The evolution of remote work has dramatically reshaped how businesses operate. Charles Ferguson, General Manager of APAC, Middle East, and Africa at GP, has firsthand experience navigating this shift.
Charles reveals the truth behind the necessity of physical offices in certain regions, the power of a well-defined mission, and the DICE framework that can help any remote team thrive. Plus, get a sneak peek into the future trends that could redefine work as we know it.
Everything in the world has changed in the past four years, and if you’re operating your business the same way you were four years ago, you haven’t gone back and asked if you’re still headed in the right direction.
Here is the transcript of our conversation:
Yuying Deng:
By the way, it’s not always the case that everyone just wants to work from home. You can’t be in all places at all times. Equipment is always the weakest link, and at the end of the day, every business is a people business because we are human beings who require touch and closeness and proximity. I believe that it is a remarkably important moment in time for people in business to step back and really authentically sit down and reassess their vision, their mission, and their values.
Okay everyone, welcome to Scaling Today. This is the podcast where we explore how companies skill and also the future of distributed work as well. I’m your host Yuying Deng, and today we have a fascinating episode lined up for you. Our guest today is Charles Ferguson. He is the General Manager, the Corporate Development Lead for APAC, Middle East, and Africa for GP. So GP is a leading company in the employer of record space. Charles has an illustrious career—other than GP, he has also worked in senior management positions in various companies like TriCore, ADP, SAP, and Salesforce. But more interestingly, at least to me, he has also owned a jazz bar in Shanghai for almost 9 to 10 years. So, that is actually my memory of Charles. I have known Charles for about three years now, and I’m very excited to dive into his take on remote work. Welcome to the show, Charles. Would you like to say a few words to our audience?
Charles Ferguson:
Thank you so much, both for the invitation and for the very kind introduction. Yeah, look, I’m excited to have this conversation with you—not least because you’re one of the pioneers who’s taken the sort of remote anthem and kept waving that flag and moving it forward. Certainly, it’s evolved quite a lot, right? So we can kind of unpack some of the changes that have taken place in the perennial debate around remote, in-office, hybrid, etc. Indeed, it is the case—the work that I’ve done has gotten me to this point where I’m fully remote now, and that’s been quite an interesting chapter in the career book, I guess you could say.
Yuying Deng:
I can see a beautiful garden behind you.
Charles Ferguson:
Oh, thank you! Yeah, it’s very beautiful. We recently relocated from Singapore to Australia, and we can talk about that a little bit as well. But yeah, the culmination—the nexus of all of these different threads that we can discuss today—whether it’s from technology, business model evolution, and globalization, etc., I’ve been very fortunate to have the opportunity to work in businesses and companies that you mentioned that have had different contributions to the future of work and where we are today. And what an exciting time—scary and exciting at the same time, right? So we’ll discuss that. But yeah, again, thank you for the invitation.
Yuying Deng:
Thank you so much for being here, Charles. Could you tell us how you got started with GP? You know, I think when I met you, we never got to that story.
Charles Ferguson:
I’m happy to. It’s actually kind of an interesting story, and I guess to a degree, it’s germane to the times we live in. I had been working—my last role was with a private equity fund called Premier Funds. They had made an acquisition of a business called TriCore, which you mentioned. And TriCore was—and I say ‘was’ in the past tense because they’ve now been sold again and merged with a former competitor called Vistra, so now it’s just called Vistra. It was a globally present business services outsourcing company. What they did, ostensibly, was provide accounting, bookkeeping, tax advisory, corporate setup—that type of stuff. And I was their Global Chief Commercial Officer.
In that capacity, one of my partners that I worked with was GP at the time. It’s the artist formerly known as Globalization Partners, right?
Yuying Deng:
I was going to ask you about that. It has been shortened quite a lot.
Charles Ferguson:
Yes, it has been shortened. It has truncated, and I think that’s great because it’s just a little bit easier. In fact, even internally, before we officially changed our branding to GP, we called ourselves GP because “Globalization Partners” is a seven- or eight-syllable phrase, depending on how you say it. That can be a mouthful for a lot of folks, so GP translates well.
