Global employee engagement remains stubbornly low. In 2024, only 23% of employees worldwide were engaged, and Gallup estimates the cost of low engagement at $8.9 trillion—about 9% of global GDP. Loneliness and stress are elevated, and fully remote workers report higher loneliness than onsite peers—putting sustained pressure on culture, well-being, and performance.
A Counterintuitive Case
In a recent staff survey distributed to all employees at Birches Group LLC, employees were asked what they valued most about working for the company, and the most cited value was workplace culture. This might sound predictable, but Birches Group is a remote-first organization. Across global operations spanning North America, Oceania, Asia, and Europe, there are no large office spaces, and staff meet only for deliberate scheduled activities once a quarter—possibly less.
Culture is a set of shared beliefs and values that shape patterns of behavior. In remote and hybrid work settings, the core question for HR and business leaders is: Can we deliberately design the conditions that enable people to do their best work across locations and time zones?
Creating an enabling environment is a core responsibility of the organization, regardless of how work is delivered. Through policies and practices that promote clarity, responsiveness, and growth, staff are enabled to contribute meaningfully to the mission of the organization.
An Enabling Environment Encompasses:
Clarity: Work conditions that focus on explicit outcomes, standards, and decisions
Connection: A commitment to growth through collaboration with employees
Capability: A commitment to deliver internal services
The Birches Group Model
Birches Group’s work focuses on purpose over process, and this philosophy shapes how work is delivered. It translates to a set of enabling practices and work features that broadly facilitate and support performance.
Clarity, Trust, and Autonomy
At Birches Group, there are no fixed shifts, no attendance checks, and no paperwork to file for what was done for the day. Staff set their schedules based on clear, agreed-upon outputs. Leaders invest time to clarify deliverables and standards. Whether staff join as experienced employees or fresh out of college, they are given autonomy to deliver work without handholding or unnecessary control.
Birches Group has consistently delivered on its commitments, with business units completing the vast majority of their planned deliverables. Year after year, performance results highlight staff’s individual achievements and business units’ completed goals.
This model shifts energy from compliance to ownership and is especially effective for remote work.
Deliberate Engagement
Corporate engagement is sustained through deliberate in-person activities, such as training and targeted alignment sessions, designed to tackle complex problems that benefit from live interaction.
For two hours each day, the team maintains core hours when staff should be available online to respond to questions or ask for support. These core hours facilitate communication and reduce the lag inherent in asynchronous work schedules.
While HR continues to facilitate group activities to bring staff together, employees are also empowered to form interest groups or social clubs. These groups—such as food, fitness, parenting, and gaming—allow staff to engage around shared interests outside of work. This builds a stronger sense of belonging and engagement.
Service-Oriented and Digitally Enabled Services
Frictionless internal services are a key component of an efficient employee experience and free up capacity for higher-value work.
Birches Group focuses its tools and platforms on simple solutions that facilitate work. This includes a knowledge base where employees can access shared information and HR services that are enabled online. HR staff continues to be available for consultation and support on nuanced cases. Birches Group continues to build its tools in response to evolving needs and technologies.
These deliberate practices have resulted in shared norms at Birches Group, such as respect for deadlines, a commitment to surfacing issues early, a bias for clarity and responsiveness, and respect for one another’s time.
The Bottom Line
When employers invest in deliberate practices that enable work—clarity of outcomes, autonomy with guardrails, psychological safety, and a strong digital backbone—employees feel empowered to do their best work.
Birches Group’s experience shows that culture is a system of choices that enables people to do great work—together— wherever they are.
What if one of the most important sources of information about an organization’s effectiveness is one that leaders measure the least?
Most organizations track financial performance, operational milestones, and program metrics, but few systematically measure the experience of the workforce tasked to deliver these results. Consequently, many leaders may not fully understand how internal practices such as communication, recognition, and role clarity impact employees’ ability to perform their jobs effectively.
Forward-looking organizations such as the Millennium Challenge Account (MCA) in Mongolia have decided to address this challenge and offer a compelling example of how a structured approach for measuring the experience of the workforce and using the insights from the analysis can strengthen organizational effectiveness.
MCA in Mongolia is responsible for implementing the Mongolia Water Compact under the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). This compact represents a major investment in Mongolia’s water sector and was designed to expand the long-term water supply to the capital city of Ulaanbaatar. It includes the development of groundwater wellfields, advanced water treatment infrastructure, wastewater recycling systems, and institutional reforms to strengthen water resource management.
The complexity of this initiative, plus the fixed implementation period (five years), requires the coordinated effort of specialists across many disciplines. Recognizing this reality, the leadership of MCA-Mongolia viewed the organization’s work environment as an important part of performance. It sought to understand how employees experience the workplace and identify conditions that support collaboration and those that hinder progress.
