The Office of the (Near) Future: Remote-First Work
Surprised by your employees’ productivity working from home? You may be considering how you can capitalize on the transition that’s already occurring and accelerate the shift to a remote-first work environment. However, before you do, there are some critical lessons that you can learn from businesses already working in a virtual environment.
Reimagining the office
As human beings, it is difficult to think about the future without viewing it as an incremental improvement over the present. In today’s virtual environment, most organizations are attempting to recreate everything that was happening in an office environment and do it online. This is a common mistake that happens all the time – but it’s not actually the most effective way to transition.
In addition, many employers have invested significant sums of money in corporate campuses to improve collaboration. As companies have invested more in keeping people engaged at the office – leaders are left wondering how to walk away from these major investments and what takes their place.
So, how do you transition to a remote-first environment?
1. Reimagine don’t recreate: List out the assumptions you have about in-person work and provoke each one of them, reimagine what those tasks and activities might look like in a virtual work environment.
For example, many assume that: “if we become remote-first, we’ll never see each other again.” If in-person interaction is critical for your company culture and productivity, repurpose the office environment as a co-working space for employees to collaborate with each other when they need it. This opens opportunities to use smaller spaces that are closer to concentrations of employees, for example a co-working space in the city and an option for those in the suburbs – shifting away from a more traditional corporate campus.
In the COVID-19 environment, this requires some thoughtful consideration on what types of interaction need to occur in person and which interactions can happen over the phone or video chat, but there is no need for absolutes. Provide your team with options to meet in person if they prefer and can do it safely.
What does this look like in practice? A great example to look at is Automattic - a distributed digital publishing company (think WordPress and Tumblr) with over 1200 employees spread across 77 countries and 93 different languages. While a fully remote organization, the company still values in-person interaction, which helps them to maintain their culture – they have simply flipped the standard ratio (mostly in-person and infrequently remote) to mostly remote and infrequently in-person.
2. Lead the change: If leaders are still in the office, the rest of the company will aim to come into the office – if you want to be remote-first, leaders must commit to being remote themselves.
Face time with senior leaders is often considered an important rite of passage for corporate cultures, and the more time a leader spends communicating with you the better chance you have of being noticed for a promotion or a high-impact project.
In a remote-first organization, leaders can create a level playing field for a distributed workforce that rewards outcomes and not the person who is the first one in, last one out, or sends emails at all times of the day.
In shifting to remote-first, your leadership team must model the way they want employees to act. This means the leaders must also go remote and build new communication habits in their organization to allow for asynchronous collaboration and updates.
We are going fully remote first at Quora. Most of our employees have opted not to return to the office post-COVID, I will not work out of the office, our leadership teams will not be located in the office, and all policies will orient around remote work. (1/2)
— Adam D'Angelo (@adamdangelo) June 25, 2020
3. Flip the ratio of in-person to virtual interactions: In-person interactions don’t go away in a remote-first world, they are more targeted and thoughtful. Provide stipends to employees for team meetings, one-on-ones, and other interactions and set guidelines on when in-person interactions should happen and when they are not needed.
People are surprised when I say this, but I think in-person is really key. And so we just flip it, so instead of saying you have to be around your colleagues 48 weeks of the year and do whatever you want for a month, we say be wherever you want for 48 weeks out of the year and for three or four weeks a year we’re going to bring you together.
- Matt Mullenweg Automattic CEO
Remote-first companies need to set clear expectations and guidelines for when teams should come together (in a co-working space, coffee shop, or elsewhere) and limit those interactions to ones that add more value being together in-person than virtually – flipping the old co-location ratio as Automattic has done.COVID-19 has challenged common biases of where work can be done most productively, and you’ll find that teams (equipped with the right tools and resources at home) can be surprisingly productive without being co-located.
And who says you can’t have office perks while at home? It can be as simple as repurposing the money invested in your latte machine to provide a stipend for a green screen, dual monitors, microphones, and a high-quality web camera (and maybe an UberEATS subscription for some snacks when desired).
