Remote work is on the rise. We can tell it by growing number of remote jobs available and the skyrocketing number of companies transforming into the “remote way” all over the world.
We have also noticed that the demand for expert knowledge regarding the remote work is rising as well! That is the reason why we launched our new Certified in Distributed Management program in Remote-how. It is designed for the leaders and managers who are looking to take their managerial skills to the next level and learn how to lead distributed teams effectively.
This “hunger for knowledge” is also a reason why we decided to scan the Web and put together this super handy list of remote work experts and thought leaders to follow and learn from in 2019. Many of the people listed we know personally, and we can vouch for their expertise. Other we have been following for some time now, and we love the content and insights they share.
Are you ready? Dive in! We hope you’ll find some great inspirations here!
(All the names are in alphabetical order.)
Enjoy!
Anna Auerbach
Anna Auerbach is the co-founder and CEO of Werk, the first and only people analytics platform that can help a company to build a flexible culture through data. They want to make companies more flexible and drive productivity, retention, and engagement in their employee base.
Nicki ‘Trautmann’ Bellington
Nicki ‘Trautmann’ Bellington is the current Head of Remote Talent Programs at Atlassian. The company provides tools that unleash the potential of a team through collaboration and development. Nicki mainly evolves Atlassian’s remote work strategy, which includes their policies, practices, and programs. This is all down with a data-centered, voice of the customer approach
Darcy Boles
Darcy Boles is the Head of Employee Experience at TaxJar, a 100% remote company. She develops the full life-cycle of Employee Experience there and deals with onboarding, cross-team communication and growing the whole team. Darcy finds that building a good company culture is key to building skilled remote teams.
Egor Borushko
Egor Borushko is the co-founder of Running Remote, the world’s largest conference on building and scaling remote teams. Egor has been a remote work advocate since 2011 and believes that remote work has multiple advantages to offer both the employer and employee. He’s always willing to hear from remote work leaders who are eager to share their stories at a Running Remote conference.
Linkedin
Greg Caplan
Greg Caplan is the founder and CEO of Remote Year, a company that brings together remote individuals who want to travel, work and explore in groups. The trips last from four months to a year and seek to increase employee loyalty, professional development and expand people’s horizons. Companies can sign up their remote teams to go off on the adventure of a lifetime with Remote Year.
Ho Yin Cheung
Ho Yin Cheung is the creator of Remo, which helps to enhance social collaboration and foster connections within remote teams. He is the founder of three companies in total and had built them from the ground up to earning multi-millions of dollars in revenue. The Remo platform offers a video-first, virtual workspace for remote teams and helps strengthen a company’s culture.
Cheryl Cran
Cheryl Cran is a Future of Work Expert and a Founder of NextMapping. Through her company, Cheryl helps leaders, teams, and entrepreneurs be future-ready now. As she puts it, “the future of work is quickly changing – companies that have remote work options have the best competitive advantage for attracting highly talented people.”
We recommend to follow her on LinkedIn, where she writes from the experience of preparing the world for the future of work!
Twitter || Linkedin || YouTube
Stephan Dohrn
Stephan Dohrn helps impact-driven entrepreneurs leverage remote work to grow their overall business and the impact they have. Starting his company in 2009, he was one of the first to offer support for remote teams and their development. To Stephan, self-management and emotional intelligence are some of the key factors for success in the remote world.
Stephan supports entrepreneurs and executives, many of whom work remotely, and who want to develop themselves and their teams towards high-performance and to generate more impact, but realize that they have a real difficulty to deal well with overwhelm, stress and pressure.
Website || Linkedin || Medium|| Instagram
Rodolphe Dutel
Rodolphe Dutel is a former director at Buffer and the founder of Remotive.io, a job board for remote workers. We especially recommend following Rodolphe on Twitter – he is one of those people who can grasp the essence of the topic and translate it to 280 characters long masterpiece. Here’s an example.
Chris Dyer
Chris Dyer is a CEO and Founder at PeopleG2 and an Author of The Power of Company Culture. He believes that people drive the business forward, so, being armed with the best intelligence while making people-related decisions is good business. He is also a recognized authority on how to implement and change company culture in growing entrepreneurial organizations, as well as to implement and to engage virtual staff. And what is his attitude towards remote? “Remote work is the fundamental change business can make to have happier employees and drive performance.”
Follow Chris’s blog and LinkedIn and read his inspirational articles!
Steli Efti
Steli Efti is the CEO of Close, a company which offers a sales communication platform for managing client relations. It’s 100% remote and has 33 people on its team. They also offer 2 annual retreats for their employees to help build up a positive company culture.