A Data-Driven Approach
The decision to conduct workforce surveys is consistent with MCC’s broader philosophy of data-driven decision-making. Across its global portfolio, MCC relies on empirical evidence to select beneficiary countries, assess program viability, and monitor impact. Applying the same rigor and discipline to organizational management is a natural extension of this philosophy. From 2020 to 2024, MCA-Mongolia partnered with Birches Group to conduct an annual Workforce Climate Survey designed to systematically measure employees’ perceptions of the MCA work environment. A longitudinal approach was adopted (i.e., repeating the survey each year) to measure trends and changes over time. Each survey yielded a diagnostic snapshot of the current climate and enabled management to assess whether interventions implemented in the previous years were producing measurable improvements. Over time, the results created a clear picture of the MCA’s improving internal dynamics as reflected by the increasing percentage of positive responses over the years.
While the numbers were encouraging, the real value came from the insights that the survey exercises generated. Birches Group designed the survey to focus on four dimensions that contribute to the employee experience:
Job Clarity
Rewards and Recognition
Operational Effectiveness
Leadership and Team Cohesion
A total of 18 statements were used to measure these dimensions. A fifth variable, Overall Employment Experience, was measured with five statements designed to capture and quantify employees’ levels of motivation, morale, and pride in the MCA. Employees were asked to evaluate each statement using a four-point scale ranging from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree,” and responses were coded as “favorable” or “unfavorable.” This allowed for the calculation of statement scores, representing the percentage of respondents who expressed a favorable view on each issue. These statement scores were aggregated into factor scores, providing an overview of how employees perceived each major dimension of the organizational climate.
Moving Beyond Low and High Scores
One of the most powerful features of the approach was the use of driver analysis to identify which workplace issues had the strongest impact on overall employee experience. Instead of focusing solely on the lowest-scoring items, this analysis examines the relationship between each statement and Overall Employment Experience. This technique works by looking at the respondents who reported high Overall Employment Experience and identifying which statements or items they are more positive on than other respondents. Conversely, it looks up the respondents who reported low Overall Employment Experience and identifies which statements or items they are more negative on than other respondents. Combining the information generates the top drivers—the items that will likely have the most impact on Overall Employment Experience.
Quadrant
What It Means
Key Weaknesses (top-left, orange)
High impact on experience but rated poorly. Fix these first.
Key Strengths (top-right, teal)
High impact and rated well. Protect and communicate with these.
Non-critical Weaknesses (bottom-left, yellow)
Rated poorly but low impact. Lower priority.
Non-critical Strengths (bottom-right, yellow)
Rated well but low impact. Nice to have.
Context Matters
Quantitative analysis is powerful, but numbers alone cannot fully capture the complexity of the employment experience. To complement the quantitative data, open-ended questions allowed employees to provide additional context about their ratings. The comments were then categorized into thematic areas and sentiments (i.e., positive or negative), providing another layer of insights to help explain the observations from the quantitative data. For example, while most respondents indicated overall satisfaction with compensation, some comments expressed the need for skills-based pay differentiation.
Building Trust Through Confidentiality and Inclusion
At the core, any successful workforce survey or any employee listening initiative is based on employees’ trust in the process. All surveys were designed and conducted with strong safeguards to protect confidentiality—including the use of an external platform and personal emails to collect responses, data aggregation, and presentation rules that protect the identities of respondents. Moreover, the questions were translated into Mongolian to ensure that employees across the organization could participate. These measures contributed to a 100% participation rate, which not only strengthened the reliability of the data but also signals the employees’ confidence in the integrity and value of the exercise.
Listening as a Strategy
Some of the most valuable data an organization can collect comes not from financial systems or project dashboards, but from the people doing the work. This experience of MCA in Mongolia highlights the strategic value of understanding one’s workforce. By combining rigorous survey design, careful data analysis, and commitment to acting on findings, organizations can build work environments that drive organizational performance.
by Gary McGillicuddy, Birches Group Managing Partner
In the 1980s, a movie was produced, Quest for Fire. The movie tried to depict the conditions in which early humans lived some 80,000 years ago. Needless to say, it was not a pleasant existence that was presented. Humans lived in pre-language tribal communities. On all sides, they were beset by challenges and outright dangers from the environment, wild animals, and of course, fellow man.
The formation of tribal communities was simply borne of necessity. Survival hinged on collective activities to gather the necessary provisions and to stave off the dangers that surrounded them. The level of knowledge to engage more effectively with their surroundings, as depicted in the movie, was quite limited. Core to the plot was the need to get fire. For early humans, fire was a gift from the Gods, generated by violent storms. There was no understanding of how fire was made; all that mattered was the uses to which fire could be put, and how devastating it could be to lose this vital heavenly resource.