4. Create a new rhythm of communication: Asynchronous communication involves a new communication rhythm — repurposing emails/check-ins and other meetings and creating new norms for how information is communicated and how others can contribute to building on ideas from other parts of the company.
Leaders should consider building a new asynchronous rhythm of doing business. Instead of emails and calls (which in a distributed workforce are tough to schedule across time zones) – consider a blogging system like what Automattic uses called P2s to document progress on projects.
P2s are posts written every day by employees to summarize what they have been working on, the problems that they might have encountered, and the discussions they had that day. If you think about the purpose of in-person meetings, whether face-to-face or on Zoom, this is typically what people are doing – unearthing hidden information from the organization to see what folks are working on, reach group decisions and find ways to collaborate.
By documenting what is happening on P2s, it has become a cultural norm at Automattic for all employees to read P2s and uncover what is happening around the company. This communication method creates a transparent organization without FOMO (fear of missing out) when not included in a meeting or copied on an email chain. Using an internal search index, you can look up P2s and follow certain topics (like Google Reader) to stay informed on progress.
5. Honor what made your culture great while continuing to grow: Continue to honor what makes your culture great, remote-first doesn’t mean you have to lose it – it offers new opportunities to build your culture and invite more talent into your organization that you previously may not have had access to.
If you ask any leader what makes their organizational culture great, you will likely get a range of responses from company to company. Some companies value a strong safety and compliance culture that enables them to reduce risk in their work environment, while others value an entrepreneurial environment where they are afforded creativity to take on challenges. Employees on Glassdoor rarely say that office perks make a company great – it’s about the people, work environment, and opportunities provided.
Those same positive attributes can be reimagined (not recreated) in a remote-first environment. It can be as simple as creating space on employees' calendars for “making time.” Making (or Maker’s time) is a concept created by Paul Graham, founder of Y Combinator, which advocates for blocking a large portion of each day for individuals to do focused project work without fear of interruption or task-switching – for example blocking each morning until 12:30 PM for individual work.
By reducing the need for emails and check-in calls, it creates more dedicated work time for employees to creatively solve challenges and is a great example of reimaging the virtual workplace vs. recreating interactions we typically had in person when located next to each other.
To encourage comradery, you can promote small team or one-on-one interactions amongst employees by providing gift cards for lunch or coffee so employees located near each other can meet and network. Another option is for leaders to participate in targeted, fun interactions across the company – for example, virtual trivia nights, a virtual scavenger hunt, or hosting a “bring your kids to work” on a company or department-wide Zoom call. Anything to create a positive environment representative of your company culture.
Remote-first work allows organizations to honor and celebrate what made their office cultures great and re-invest time and resources to continue improving on that culture forward in a distributed work environment where you have access to more talent outside of your city.
So, what’s next?
The current work environment offers both challenges and opportunities. Shifting to a remote-first permanently can make sense for organizations moving forward that have seen the benefits of this shift but doing so doesn’t need to be a daunting challenge. By learning from organizations who have been doing this and doing it well for years, your organization can meet the challenge of the future, while preserving your culture, accessing new talent and reimagining your work environment to unlock productivity.
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High-performing teaming
Work today is too complex for individuals to succeed in isolation. Almost every critical decision, innovation, or transformation depends on teams working effectively together. Leaders rely on their teams to deliver results. Teams, in turn, rely on their leaders to create the conditions where performance is possible. This exchange, what leaders need from their teams, and what teams need from their leaders, sits at the heart of what we call teaming.
When teaming is strong, leaders get what they need from their teams [creativity, resilience, execution] and teams get what they need from leaders [direction, support, and the conditions to thrive]. It’s how strategy becomes action, how uncertainty becomes opportunity, and how businesses stay competitive in a fast-changing world.
Team meetings: A missed lever for performance?
Meetings are a universal ritual in organizational life. While managers on average spend more than half their working hours in meetings, many leaders can’t shake the feeling that meetings are falling short of their potential. Are they advancing the work, or quietly draining energy?At BTS, we study teams not as collections of individuals, but as living systems. This perspective reveals dynamics that traditional methods often overlook. Rather than aggregating individual 360° assessments, we assess the team as a whole to examine how the team functions collectively. Applying that lens to one of the most common team activities (meetings) uncovers patterns worth paying attention to.Drawing on thousands of team assessments in our database, we focused on two meeting behaviors:
- Do teams meet regularly?