Stacy Elliott
Stacy Elliott is an Executive Communications Director at Microsoft. She has now been working remotely for 15 years. We recommend following Stacy on Linkedin.
Paul Estes
Paul Estes works as Senior Director at Microsoft 365, where he spearheads a company wide initiative to help Microsoft embrace freelance work. Paul truly believes in inspiring individuals and businesses to digitally transform themselves through involvement in the gig economy. He has a deep passion for the on-demand workforce and its ability to impact the current world of work
Laurel Farrer
Laurel Farrer is a Remote-Friendly Operations Expert and Remote Work Advocate. She writes about remote work for several online publications and education platforms. Laurel also advises US governments, business conferences, and industry associations on how to share remote work resources with their audiences to stimulate economic growth. We recommend following her blog and LinkedIn, where she writes from her learnings and experience about remote work and related topics.
Kieran Flanagan
Kiran is currently the VP of growth at HubSpot, which focuses mainly on marketing and software sales. His role mainly covers global web strategy, acquisition for their sales and the freemium funnel. He is also a recognised author who helps advise and mentor startups. He speaks at numerous events all around the globe,
Wade Foster
Wade Foster is co-founder and CEO at Zapier, a program allowing you to easily automate and connect apps that their customers use. They have a fully remote team that is growing that wants to get rid of the boring and tedious parts of your working day.
Amy Freshman
Amy Freshman is a Senior Director of Human Resource Global Workplace Enablement Mergers & Acquisitions at ADP. She is particularly interested in flexible work arrangements, recognizing that flexibility comes in many flavors. Amy leads flexible work arrangements programs, intending to provide a work environment that is results-driven offering opportunity for flexibility on where, how, and when work gets done. We recommend following Amy on LinkedIn.
Hailley Griffis
Hailley Griffis is the Head of Public Relations at Buffer. For her entire career, she has worked in-house doing public relations for tech companies. She has key skills in building media relationships, acting as a spokesperson and arranging numerous speaking engagements. She currently hosts her own podcast, MakeWorkWork. Buffer is a large advocate of remote and the benefits it can bring.
Hailley is also responsible for Buffer’s annual report on the subject of remote: State of Remote Work. You can read the 2019 edition here.
Tim Herbig
Tim Herbig is responsible for the overall sales, product, marketing and engineering efforts at Iridion. He’s the director of Iridion and offers a leading conversion optimization platform. Tim is also a keen writer, coach, and speaker helping companies to develop their teams in agile working environments.
Remote work advise from Tim? “The more emotional the topic you want to discuss in a remote environment is, the more synchronous you need to communicate it.”
Trina Hoefling
Trina Hoefling is a Transformational Change Agent at Smart Workplace and author of Working Virtually – Transforming the Mobile Workplace. She has 30 years of experience strategically developing people and facilitating teams. We recommend following her blog and LinkedIn, where she writes from her learnings and experience about remote work and related topics.
Nathan Hirsch
Nathan Hirsch is a founder and CEO of FreeeUp, a marketplace, connecting business owners with the top 1% of freelancers in eCommerce, digital marketing, and web development, amongst others. We recommend following Nathan on LinkedIn, as well as, on his Facebook group – Outsourcing Masters for eCommerce and marketing entrepreneurs.
Mike Hostetler
Mike Hostetler is a mentor at VentureScale, an advisor at Menlo One, and a managing director at Epic Creative Inc. He is passionate about remote work, the future of work, leadership, and helping others succeed. Mike executes these passions through the lens of a coach, mentor, and teacher. We recommend following Mike on Twitter!
Raimee Iacofano
Raimee Iacofano started her remote work journey over 2 years ago and believes it’s something everyone can do. Her goal is to provide with the resources, inspiration, and facts about remote work to help in gaining location independence. She is passionate about telling her stories, and we recommend to read them on her blog.
Instagram || Twitter || Linkedin || Blog
Jim Kalbach
Jim Kalbach is Head of Customer Experience at MURAL. He designs mainly for user experience, commercial ethnography and information architecture. Mural is a digital collaboration tool that creates workplaces that help you design together. It’s based currently in San Francisco and offers enterprise-class software. “The biggest success factor in managing a remote team is trust. My team spans nine time zones and three continents, and I have complete faith that they are doing their best work from wherever they are.” says Jim.
Kate Kendall
Kate Kendall is a Tech entrepreneur, community builder, writer, and advisor. She is a founder of three tech companies: CloudPeeps, Atto Accelerator, and Indie Labs. We recommend following her blog where she writes from her learnings and experience about remote work and related topics.