In the movie, due to an oversight in vigilance, the tribe’s fire was accidentally extinguished in a rainstorm. It was decided that the two stronger men would go on a quest, a Quest for Fire. Hoping to possibly steal fire from another tribe, the men proceeded to cross territory utterly unfamiliar with unknown dangers. Wild animals stalked them, the elements harassed them, and they were under constant threat from the very people from whom they were hoping to steal.
Survival against these conditions entirely depended on teamwork, the pooling of observations leading to the progressive building of knowledge. In their quest, yes, the challenges of survival were largely dependent upon strength and luck. However, along the way, the movie shows us what separates man from the rest of the beasts in the field. We are not solely reliant on instinct; we can observe, adapt, and learn. In the quest for fire, the initial goal was to steal it from another tribe since, of course, you cannot recreate a gift from the gods. But can you? Stealth and observation give the opportunity.
Humanity is driven, or as some have thought, condemned to an endless quest for knowledge and all that brings. We are not content with seeking a harmonious life in the natural world.
Finding the Spark
In the quest of this team, it came down not to stealing but learning. With a little friction and dried wood, you could create a spark; the rest follows from that moment. This success in the quest, of course, was not just the knowledge to create and harness fire; it was the power this knowledge brought. Humanity is driven, or as some have thought, condemned to an endless quest for knowledge and all that it brings. We are not content with seeking a harmonious life in the natural world. Since our expulsion from the Garden of Eden because we ate from the tree of knowledge, we have no choice but to pursue knowledge. Fundamental to sustaining our frail existence, we need to use our brain power to control the world around us through understanding this world and how we fit in. Beyond addressing individual challenges to our existence, this has led to a deeper introspection as to our purpose and what that means for the communities in which we live. From St. Augustine, who asserted our purpose must be to build the City of God (De cogitate Dei contra paganos), following the sack of Rome in the fifth century, initially, the adoption of Christianity had weakened the empire by turning away from Rome’s traditional gods. St. Augustine argued that the sacking of Rome was the result of a focus on material wealth. He set forth that the focus of society must be to build the City of God as opposed to the City of Man.
Thomas More, in his work Utopia, articulates a view of society that rests on a collective view and supports a world built on the rule of law, as what today would be an early socialist model, where private property does not exist. Utopia reflects 16th-century humanist thought, also linked to ancient views of society by Plato. Here, humans set the rules and can shape society to their goals. In Utopia, the pursuit of leisure and pleasure is a central tenet of society.
Putting the Models in Place
Whether with a spiritual or humanistic focus, it is about how to shape and advance community. From our two travelers seeking fire, this was for the well-being of their camp. This long story of how and why we try to grow our knowledge, regardless of its objectives, is pursued from a collectivist perspective. The structures advanced by St. Augustine and Thomas More were used to guide several examples of new communities. Most notably, such movements were pursued seriously in the 19th century in America.
Two good examples are the Shaker movement and the Oneida experiment. While both had a strong religious foundation, the communities that they established were quite different. The Shakers espoused a simple lifestyle that focused on practical utility and communal responsibility. Men and women lived separately and strictly practiced celibacy. The model was very successful, and dozens of Shaker communities sprang up across the United States. The basis of the Shaker economy came under threat through advances in technology and manufacturing, following the Civil War, when their highly refined handmade approaches could no longer compete. Communities began to dissolve, and with a decision to no longer admit members, the rule on celibacy made the disappearance of the Shaker movement a certainty.
Conversely, the Oneida experiment, which began in 1848, promoted a different communal model. In their effort to create “heaven on earth,” they promoted open and shared relationships. They practiced “complex marriage,” where all members were married to each other. The Oneida community continued for thirty-two years, and while many sought to join the community, social pressures on the morality of the community ultimately led to its breakup.
Unlike the Shakers, the Oneida Community was successful in a number of industries. Most notably, as silversmiths, the Oneida business exists to this day. They were successful in transitioning both socially and business-wise to continue their economic success. Interestingly, in both the Shaker movement and the Oneida experiment, women worked in much more equal positions with men, reflecting the shared philosophy of communities of shared responsibility.
Finding the Secret of Success
Both the Shakers and the Oneida community initially built successful economic models based on the idea of communal ownership. Both St. Augustine and Thomas More envisaged societies organized around communal ownership. Oneida went on to greater success by recognizing that enduring success needed adaptation and accepting the self-interest of its members to accumulate wealth. What the Shakers and early Oneida members did not embrace, and what our initial two questers for fire learned, is that knowledge not only brings possibly wealth, but also power.
