Managing a distributed workforce across borders demands clear culture, autonomous hiring and the right technology partnerships
When Meagan Mayers joined Avaaz as head of people and culture, she inherited a workforce that had been fully remote since 2012, staff spread across 30 countries, payroll running in four jurisdictions, and a people team of just four. It is a model that many HR leaders are now being asked to replicate, often with little precedent to draw from.
As cross-border hiring accelerates. Remote's 2025 Global Workforce Report found that more than half of respondents expected to increase international hires within the next year – the pressure on people functions to manage distributed employees effectively has never been greater.
Mayers, who is based in New Zealand while most of her team operates out of Europe, says the fundamentals are more straightforward than many HR professionals fear. But they require intentional design from day one.
Building culture when there is no office
For Mayers, the starting point is culture. She is emphatic that it cannot be left to chance.
"Having a really clear company culture, organisational culture that has clear principles or parameters in place and holding people account to them," she said, is non-negotiable. That means establishing working norms that create a sense of shared presence, even when no two team members share a time zone.
"Whatever you use for internal communications is a place where you come on, you say good morning to each other, you're transparent about when you log off to do something – you're unavailable. Just having that be a working norm," she explained.
"So you create a kind of virtual office space feel where people can have conversations or put something in to say, 'Oh, did you see this article? Or this thing of interest?'"
Avaaz historically gathered its entire organisation twice a year for in-person company events, using those moments to run cultural training, onboard new staff and reinforce shared values. The pandemic stripped that away almost overnight and exposed how heavily those gatherings had been doing the work of connection.
"We had to really significantly shift how we onboarded new staff members, how we leaned into our remote culture more so than kind of holding our breath between spaces," Mayers said. It was a lesson that has since shaped how Avaaz invests in remote engagement year-round, rather than relying on periodic in-person events.
Outcomes over hours – the shift in performance thinking
Managing performance across borders requires a fundamental rethink of what accountability looks like. Mayers is direct: the traditional 9-to-5, presenteeism-driven model simply does not translate.
"It shifts you a lot away from a 9-to-5 dynamic where you show up, you do your job and you leave, to allowance for an expansion," she said. "I think in many ways you almost want to shift to an output driven, an outcome driven kind of stance and management instead of one that is just hourly based."
This is not simply a philosophical preference – it is operationally necessary. When team members span multiple time zones, overlapping hours can be limited. Mayers, for instance, runs her core meetings in late evening or early morning New Zealand time, freeing up her afternoons for her family. She is candid that this requires both personal flexibility and organisational honesty about what sacrifices distributed work entails.
"Being really forthright, if you are global and you do operate in a 24-hour time zone, just to ensure people are clear on what boundaries they should and can set for themselves and where flexibility may be required and how those kind of work in concert together," she advised.
Clarity also means documentation. Mayers describes a shift "from kind of one-to-one conversations to a lot more documentation and clarity on where resources can be found," making self-sufficiency the default rather than an aspiration.
Hiring for autonomy and knowing when external expertise is essential
Avaaz hires deliberately for professional maturity, and Mayers makes no apology for it. The organisation typically avoids hiring people for whom a role would be their first job, not as a matter of elitism, but of practical risk management.
"There is a professional maturity that is the minimum threshold to kind of work with us," she explained. "We just have had experiences of people that aren't experienced or committed to the kind of work that we do having a much harder time getting used to the lack of kind of external accountability on the day-to-day basis."
That philosophy extends to the people function itself. With a team of four managing 115 permanent staff and approximately 50 contractors across 30 countries, Mayers relies heavily on employer of record (EOR) providers for jurisdictions where Avaaz is not directly registered as an employer – currently the United States, France, Canada, the United Kingdom and soon Spain.
"Partnering both outside of the company – EORs or local experts – becomes imperative so that we're not having to house or employ people for each country," she said. "Partnering across the organisation so that the distribution of knowledge and skill sets can be kind of more specialised is important too."
EOR platforms have become a critical infrastructure layer for lean people teams managing cross-border employment, payroll and tax obligations without the headcount to handle each jurisdiction in-house.
Mayers also highlighted the importance of physical wellbeing in a laptop-first environment, encouraging staff to leave their workspaces during the day. "We have weekly management calls, et cetera, and to encourage people to get out of your office, take it online, be off camera, go for a walk, have a kind of walk-and-talk conversation," she said.
The commitment required to go global
Mayers is measured in her advice to HR professionals considering a distributed model for the first time. Her most pointed observation is also her most practical: it is a choice, and it has to be made fully.
"If you do make it, you know, you've got to go all in. You've got to be fully ready to have the hard conversations remotely and set up, you know, practice and fail sometimes and create that space where you can make mistakes and it's a learning opportunity, you're not being penalised for it."
For organisations still building the foundations of a global people strategy, that willingness to design explicitly – to document norms, hire for autonomy, invest in culture as infrastructure and partner smartly with external providers – is what separates the workforce models that endure from those that collapse under their own complexity.