I left the private equity world in the iteration I was in, and I took a long sabbatical, reconnected with my family, and as part of that process, I was doing some advisory work for a lot of different firms. At one point, GP reached out to me and said, “Hey, we’re very keen to become more commercially focused on the Asia-Pacific region. Would you be willing to do some work with us?” And I said, “Sure.” I met with their team, met with some of their clients, and as I said, I’d been a partner in the past, so it became very intriguing to me. To the point where I kind of fell in love, you know? It was such a beautiful idea, what they were providing to the market, and the people doing the work were so impressive and compelling that ultimately, I decided to join.
Now, the reason I said it was interesting compared to—or, I guess, to express part of the story as it relates to where we are today—is that the conversations I had were in March of 2020, and I officially joined in May of 2020. So, I joined in the middle of the circuit breaker. For those in Singapore, that would be a very fresh and painful memory.
Yuying Deng:
Still quite fresh, yes.
Charles Ferguson:
Yes, quite fresh. For those who aren’t from Singapore, Circuit Breaker was our lockdown in Singapore, and it was severe. I spent the first two years with the company having not met any of the people physically in the company.
Yuying Deng:
So GP was remote from the start?
Charles Ferguson:
We were. In California, where Salesforce was at the time, they had an office. There was an office in Boston, where the company is headquartered, and a small presence there at the time. Outside of that, in a few other offices around the world, part of what we do is provide the requisite HR support and labor law support to get businesses compliant when they go to hire remote staff, and they use our local vehicles. So, the model that we incepted 13 years ago is called employer of record—EOR for short, we’re big on acronyms.
The idea is that we hire on behalf of our clients in a local jurisdiction, ensuring they’re compliantly onboarded, paid, and all those great things. The point being, in many markets where we operate, we don’t have a physical office. That said, in the beginning, we did think we might establish formal offices in many places. But as the pandemic unfolded, we realized that what we were doing by the nature of our business was so efficient that we didn’t really need physical offices.
Yuying Deng:
That must have been a realization.
Charles Ferguson:
It was a realization. It was kind of like happenstance to some extent. It was already kind of on deck, but it became part of our core ethos as a company. It was catalyzed by necessity, but we picked up the ball and ran with it. We got a little more aggressive about it. The only caveat I’ll add is that where it’s statutorily required to have a physical office, of course, we have offices. There are markets like Saudi, Dubai, and Japan where you must have a physical presence to comply with the law. Outside of that, wherever possible, we avoid it.
Yuying Deng:
Challenges and benefits of growing a distributed team. Charles, you must be so familiar with this. You grew the GP team within APAC to quite a large extent, and growing a team which is distributed must come with its own set of challenges. What are some of the biggest obstacles you faced, and how did you overcome them?
Charles Ferguson:
You know, it’s interesting. Maybe now, four years into the evolution of this pandemic that kind of really catalyzed or accelerated this move to being more mainstream, this conversation around remote, hybrid, and in-office is much more prominent. Prior to that, no one really had tremendous amounts of experience on how this should or shouldn’t work. Bearing that in mind, it’s important for people to often step back for a moment and take stock of the fact that they should pat themselves on the back. I mean, most companies, even very traditional businesses, had to pivot on a dime and figure it out.
Necessity being the mother of invention, lots of really interesting and creative ways came to the fore, catalyzed by a robust response from the tech segment of the marketplace. The biggest challenges? Well, there are so many.
Yuying Deng:
Which one stuck in your mind?
Charles Ferguson:
First and foremost, isolation and engagement. And I don’t want to sound hokey, but we are a human capital management business, and at the end of the day, every business is a people business. You need to combat potential feelings of disconnectedness and isolation, and that brings up other red-thread challenges like communication, collaboration, and culture. These are things you would deal with even in a physical market entry scenario, but they are exacerbated by being fully remote.
Communication and collaboration, for example, are important because we’re human beings who require touch, closeness, and proximity to create bonds. It’s very difficult to build authentic trust without having been in the same room with someone. I can speak from my experience—we create bonds digitally, but it doesn’t really do it. You and I have met, spent time together, so this screen time we’re sharing today builds on a pre-existing level of connection. For others, this may not be the case.