Yuval Harari, in his recent book, Nexus, examines the evolution of information networks from the Stone Age to the present. He effectively argues that the growth of information does not support a linear evolution of knowledge, which builds and deepens understanding and the building of shared consensus. Belief systems are paired with information and support the desire to act. While the Shakers and the Oneida community were quite successful in their work, it was a strong belief system that enabled these achievements for a small community. But at the same time, these beliefs ultimately led to their failure. Harari demonstrates that mythologies that lead to the creation of bureaucracies are essential, but also possess the seeds of their own demise. Information not only informs, it challenges, and as often as not generates resistance as much as inspiration.
So how can we advance in our quest for fire? The continued massing of information is the starting point, but must be accompanied by the context of our belief systems, which both spur action while also accepting “truth” in balanced and progressive doses. Too many leads to backlash, too few leads to stagnation and progressive irrelevance.
Getting to Our World and the Role of HR
Working on development and all the topics this broad category encompasses does, in fact, rest on our mythology, leading our methodologies, which we call multilateralism. From the hard lessons of World War II, a consensus emerged that cooperation is perhaps a better way to pursue inter-state relations and may be worth trying. A great and extensive network of organizations and programs was built on the tenets of the religion of multilateralism.
This has led to a widespread adherence to these tenets, the belief that progress in the evolution of humanity can only be realized through committed, and yes, unquestioning acceptance. And yes, questioning its utility is confronted not with logical counterarguments, but declarations of heresy or worse. These challenges today have been a long time coming and do present a threat to the church of multilateralism as much as Luther did to the Catholic Church through the posting of his ninety-five theses on the door of the church in Wittenberg.
The Reformation, which sprang from Luther’s actions, yes, threatened the Church but, in the end, strengthened it. The resistance to science and knowledge gradually lessened. Recommitment to mission and basic principles as follows. This is what the church of multilateralism desperately needs today, over the clutching of our rosary, praying that all this will pass soon. Let us embrace what makes multilateralism work and the best way to address global challenges, and accept that it is a messy process that needs to be held to account much more.
Whether with a spiritual or humanistic focus, it is about how to shape and advance community.
We are Globalists
Multilateralism is by definition a global perspective. This is not only because it is nice to be global, but there are also distinct advantages that come from integrating diverse perspectives and capacities. There have been many successes that have come from taking this approach that have led to significant progress in poverty reduction, health, education, protection, and human rights. The list is long and should never be diminished in its value.
At the same time, the fundamental weakness of multilateralism, the need for consensus to support collective action, needs to be re-examined. Yes, the mythology of multilateralism led to the formation of great and now lumbering bureaucracies. Putting the international agenda in the hands of these bureaucracies has led to the inevitable lumbering responses. It has bred an industry driven by process and court protocols, and is not getting on with it.
There are possibly better models. The size of classic institutions has, at the same time, led to their failure. It is now time to look much more closely at some of the models that have performed well. Looking at the example of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, Tuberculosis, and Malaria is worth considering. The Global Fund is essentially a funding agency to pursue global priorities on these diseases. It does not maintain a network of field offices and the big bureaucracies accompanying program delivery. It seeks funding partners at the country level, best positioned to be successful at the community level. There are other examples of funding entities, such as the Gates Foundation and the Millennium Challenge Corporation, seeking effective implementation partners that can tailor the global agenda to meaningful local impact. The evolution of the United Nations Common System started with policy and technical secretariats. Over time, the system transformed into a large bureaucracy, with staff deployed to more than 600 locations across the planet. The demands to maintain working infrastructures that support such a massive reach are daunting. And of equal impact, it creates mindsets that the program goals morph into bureaucracies focused on ever greater growth. Examining performance and effectiveness becomes secondary to validating the status quo and sustaining career ladders.
From the HR perspective, what is the challenge that keeps large organizations from moving to a more flexible approach? This poses a significant threat to these approaches, which have remained largely unchanged from the 1970s. HR should bring insight into workforce formation and management essential to achieving the institutional mission, as opposed to the survival of the existing bureaucracies. In a world where multilateral programs are pursued much more with an increasingly widening network of specialized organizations seems to be the promise of improving impact and bringing value. We can see examples of these nimbler partners that combine new structural approaches with highly focused programs. In this edition of the Community Magazine, we are featuring a wonderful, small, yet very impactful organization, Amplify Girls. What makes Amplify Girls so representative of a new way to pursue a quest for fire is that they have embraced what our inevitable future is, working primarily as a virtual organization.
Where time and presence are no longer defining features of employment, it forces an organization to value skills, promote learning, and break down classic grade structures to milestones of capacity, where staff can advance as skills growth warrants.
Our Inevitable Future
Organizations, both public and private, have been moving gingerly into more forms of virtual work. The impact of the Covid pandemic was seen as a possible catalyst. However, now that the pandemic has passed, there has been a significant retrenchment in virtual work options. Most organizations take some pride in offering a thin gruel of virtual work, enabling a day or two a week to work from home. This is hardly a new working model, and effectively does not change the fundamental nature of organizational structure. It remains a model of control over facilitation and is a minimal nod to the increasing demand for workplace flexibility.