- Do team members leave meetings with clear accountabilities and next steps?
Our question: How strongly do these behaviors relate to overall team effectiveness?
What the data revealed
Using data from 1,043 respondents (team members and informed stakeholders) we ran a Bayesian analysis to evaluate the predictive power of each behavior.The results were striking:
- Both behaviors were linked to higher team effectiveness.
- But one mattered far more: leaving meetings with clear accountabilities and next steps was 3.9x more predictive of team effectiveness than simply meeting regularly.
- And teams that often or always wrap up meetings with next steps rated 0.66 points higher on a 5-point scale of team effectiveness than teams who sometimes, rarely, or never close with accountabilities - that's almost a full standard deviation higher (0.96 sd)
Meetings aren’t the problem, muddy outcomes are.
Teams often default to frequency, setting cadences of check-ins or standing meetings. Our data suggest that what differentiates effective teams from the rest is not how many meetings they hold, but what comes out of them. A team that meets less often but ends each session with clear accountabilities will outperform a team that meets frequently but leaves outcomes ambiguous. In other words, meetings aren’t inherently wasted time; they become wasted time when they don’t translate into aligned action.
A simple shift that pays dividends
The good news: improving meetings doesn’t require radical redesign. Small changes reinforce accountability and dramatically increase the value extracted:
- Close with clarity. Reserve the last 5–10 minutes of every meeting to confirm: What decisions have been made? Who owns what? By when? This habit shifts meetings from “discussions” to “decisions.”
- Make commitments visible. Use a shared action log, team board, or project tracker so next steps are transparent, and progress is easy to follow. Visibility builds accountability.
- Assign a “Closer.” Rotating this role signals that closing well is everyone’s responsibility. The Closer ensures the team doesn’t drift into vague agreements, but leaves aligned and ready to act.
When teams adopt these habits, the difference is tangible: less rehashing of the same topics, faster progress on priorities, and a stronger sense of shared ownership. These small shifts compound quickly, making meetings not just more efficient, but more energizing and effective.In a world where teams face relentless demands and limited time, focusing on how meetings end may be one of the fastest ways to improve how teams perform.
How to avoid the AI fizzle
In the 1990s, Business Process Reengineering (BPR) was the Big Bet. Companies launched tightly controlled pilot programs with hand-picked teams, custom software, and executive backing. The results dazzled on paper.
But when it came time to scale? Reality hit. People weren’t ready. Systems didn’t connect. Budgets dried up. The pilot became a cautionary tale, not a blueprint.
We’ve seen this before with Lean, Agile, even digital transformations. Now it’s happening again with AI, only this time, the stakes are different. Because we’re not just implementing a new solution, we’re building into a future that’s unfolding. Technology is evolving faster than most organizations can learn, govern, or adapt right now. That uncertainty doesn’t make transformation impossible, but it does make it easier to get wrong.
And the dysfunction is already showing up, just in two very different forms.
Two roads to the same cliff
Today, we see organizations falling into two extremes. Most companies are either overdoing the control or letting AI run wild.
Road 1: The free-for-all
Everyone’s experimenting. Product teams are building bots, prompting, using copilots. Finance is trying automated reporting. HR has a feedback chatbot in the works. Some experiments are exciting. Most are disconnected. There's no shared vision, no scaling pathway, and no learning across the enterprise. It’s innovation by coincidence.
Road 2: The forced march
Leadership declares an AI strategy. Use cases are approved centrally. Governance is tight. Risk is managed. But the result? An impressive PowerPoint, a sanctioned use case, and very little broad adoption. Innovation is constrained before it ever reaches the front lines.
Two very different environments. Same outcome: localized wins, system-wide inertia.
The real problem: Building for optics, not for scale
Whether you’re over-governing or under-coordinating, the root issue is the same: designing efforts that look good but aren’t built to scale.