Yuying Deng:
I see what you mean. So, how do you do it at GP? I’ve seen you with your colleagues, and you seem quite close. Is there anything specific you guys do at GP to bring everyone closer?
Charles Ferguson:
It begins with how you hire and what you’re looking for. I say this often, but I think the end of the pandemic, or the current phase of it, marks an important moment in time for business leaders to sit down and reassess their vision, mission, and values—both as individuals and as a company. The world has changed so profoundly in the past four years, and businesses need to reassess whether their direction is still the right one, and whether their values and mission remain the same. This change filters down into the jobs you’re hiring for. The jobs to be done today may not be the same as four years ago, and it’s essential to adjust job descriptions to reflect these changes.
Yuying Deng:
What are some character traits you think are relevant today but may not have been four years ago?
Charles Ferguson:
I’ll give you five, and I use an acronym for them: DICEE. D stands for Determination—can you show determination to overcome shocking obstacles? I stands for Insight—can you extract insights from the noise of everyday distractions? C is Curiosity—are you hungry to learn? E is for Engagement—can you engage people around you, including customers and prospects? And the last E is Empathy—can you put yourself in someone else’s shoes and understand their circumstances?
If someone can embody these traits, they have a higher likelihood of success in a remote environment.
Yuying Deng:
Do you find these traits only in experienced people, or do younger people also have them?
Charles Ferguson:
I think people at any level have varying degrees of these traits. The pandemic disrupted everything—even school—and younger workers may have honed these traits through their remote education experiences. In fact, older workers who show adaptability to the new norms impress me just as much as younger workers. Interestingly, I’ve seen multi-generational workers collaborate better in remote settings than in physical offices, where age or background differences can be more pronounced. Remote work has democratized collaboration.
Yuying Deng:
Yes, I agree. It opens up global talent pools and provides opportunities to people in secondary cities to apply for jobs they might not have considered before.
Charles Ferguson:
Exactly.
Yuying Deng:
So, on a more practical note, onboarding and offboarding team members remotely can be challenging. I know GP has team members across Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. What’s your process for bringing new team members onboard and offboarding those who have left for other opportunities? How do you handle equipment and IT support?
Charles Ferguson:
The tactical aspects can be really challenging. Early on, my home office was the IT center—I was the IT closet! It was fun, like a startup environment, but as we scaled, we hired IT staff trained to image machines and distribute them.
We rely on services like Esevel, which provide this incredible flexibility to the scaling story. They handle equipment distribution, security, and ergonomic support. We also use remote monitoring tools and FedEx for shipping equipment where local services aren’t available.
We’re fully remote, so we have to ensure everything is secure, from onboarding to offboarding, especially since we’re not just managing our own 1,500 employees but also tens of thousands of employees on behalf of our clients.
Yuying Deng:
That sounds like a lot to manage!
Charles Ferguson:
It is, but services like Esevel help us maintain consistency and security. Equipment is always the weakest link, so it’s essential to ensure laptops, phones, and other devices are properly managed. We’ve moved past having laptops stacked up in my home, which my wife appreciates!
Yuying Deng:
I bet she does! Looking ahead, what trends do you see in distributed work and remote work? Will it become more common with mainstream companies, or will it remain a niche?
Charles Ferguson:
Initially, I thought fully remote was the future of work. Now, I think it’s one option among many. We have to remember that not every worker is an information worker. There are retail workers, F&B workers, and other essential workers who can’t work remotely. The future will be hybrid, and companies need to empower their employees with the choice of where and how to work. The nature of the office will change—it will become more of a collaboration space and a hub for culture-building rather than a place for individual work.
Yuying Deng:
Totally. It will be interesting to see how work evolves over the next few years. Well, Charles, we’ve come to the end of the podcast. Thank you so much for joining us today and sharing your insights. Where can our listeners find you?
Charles Ferguson:
You can find me on LinkedIn at Charles H. Ferguson, or on Twitter, now X, at Asia Charlie. And definitely check out gp.com to learn more about what we do at GP.
Yuying Deng:
Thank you, Charles. We’ll link to your profiles in the show notes. Thanks again for joining us.
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