In 1995, Dave Ulrich, together with Ron Ashkenas, Todd Jick, and Steve Kerr, published The Boundaryless Organization. The book presented a challenging assessment of classic organizational structure, examining structural features from hierarchy to function and geography. While these classic divisions are deeply embedded in organizations and their culture in the modern world, this approach and its accompanying mindset will impede evolution in ways that capture new working realities.
In this updated edition, the boundaries of time and place have been added to the list of features that organizations must strive to overcome. Allowing staff to work from home two days a week is not a virtual approach. These policies perpetuate the classic limits of geography and hierarchy. Presence and input are still the defining features of how work is organized. It really is time to let go and become truly virtual, meaning anywhere, anytime.
Yes, there are factors to overcome, but most of these are traditions. When the benefits of a truly virtual organization are embraced, the advantages become overwhelming. The simple capacity to reach talent anywhere and avoid the costs and family disruption of expatriation alone merits this approach. While asynchronous work requires a sense of responsibility and understanding how your work supports the larger endeavor, an asynchronous organization essentially can be working in a much broader time footprint, expanding productivity and client support. Yes, in a virtual organization, the workday may need to stretch to engage across time zones. Early morning and evening engagement with colleagues will become the norm. The virtual environment, at the same time, promotes a greater level of accountability and responsibility for each team member. Where time and presence are no longer defining features of employment, it forces an organization to value skills, promote learning, and break down classic grade structures to milestones of capacity, where staff can advance as skills growth warrants.
To build such a world, the challenges and the need for creative thought on the part of HR have never been greater. More than a quarter of the way into the 21st century, it is high time we shed the lingering organizational models of the past. Like our two team members who crossed new territory in a quest for fire, our quest needs to bring together a global effort. Cost-effective, enabling diversity, facilitating a focus on outputs, enabling work-life balance, facilitating gender balance, enabling a focus on results and pay for performance, and capturing the generational perspective of the future of work, do we need to say more?1
HR should bring insight on workforce formation and management essential to achieving institutional mission, as opposed to the survival of the existing bureaucracies.
1 The Shakers wrote a famous hymn, It’s a Gift to be Simple. This melody formed the basis for Aaron Copland’s Appalachian Spring.
Distributed teams are now the operational norm for many organizations, with 75% of Fortune 500 companies offering permanent remote work options. But the infrastructure to support these teams has not kept pace. Communication is still fragmented across platforms, projects live in one tool while conversations happen in another, and updates get buried in email threads. Research on distributed team design points to a consistent finding: teams that have shared communication standards, clear workflows, and a centralized digital workspace outperform those that do not, regardless of talent or technology.
The challenge is not access to tools but the organizational discipline to use them consistently, build norms that travel across time zones, and treat distributed infrastructure as a leadership responsibility rather than an IT one.
Why This Matters
For organizations operating across multiple countries and time zones, this is not a technology gap; it is a governance gap. Global hiring introduces compliance, payroll, and tax complexity that require clear classification standards, consistent policy application, and, in some cases, regional legal expertise.
Beyond compliance, the organizations that are succeeding with distributed work are the ones that treat it as a deliberate operating model, not a default or an accommodation. That means investing in the structures, standards, and management practices that make distributed work sustainable and equitable for everyone on the team, regardless of location.
What You Can Do
Establish clear communication standards for your distributed teams: what tools are used for what, when synchronous communication is expected, and how decisions are documented and shared.
Audit your workforce policies for consistency across locations, including pay, benefits, performance standards, and access to development opportunities. Distributed workers should not face different standards based on where they are.
Treat onboarding as the foundation of distributed team success. New hires joining remotely need structured introduction to expectations, team norms, and communication practices that in-office employees often absorb informally.
Ensure managers have the skills, tools, and explicit authority to lead distributed teams well. Leading across locations is a distinct capability and one that organizations should invest in deliberately.
When teams are distributed, the informal signals that managers traditionally relied on in offices disappear. There are no hallway check-ins, no passive visibility into effort, and no shared daily rhythm. Research on remote performance management is clear that distributed teams succeed when performance is built on clear, consistent, and transparent job-based standards rather than proximity or presence. Yet many organizations have not made this shift.
Managers still default to activity monitoring, hours logged, and response times as proxies for contribution, which introduces both bias and inequity. For teams spread across time zones, this creates a two-tier system where those who are most visible due to geography or schedule are perceived as higher performers, regardless of actual output.
Why This Matters
When distributed teams lack clear, transparent standards for what good performance looks like, decisions about pay, promotion, and recognition default to familiarity and proximity. This is how location and schedule become informal proxies for merit, and how inequity compounds across a distributed workforce.