Here’s the common pattern:
- A team builds something clever.
- It works in their context.
- Others try to adopt it.
- It doesn’t stick.
- Momentum dies. Energy scatters. Or worse, compliance says no.
Sound familiar?
It’s not that the ideas are flawed. It’s that they’re built in isolation with no plan for others to adopt, adapt, or scale them. There’s no mechanism for transfer, no feedback loops for iteration, and no connection to how people actually work across the organization.
So, what starts as a promising AI breakthrough (a smart bot, a helpful copilot, a detailed series of prompts, a slick automation) quietly runs out of road. It works for one team or solves one problem, but without a handoff or playbook, there’s no way for others to plug in. The system stays the same, and the promise of momentum fades, lost in the gap between what’s possible and what’s repeatable.
We’ve seen this before
These aren’t new problems. From BPR to Agile, we’ve learned (and re-learned) that:
- Experiments are not strategies. Experiments show potential, not readiness for adoption. Without a plan to scale, they become isolated wins; interesting, but not transformative.
- Culture is the operating system. If the beliefs, behaviors, and incentives underneath aren’t aligned, the system breaks, no matter how advanced the tools.
- Managers matter. Without their ownership and support, change stalls.
- Behavior beats code. Tools don’t transform companies. People do.
Design thinking promised to bridge this gap with user-driven iteration and empathy. But in practice? Most efforts skip the hard parts. We tinker, test, and move on, without ever building the conditions for adoption.
AI and the new architecture of work
Many organizations treat AI like an add-on—as if it’s something to bolt onto existing systems to boost efficiency. But AI isn’t just a project or a tool; it changes the rules of how decisions are made, how value is created, and what roles even exist. It’s an inflection point that forces companies to rethink how work gets done.
Companies making real progress aren’t just chasing use cases. They’re rethinking how their organizations operate, end to end. They’re asking:
- Have we prepared people to reimagine how they work with AI, not just how to use it?
- Are we redesigning workflows, decision rights, and interactions—not just layering new tech onto old routines?
- Do we know what success looks like when it’s scaled and sustained, not just when it dazzles?
If the answer is no, whether you’re too loose or too locked down, you’re not ready.
The mindset shift AI demands
AI isn’t just a tech rollout. It’s a mindset shift that asks leaders to reimagine how value gets created, how teams operate, and how people grow. But that reimagination isn’t about the tools. The tools will change—rapidly. It starts with new assumptions, new stances, and a new internal leader compass.
Here are three essential mindset shifts every leader must make, not just to keep up with AI but to stay relevant in a world being reshaped by it:
1. From automation to amplification
Old mindset: AI automates tasks and cuts costs.
New mindset: AI expands and amplifies human potential, enhancing our ability to think strategically, learn rapidly, and act boldly. The question isn’t what AI can do instead of us, but what it can do through us—helping people make better decisions, move faster, and focus on higher-value work.
2. From efficiency to reimagination
Old mindset: How can we use AI to make current processes more efficient?
New mindset: What would this process look like if we started from zero with AI as our co-creator, not a bolt-on?
3. From implementation to opportunity building
Old mindset: Roll out the tool. Train everybody. Check the box.
New mindset: AI fluency is a core human capability that creates new realms of curiosity, sophistication in judgment, and opportunity thinking. Soon, AI won’t be a one-time training. It will be part of how we define leadership, collaboration, and value creation.
From sparkles to scale
In most organizations, the spark isn’t the problem. Good ideas are everywhere. What’s missing is the ability to translate those isolated wins into something durable, repeatable, and enterprise-wide.
Too many pilots are built to impress, not to endure. They dazzle in one corner of the business but aren’t designed for others to adopt, adapt, or sustain. The result? Innovation that stays stuck in the lab—or dies.
Designing for scale means thinking beyond the “what” to the “how”:
- How will this spread?
- What behaviors and systems need to change?
- Can this live in our whole world, not just my sandbox?
It’s not about chasing the next use case. It’s about setting up the conditions that allow innovation to take root, grow, and multiply, without starting from scratch every time.
