Chris Dyer

Chris Dyer has been running a fully remote company since 2009, which means he was solving the problems most organizations met in 2020 for eleven years before they were fashionable, and had already discovered which of the obvious solutions do not work.

He is the founder and chief executive of PeopleG2, a background check company that has appeared on the Inc. 5000 list of fastest-growing companies five times while operating with no office. The distinction he draws is between remote work as a location policy and remote work as an operating model. The first is a decision about where people sit. The second changes how decisions get recorded, how trust is established without proximity, and how a team knows what is happening without a manager physically observing it.

The Power of Company Culture sets out seven pillars he found behind cultures that perform: transparency, positivity, measurement, acknowledgement, uniqueness, listening and mistakes. The last is the one that separates it from most culture material, since an organization's real relationship with error is visible in what happens the first time someone gets something wrong in public. He also coauthored Remote Work, on redesigning processes and practices for a distributed workforce.

He has delivered more than three hundred keynotes across more than twenty countries, for organizations including NASA, Johnson and Johnson, Intuit, IKEA and Southwest Airlines.

The session suits an organization arguing about return-to-office, a team newly distributed across sites or time zones, or a leadership group that has noticed its culture worked when everyone shared a building and has not been rebuilt since. The content is practical rather than philosophical, which is the useful register for a debate that usually runs on assertion.