A job-anchored approach to performance addresses this directly: when performance standards are tied to the actual expectations of each job level rather than to personal traits or manager impression, they travel across locations, time zones, and working arrangements without losing their meaning or consistency. Organizations that build performance around what the job requires and assess it through multiple perspectives, including peers and stakeholders, create systems that are credible and fair regardless of where someone sits.
What You Can Do
Anchor performance standards to the job, not the person. Define what good performance looks like at each level in terms of the work itself: the ideas an employee is expected to generate, the collaboration and responsiveness their role requires, and the reliability of their delivery. These standards should mean the same thing whether someone is in headquarters or working remotely across a different time zone.
Move toward multi-rater assessment. In distributed settings, a manager’s line of sight is limited. Incorporating input from peers, direct reports, and internal or external stakeholders gives a fuller and more accurate picture of how someone is actually performing and reduces the bias that comes from visibility alone.
Audit whether reward and recognition decisions are aligned with performance data. If patterns emerge by location, time zone, or work arrangement, that is a signal that the system needs adjustment.
Despite high-profile return-to-office (RTO) mandates from Amazon, JPMorgan Chase, and Dell, the data tells a more measured story. Hybrid work remains the dominant model, with 67% of organizations still operating on hybrid schedules and 22% of workers remaining fully remote. For employees, flexibility has moved from a perk to a threshold requirement.
A 2025 Pew Research Center survey found that 46% of remote workers said they would be unlikely to stay with an employer who ended flexible arrangements, rising to 61% among fully remote workers. The equity costs are also measurable: a 2025 TIME analysis found that more than 212,000 women aged 20 and over left the workforce since January 2025, with RTO mandates and rising childcare costs cited as key drivers.
Why This Matters
RTO mandates are not just a culture question, they are a workforce composition and equity question. Research from MIT Sloan shows that mandates do not improve financial performance but do increase attrition, especially among high performers and those with caregiving responsibilities. For organizations operating across multiple geographies, the more pressing question is not where work happens but whether policies are consistent, fair, and clearly justified to employees regardless of location.
What You Can Do
Audit your current work location policies to assess whether they are applied consistently across roles, levels, and locations, and whether the rationale is documented and communicated.
Use employee climate surveys and pulse checks to assess how flexibility policies are experienced across different employee groups, paying attention to patterns by role, gender, caregiving responsibilities, and location. What employees say about fairness and access is as important as what the policy says on paper.
Shift the management conversation from attendance and visibility to outcomes, establishing clear, grade-specific performance standards that work regardless of where someone is sitting.
Virtual work is reshaping the world of work, whether we’re ready or not. The question is no longer if it will become the norm, but how we will adapt to it. While some still cling to the comfort of traditional office structures, the world has moved on. So must we.
Since the COVID-19 pandemic, the landscape of work has seen rapid evolution, with organizations turning to virtual work at an unprecedented scale. According to the World Economic Forum’s 2025 Future of Jobs Report, 43% of surveyed employers identified flexible working arrangements, including virtual work, as a promising business practice to increase talent availability between 2025 and 2030. Interest in cross-border virtual work is also rising, with 27% of employers citing it as a potential approach. This shift is not a temporary blip; it marks a fundamental change in how work is organized and delivered.
Yet resistance persists. Critics argue that virtual work erodes cohesion, hampers development, and obscures accountability. But these are not flaws of the model. These are challenges of implementation. The real obstacle is a 20th-century mindset that equates presence with productivity and control with leadership. Offices, as we classically understand them, are structures of control, not facilitation, and certainly not motivation.
One must ask, “What do we gain with this control, and at what cost?” Would it not be better to tackle the challenges of a virtual work environment rather than remain mired in the past? Many in 1910 likely resisted giving up their horses and were not always comfortable with that new mechanical contraption. We got over it. The office, as a physical concept, needs to be consigned to the same place we sent carbon paper, IBM Selectric typewriters, and shorthand.
The start/stop approaches taken by many firms thus far are akin to gingerly putting your foot in what you fear will be ice-cold water. Thus, we have in many organizations the emergence of the hybrid approach with some days offsite and some days on. This model, often touted as a compromise, is proving to be the worst of both worlds: costly, confusing, and unsatisfying. Organizations that fully embrace virtual work will gain a competitive edge in attracting talent, fostering innovation, and building resilience in an increasingly volatile world.
In this second edition of Community™, we explore the evolving nature of the workplace. Is a workplace still a place? Or is it a dynamic ecosystem of people, principles, and tools, untethered from geography?
We’ll examine the decline of traditional expatriate assignments, the rise of distributed teams, and the policies needed to support this new reality. We also share insights from our pilot projects that show how we impute skills and use this information to surface challenges across job evaluation, pay management, and recruitment policies.