Matthew Mottola
Matthew built and leads growth for the Microsoft 365 freelance toolkit – the unlock to embrace freelance at enterprise scale. He guest lectures and helped developed the entrepreneurship curriculum at Georgia Tech, along with delivering product-first insights through advising, writing and speaking. He is the author of StartUp Not StartDown, and upcoming book Our Big Leap Forward.
He is a true supporter of the Future of Work and believes that the technology behind the freelance economy and intelligent automation is driving a new world of work for individuals and companies. Follow Matthew on LinkedIn or catch his virtual session at the Remote Future Summit 2019.
We also recommend reading his articles on Linkedin. Here’s the example.
Matt Mullenweg
Matt Mullenweg is the CEO at Automattic and also co-founder of WordPress. He specializes in simplifying the complex and hiring. His work at WordPress involved growing the open sources platform which now runs over 31% of all websites.
Zack Onisko
Zack Onisko is the CEO of Dribbble in San Francisco. Dribbble acts as a community for designers to share, grow and find new positions. He has almost 15 years of experience in analytical product growth and is a marketing strategist. In the past, he has grown and led three startups to successful acquisitions.
Pilar Orti
As a director at Virtual, not Distant, Pilar Orti helps organizations and teams transition from being in the office together all the time to a more “office optional” approach. She delivers online and face-face workshops, coaches managers and leaders, and facilitates the transition from collocated to remote through collaborative consultancies. We recommend following Pilar on LinkedIn or catching her in her role as an expert speaker in the podcasts: “21st Century Work Life” and “Management Café” at www.virtualnotdistant.com.
Dominic Price
Dominic Price is a work futurist at Atlassian. He is a strong supporter of the idea that the future of work is all about unleashing the power of teams. We recommend following Dominic’s articles on LinkedIn, where he reflects that philosophy in writing.
Andreas Klinger
Andreas Klinger is the head of Remote at AngelList, connecting remote job seekers with employers. The company is based in San Francisco and boasts of over 10,000 matches per week between remote hiring companies and potential candidates.
Liam McIvor Martin
Liam McIvor Martin is the co-founder of both Time Doctor and Staff.com. He also acts as a co-organizer for Running Remote, the world’s largest conference on building and scaling remote teams. Liam also offers his services as a speaker, writer, and metrics-based marketer.
Melissa Ng
Melissa Ng is the CEO & founder of Melewi, helping to craft digital revenue-generating digital products that users just can’t so no to! When she started her first company 10 years ago, she received a lot of doubt that a fully remote company would ever work. Melewi now has been 500-100 clients, all while Melissa led a digital nomad lifestyle.
Darcy Peters
Darcy Peters is the Customer Engagement Lead at Buffer, a company that champions flexible working arrangements in the workforce. She spends her time brainstorming social media strategies with customers one-on-one, while also crafting and running webinars. What working remotely is for Darcy? Let’s hear it straight from her! “For me, working remote is working free. The space for creativity, reflection and productivity is endless.”
Twitter || Linkedin || Instagram
Dorota Piotrowska
Dorota Piotrowska is the Head of People at Netguru, a company that helps to build digital products that let people do things differently. They also work in consulting and help teams solve their specific problems and develop new strategies. The three key principles that guide her in her professional life are intellectual humility, well reflected lifelong learning and Peter Drucker’s saying „Culture eats strategy for breakfast”.
Amir Salihefendic
Amir Salihefendic is founder & CEO at Doist, a company that specializes in productivity software. Doist creates tools that simplify and help organize a workers day. They are also big remote work advocates and want to help people improve their productivity and make the most out of the time they have available in the day.
Jeremy Scrivens
Jeremy Scrivens is Director at The Emotional Economy at Work, where he utilises the principles of positive transformation to engage the workforce to imagine and create the new future of work. He is known for his work in coaching innovation, collaboration, and engagement at scale. Jeremy is a global thought leader in building up collaboration in the digital world.
Wiktor Schmidt
Wiktor is the Executive Chairman at Netguru, a company that helps to build digital products that let people do things differently. They also work in consulting and help teams solve their specific problems and develop new strategies. He’s responsible for Netguru’s strategy and growth and is also an active angel investor in a number of technology startups.
Tim Schumacher
Tim is the Chairman of Eyeo, headquartered in Cologne, Germany. They created the famous software Adblock Plus, which has been downloaded over 1 billion times worldwide. He is also involved in a number of different other projects as an angel investor.