Here’s how to make that shift:
1. Test in the wild, not just in the lab
Skip the polished demo. Put your solution in the hands of real users, in real conditions, with all the friction that comes with it. Use messy data. Invite resistance. That’s where the insights live, and where scale begins. If it only works in ideal settings, it doesn’t work.
2. Mobilize managers
Executives sponsor. Front lines experiment. But it’s team leaders who connect and spread. Equip them as translators and expediters, not blockers. Every leader is a change leader.
3. Hardwire behaviors, not just tools
The biggest unlock in AI is not the model—it’s the muscle. Invest in shared language, habits, and peer learning that support new ways of working. Focus on developing behaviors that scale, such as:
- Change readiness: the ability to spot opportunity, turn obstacles into possibilities, and help teams pivot.
- Coaching: getting the best out of your AI “co-workers” just like human ones.
- Critical thinking: applying human judgment where it matters most—context, nuance, and ethics.
4. Align to a future-state vision
To scale beyond one-off wins, people need a shared sense of where they’re headed. A clear future-state vision acts as an enduring focus, allowing everyone to innovate in concert. That alignment doesn’t stifle innovation. It multiplies it, turning a thousand disconnected pilots into a coherent transformation.
5. Track adoption, not just “wins”
Don’t mistake a shiny, clever prompt for progress. A great experiment means nothing if it can’t be repeated by many people. From day one, design with scale in mind: Can this be adopted elsewhere? What would need to change for it to work across teams, roles, or regions? Build for transfer, not just applause.
The real opportunity
AI will not fail because the tech wasn’t good enough. It will fail because we mistook experiments for solutions, or because we governed innovation into paralysis.
You don’t need more control. You don’t need more chaos. You need design for scale, not just scale in hindsight.
Let’s stop chasing sparkles. Let’s build systems that spread.
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From top-down to judgment all around: The AI imperative for organizations
Each business revolution has reshaped not only how businesses operate, but how they organize themselves and empower their people. From the industrial age to the information era, and now into the age of artificial intelligence, technology has always brought with it a reconfiguration of authority, capability, and judgment.
In the 19th century, industrialization centralized work and knowledge. The factory system required hierarchical structures where strategy, information, and decision-making were concentrated at the top. Managers at the apex made tradeoffs for the greater good of the enterprise because they were the only ones with access to the full picture.
Then came the information economy. With it came the distribution of information and a need for more agile, team-based structures. Cross-functional collaboration and customer proximity became competitive necessities. Organizations flattened, experimented with matrix models, and pushed decision-making closer to where problems were being solved. What had once been the purview of a select few, judgment, strategic tradeoffs, and insight became expected competencies for managers and team leads across the enterprise.
Now, AI is changing the game again. But this time, it’s not just about access to data. It’s about access to intelligence.
Generative AI democratizes access not only to information, but to intelligent output. That shifts the burden for humans from producing insights to evaluating them. Judgment, which was long the domain of a few executives, must now become a baseline competency for the many across the organization.
But here’s the paradox: while AI extends our capacity for intelligence, discernment, the human ability to weigh context, values, and consequence, is still best left in the hands of human leaders. As organizations begin to automate early-career work, they may inadvertently erase the very pathways and opportunities by which judgment was built.
Why judgment matters more than ever
Deloitte’s 2023 Human Capital Trends survey found that 85% of leaders believe independent decision-making is more important than ever, but only 26% say they’re ready to support it. That shortfall threatens to neutralize the very productivity gains AI promises.
If employees can’t question, challenge, or contextualize AI’s output, then intelligent tools become dangerous shortcuts. The organization stalls, not from a lack of answers, but from a lack of sense-making.
What organizations must do
To stay competitive, organizations must shift from simply adopting AI to designing AI-aware ways of working:
- Build new learning paths for judgment development. As AI replaces easily systematized tasks, companies must replace lost learning experiences with mentorship, simulations, and intentional development planning.