This issue introduces a new companion to our Workforce Effectiveness framework: one focused specifically on Workplace Policies. Many of the fundamental features of a workplace related to ensuring safety, enabling creation of a team environment, empowering staff through the provision of resources and facilities, and articulating the employment compact between the employer and employee on the values and expectations within the working relationship need to be seriously addressed with new yet equally potent approaches.
At Birches Group, our largest office is in the Philippines, but our true strength lies in our ability to assemble teams that span continents—from Manila to Nevada and beyond. Virtual work gives us access to talent wherever it can be found, enabling us to connect diverse perspectives, skills, and experiences across borders. This global reach makes us more adaptable and innovative, equipping us to meet shifting client needs and navigate the evolving demands of the communities we serve.
The future of work isn’t coming. It’s already here. The only question is, will your organization be ready?
A leading healthcare organization operates with a mission to expand access to quality primary care through a combination of in-clinic, home-based, and digital services. At the core of its approach is a strong organizational philosophy: fostering a diverse and engaged workforce while creating a culture that empowers individuals to perform at their best.
Achieving this vision requires more than clinical excellence. It depends on ensuring that staff across all roles and locations are skilled, motivated, and fairly recognized for their contributions.
What’s the challenge?
As part of a broader effort to strengthen talent management practices, the organization partnered with Birches Group to implement a comprehensive HR transformation program. A central element of this initiative was the introduction of a Skills Assessment framework based on Birches Group’s Community™ Skills methodology.
Historically, compensation progression had been driven by tenure or performance indicators such as annual reviews. While useful, these approaches did not fully capture how employees were developing the capabilities required for their roles.
The organization sought to transition to a more forward-looking model—one that directly links pay progression to measurable growth in skills. This required adapting the framework to operational realities and equipping HR teams and managers with the tools and confidence to apply it effectively in practice.
What’s the solution?
Birches Group designed and delivered a structured, hands-on training program to support the rollout of the Skills Assessment framework. The approach emphasized practical application and alignment with real organizational decisions on pay and talent development.
The training introduced the core philosophy that compensation progression should reflect capability growth rather than time in role or short-term performance metrics. Participants were guided through five stages of skills progression—Basic, Proficient, Skilled, Advanced, and Expert—each aligned with job-level expectations. This ensured consistency with existing job evaluation structures and created an integrated talent management system.
To support adoption, the program incorporated real-life scenarios and role-specific examples, enabling managers to understand how skill development manifests across different functions. Interactive exercises allowed participants to assess employees, compare results, and calibrate evaluations to ensure consistency.
A key component of the training focused on strengthening the role of managers as coaches. Participants learned how to use assessment outcomes to identify skill gaps, define targeted development goals, and create structured learning plans aligned with both role requirements and organizational priorities.
What’s the outcome?
Following implementation, the organization has completed multiple cycles of skills assessments using the Community™ framework. Early results indicate a shift toward more transparent and consistent decision-making in pay adjustments, grounded in observable capability growth.
This has strengthened trust between employees and leadership by reinforcing perceptions of fairness and objectivity. At the same time, aggregated assessment data has provided valuable insights into workforce capabilities, helping identify strengths, gaps, and areas for targeted investment in learning and development.
The approach also enhances the organization’s ability to compete for talent by clearly demonstrating a link between skill development and career progression. This positions it as an employer that values and rewards real growth, an important differentiator in competitive labor markets.
What’s the takeaway?
A skills-based approach to talent management is more than a technical solution—it is a catalyst for cultural change. By equipping managers to assess and develop capabilities objectively, organizations create a reinforcing cycle where growth is recognized, motivation increases, and performance improves.
This experience highlights the value of integrating compensation, capability development, and workforce planning into a unified framework. With ongoing support from Birches Group, the system continues to evolve, ensuring its relevance and effectiveness over time.
In an environment where skills are increasingly central to organizational success, investing in the ability of managers to assess and develop talent is key to building transparent, equitable, and high-performing workplaces.
A global agricultural research network is composed of multiple independent centers employing thousands of staff across dozens of countries. Many of these centers have operated for decades and maintain significant autonomy over their administrative policies and structures. As a result, employment conditions, principles, and practices can vary considerably across entities and locations.
At the system level, a central coordinating office provides a forum for policy alignment and collaboration. While its mandate has traditionally focused on research coordination, its role has increasingly expanded to include administrative harmonization. To support its evolving function, the office has begun deploying staff beyond its headquarters location into a range of international settings.
What’s the challenge?
In the absence of a unified framework for defining employment conditions across locations, and with individual entities following varied approaches, the central office lacked a clear model to guide its own workforce deployment.