Dylan Serota
Dylan Serota is the co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Terminal, based in San Francisco. The company builds teams connecting top engineers in tech hubs around the world. By doing this, they help companies run operations in new locations around the world.
Hiten Shah
Hiten is an American entrepreneur and startup advisor. He is the co-founder and president of the analytics companies KISSmetrics and Crazy Egg and a co-founder of FYI. Hiten is truly a remote work pro and he happily shares his knowledge and contributes to the remote community, by speaking on events like The Remote Future Summit 2019, or by publishing great content.
Recently, he and his team created a super insightful report titled Why Everyone Loves Remote Work presenting the current state of remote work. Make sure to check it out!
Gregory Sherrow
Gregory Sherrow is a Vice President of Client Solutions in ePublishing. He has put his knowledge and passion for remote work into assisting individuals and companies through articles, mentorship, consultation, and training courses. Gregory has an abundant article section on LinkedIn and a video channel that provides advice and resources for work from home workers, managers, and entrepreneurs.
Kate Smith
Kate Smith is a Remote Career and Online Bizness Coach and a founder of WiFly Nomads. WiFly Nomads provides with a series of engaging workshops, through which you’ll learn how to start working remotely. Kate interviews industry experts from around the world on entrepreneurship, remote work, freelancing, traveling like a pro, and mastering your mindset. Get inspired and escape from the 9-5 grind by listening to her weekly podcasts.
Steph Smith
Steph Smith is Head of Publications at Toptal, where she works as a data-driven growth marketer. She has a great passion for early to medium stage tech companies with progressive policies. Steph also loves coding, making projects and traveling around the world. Check out her remote work blog on women in tech and productivity.
Lisette Sutherland
Lisette Sutherland is the director of Collaboration Superpowers, a company that helps people work together from anywhere through online and in-person workshops. She is also a creator of a weekly podcast featuring interviews with remote working experts, highlighting the challenges and successes of working with virtual teams. Follow Lisette on Twitter, where she tells stories of remote teams doing great things.
Sara Sutton
Sara Sutton is a CEO and founder of FlexJobs, a job board for remote workers. We especially recommend following Sara on LinkedIn, where she writes about work flexibility in a concise but pithy way.
Iwo Szapar
Our very own CEO, Iwo Szapar. Yes, we might not be 100% unbiased with this one, but we actually really enjoy Iwo’s social media presence. If you were to choose one channel, give Iwo’s a follow on Linkedin. The most interesting and inspirational remote work related content to be found there!
Wayne Turmel
Wayne Turmel is a co-founder and Product Line Manager at The Remote Leadership Institute. He is a master of virtual presentations and valuable strategic resources to remote leaders globally. His playful presence, paired with his wealth of knowledge is a powerful combination for high-levels of virtual engagement. He is also an author of several books related to remote leadership. To get a glimpse of his writing, we recommend following Wayne on LinkedIn.
Kathryn Tyler
Kathryn Tyler is a co-founder of Digital Mums, on a mission to help mothers find flexible, rewarding careers. She believes that through learning, mothers can regain lost confidence and build in-demand knowledge and skills to gain a competitive advantage in the labor market. We recommend following Kathryn on Twitter.
Sophie Wade
Sophie Wade is a founder and Workforce Innovation Specialist at Flexcel Network, as well as, one of the Remote Future Summit 2018 speakers. She helps businesses transform their mindset and operations for the future of work environment. We especially recommend reading Sophie’s blog, where she has a section entirely dedicated to workplace flexibility.
Ken Weary
Ken Weary is the VP of Operations at Hotjar, a service that shows real-user behavior and experience on a particular website. This then allows a company to see where improvements can be made in UX and gain greater insights into their company website. Ken is passionate about his work and truly believes that communication is the key to delivering value on a recurring basis.
Meaghan Williams
Meaghan Williams is the Remote Work and Inclusion Program Manager at Hubspot. There she project manages the rollout of a global remote work philosophy and helps to build and share their remote work knowledge with other teams.
Jon Younger
Jon is an independent consultant at Agile Talent Collaborative, acting as an HR thought leader, author, and board member. He conducts best practice research for companies that rely on external experts to achieve their goals.
Jan Zborowski
Jan Zborowski is the co-founder of SoftwareMill, a renowned company that operates in software development marketing. He manages the connection between the IT world and he the non-IT surroundings present in the company. SoftwareMill offers a number of fully customized software solutions to its clients, including desktop systems and web-based applications.
Aaaand… That’s it! We hope you enjoyed the list and found some solid inspiration here to improve your feeds.
(If you feel like we missed somebody important – let us know. This list is by all means open for further development and you can help make it better!
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