- Design workflows that require human input. Treat AI as a co-pilot, not an autopilot. Embed review checkpoints and tradeoff discussions. Just as innovation processes have stage gates, so should AI analyses.
- Make judgment measurable. Assess and develop decision-making under ambiguity from entry-level roles onward. Research shows the best learning strategy for this is high-fidelity simulations.
- Start earlier. Leadership development must begin far earlier in career paths, because judgment, not just knowledge, is the new differentiator.
What’s emerging is not just a flatter hierarchy, but a more distributed sense of judgment responsibility. To thrive, organizations must prepare their people not to outthink AI, but to out-judge it.
BTS acquires Nexo to strengthen its position in Brazil and Latin America
P R E S S R E L E A S E
Stockholm, May 5, 2025
STOCKHOLM, SWEDEN – BTS Group AB (publ), a leading global consultancy specializing in strategy execution, change, and people development, has agreed to acquire Nexo Pesquisa e Consultoria Ltda., Nexo, a boutique consulting firm headquartered in São Paulo, Brazil.
Nexo has been growing continuously since it was founded in 2017. With revenues of approximately 12 million Brazilian Reales (approx. 2.1 million USD) in 2024, and a highly capable team of 21 members, Nexo has built a strong reputation for delivering transformative projects in strategy, innovation, leadership, and culture.
Nexo collaborates with a great portfolio of clients across sectors such as financial services, consumer goods, and technology, assisting both local and global companies in navigating uncertainty, unlocking creativity, and activating strategy through people. Their work encompasses culture transformation, leadership development, employer value proposition, innovation culture, and vision alignment – supported by proprietary methodologies and frameworks.
BTS currently operates in Brazil servicing both local and multinational clients with a team of 13 employees. By acquiring Nexo, BTS not only increases the Group’s footprint in Brazil but also adds significant capabilities in culture and transformation services. Nexo’s client base has limited overlap with BTS, creating strong growth potential and synergy opportunities.
“Nexo is known for helping leaders and organizations tackle some of the most complex, human-centered challenges with creativity, empathy, and strategic clarity and the Nexo team is loved by their clients,” says Philios Andreou, Deputy CEO of BTS Group and President of the Other Markets Unit. “Their products and services complement and elevate our existing offerings, especially in culture transformation, and we are thrilled to welcome the Nexo team to BTS.”
“We’re excited to join BTS. We’ve long admired BTS’s approach and unique portfolio to support large organizations and leaders in connecting strategy with culture across the organization,” says Andreas Auerbach, co founder of Nexo. “Becoming part of BTS, allows us to scale our impact and bring more value to our clients while staying true to our values and culture,” adds Mariana Lage Andrade, co-founder of Nexo.
Upon completion of the transaction, Nexo’s business and organization will merge with BTS Brazil. Nexo’s founders will assume senior management roles in the joint operation.
The acquisition includes a limited initial cash consideration. Additional purchase price considerations will be paid between 2026 and 2028, provided Nexo meets specific performance targets. A limited portion of any such additional purchase price considerations will be paid in newly issued BTS shares. The transaction is effective immediately.
BTS’s acquisition strategy continues to focus on broadening our service portfolio, expanding our geographic reach, and enhancing our capabilities to support future organic growth in a fragmented market.
For more information, please contact:
Philios Andreou
Deputy CEO
BTS Group AB
philios.andreou@bts.com
Michael Wallin
Head of investor relations
BTS Group AB
michael.wallin@bts.com
+46-8-587 070 02
+46-708-78 80 19
High-performing teaming
Work today is too complex for individuals to succeed in isolation. Almost every critical decision, innovation, or transformation depends on teams working effectively together. Leaders rely on their teams to deliver results. Teams, in turn, rely on their leaders to create the conditions where performance is possible. This exchange, what leaders need from their teams, and what teams need from their leaders, sits at the heart of what we call teaming.
When teaming is strong, leaders get what they need from their teams [creativity, resilience, execution] and teams get what they need from leaders [direction, support, and the conditions to thrive]. It’s how strategy becomes action, how uncertainty becomes opportunity, and how businesses stay competitive in a fast-changing world.