Key questions emerged: how to ensure fair and competitive purchasing power across locations, how to account for difficult working conditions, and to what extent employment conditions should differ from those at headquarters. Establishing a consistent and credible approach was essential to support expansion while maintaining internal coherence.
What’s the solution?
International employment systems typically follow established models. One common approach is the “home/host” model, where employment conditions are anchored in the home country with limited adjustments for temporary assignments abroad. However, this approach is less suitable for organizations with long-term, multi-location international deployment.
In such cases, a more globally integrated model is required—one that establishes market-relevant employment conditions independent of an individual’s country of origin while fostering internal equity and cohesion.
Once a market position is defined, the primary consideration becomes how to adjust for differences between locations. While many factors can vary, the most significant is cost of living. Measuring and applying cost-of-living differences is complex, and organizations take different approaches—some make no adjustments, while others aim to maintain purchasing power parity across locations.
In this case, the central office adopted an established international benchmark by aligning its approach with a widely recognized multilateral system. Using post-adjustment indices, it introduced a structured method to ensure purchasing power consistency across duty stations. Given that headquarters is located in a relatively high-cost environment, this resulted in downward adjustments in base salary levels for many locations.
This approach provided a transparent and pragmatic solution, balancing fairness with responsible resource management. It also allowed for targeted adjustments in locations where cost differentials exceeded defined thresholds.
What’s the outcome?
The introduction of a clear and structured framework has enabled the central office to deploy staff internationally with confidence and consistency. By anchoring its approach in a recognized global standard, it has strengthened both the credibility and sustainability of its employment model.
Transparency has been a critical factor in this process, particularly in managing expectations around variable pay adjustments. The framework not only supports current deployment needs but also serves as a reference point for broader system alignment across the network’s independent entities.
What’s the takeaway?
In global workforce management, transparency and credibility are essential—especially when compensation varies by location. Anchoring policies in established and widely understood frameworks simplifies implementation, supports acceptance, and builds trust among stakeholders.
For organizations navigating similar challenges, leveraging recognized international models can provide both clarity and legitimacy, particularly when engaging with partners and funding communities.
A regional intergovernmental organization works to support countries and territories in protecting their environment and promoting sustainable development. As part of its long-term vision, it aims to become an employer of choice within its region—one that attracts global talent, fosters an inclusive and empowering culture, and enables staff to contribute meaningfully to community impact.
Achieving this vision requires more than technical expertise. It depends on creating a work environment where employees, contractors, and volunteers feel safe, supported, and valued. A healthy and secure workplace is not only a moral imperative but also a critical driver of organizational performance. When individuals feel protected, they are better able to focus, collaborate, and deliver on the organization’s mission.
What’s the challenge?
The organization operates across a geographically dispersed and diverse region, with personnel based in headquarters, field offices, and remote locations. Each setting presents distinct health, safety, and security risks—from natural hazards to operational risks associated with fieldwork.
While policies existed, they had been developed over time and lacked a unified, integrated framework. This created challenges in ensuring consistency, clarity of roles, and effective implementation across all locations. Without a cohesive system, there was a risk of gaps in accountability, uneven application of standards, and missed opportunities to proactively manage risks.
What’s the solution?
The organization engaged Birches Group to design a comprehensive Occupational Health, Safety, Security, Environment, and Wellbeing (OHSSE) Management System tailored to its international and multicultural workforce.
The process began with a detailed review of existing policies, procedures, and regulatory requirements across all operating locations. This assessment identified compliance obligations, highlighted inconsistencies, and pinpointed areas for improvement.
To ensure the system was practical and context-specific, Birches Group facilitated consultations with leadership and staff representatives. These discussions explored how policies could be effectively implemented across different environments, including headquarters, field operations, and mission travel.
The resulting framework provides clear and actionable guidance aligned with international standards. It defines core principles, establishes roles and responsibilities, and introduces structured processes for hazard identification and risk mitigation. It also incorporates communication, training, and capacity-building measures, along with mechanisms for ongoing monitoring, evaluation, and continuous improvement.
What’s the outcome?
With the new system in place, the organization now benefits from a unified and coherent framework for managing health, safety, and well-being across all its operations. Staff are better equipped to integrate safe practices into their daily work, while leadership can demonstrate a clear commitment to workforce well-being.
The system enhances the organization’s ability to anticipate and respond to risks, contributing to a safer and more resilient work environment. It also strengthens its reputation as a responsible and values-driven employer, supporting efforts to attract and retain skilled talent. Over time, these improvements contribute to higher morale, reduced incidents, and stronger organizational performance.
What’s the takeaway?
This experience underscores a broader lesson for international organizations: health, safety, and well-being are fundamental to mission success. An integrated OHSSE framework does more than reduce risk—it builds trust, reinforces organizational culture, and protects the people who drive impact.
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