We were thrilled to work with new event client Oyster to bring their two-day Future of Work conference to life July 14-15, 2021. Ascent by Oyster brought together more than 350 attendees from—60+ countries (!!)—that lead distributed work and open the door to higher levels of organizational performance.

Oyster sees a change happening that is much deeper than “where” people work, and an opportunity for organizations of all sizes to achieve unprecedented things by broadening their talent horizons. The event focused on the future of work, as we are currently facing a shift in the workforce that is beyond geographical location.

Our event management team worked with more than 30 speakers to bring this event to life, including enterprise companies like Dropbox, Quora, Okta, Doist, and GoPro! The informative sessions varied from fireside chats to panels and presentations across one track.

Session themes included:

• Building a Successfully Distributed Company

• Legal Perspective for Globally Distributed Companies 

• The Future of HR (Evolution of the People Function in the Post-Pandemic)

• How to Become an Impact "Unicorn"

• Closing the Opportunity Gap with Remote Work 

The conference was held on Hopin, and in addition to providing a virtual stage for the speakers, we took advantage of the platform’s Expo Booths and Networking functions as well. 

We’ve included our key takeaways from the event below:

• An HR leader’s role is quickly changing, and they’ll likely always have to consider a remote working environment for their employees—and the compliance that comes with it. 

• Offering work-from-anywhere options is certainly a competitive advantage both for employees and companies alike—if the position allows, of course. Being able to hire from across the globe opens the applicant pool for companies to receive a more diverse array of potential employees. While from the new hire’s perspective, they have more flexibility in their working environment. 

• Ongoing education is essential to maintaining a successful distributed workforce. Engagement, sense of belonging, culture & wellbeing are all intangibles that cannot be ignored with a global team. 

• The inevitable: legal challenges of taking your company remote. The obvious challenges of cross-border hiring and remote work shouldn’t deter companies from accelerating forward with a distributed workforce. To help out, Oyster just released a set of distributed HR tools (which includes a legal hiring kit) to assist HR and People Ops leaders in navigating cross-border hiring.

Aside from the speaker management role at this event, we also handled attendee comms, website creation, and virtual platform management. We look forward to seeing what Oyster does next as a leader in the remote workspace!

And if you’re interested in hosting your own event, get in touch!