - flexible work locations (WFH, anywhere in the world, co-working places around the globe or in certain locations), flex working days/hours, type of contract, extra holidays, child care assistance, paid time to work on the side project/volunteering, long remote or 4-day week, different perks for employees, etc. We combine 30 criteria to obtain the final flex score.
In that way, talents have full transparency and do not have to wait until the interview with HR to ask about those conditions but can make a decision right away if this employer is the one (s)he wants to work with.
If you can give one piece of advice to a business thinking about moving to a remote/flexi model, what would it be?
Flexibility goes with diversity. Don’t be rigid, trying to make everyone fit into the same pattern. Your talents have different expectations and lifestyle. Your flex policy should allow each one of them to shape the way they want to work so they are productive and fulfilled.
What's next for jobgether?
Our short term goal is to grow our capability to aggregate at scale all flex jobs available globally. It’s hard work and no one has done it before but we know that this is what our talents want.
