Case Study: How PGC Supported DataCite in Their US Expansion
We caught up with Matthew Buys, Executive Director at DataCite, to discuss their successful North American expansion and their experience of working with PGC. Read the interview highlights below or click play in the above video to watch the full interview.
Company Overview
DataCite is a leading global non-profit organization that provides persistent identifiers (DOIs) for research data and other research outputs. Organizations within the research community join DataCite as members to be able to assign DOIs to all their research outputs. This way, their outputs become discoverable, and associated metadata is made available to the broader research ecosystem.
DataCite currently serves members across 47 countries globally. They have 37 national or regional consortia. Part of their model is to work with local stakeholders to be active participants in the research community by promoting data sharing and citation through community-building efforts and outreach activities.
HQ: Germany
Where does DataCite employ staff?
The consortia employ their own staff to support the regions we are active in. We have a small distributed team of direct DataCite staff. Currently, our team is spread across the UK Germany, Netherlands, Spain, and the U.S.
We also have a very well-defined governance structure of 78 individuals that are present in different groups around the globe. So we have different focus groups and different expert groups in various regions that work on different aspects of the organization.
With such a large global presence, is your company operating fully remotely?
DataCite has always been fully remote. Initially, remote work started as a project in Germany in 2009. We currently still have this physical office in Germany but only one of DataCite’s team members is based there. The rest of the team is fully remote, with the majority working from home and some utilizing coworking spaces.
Remote working was not new to us but it definitely did change in 2020 and 2021 with the changing landscape. A lot of our online meetings were previously internal and then we would travel to different regions to meet at external offices, so external meetings have changed to remote.
Is having a global workforce challenging?
Remote work is not new to us, but something that we have also adapted to like everyone else in the world. We now try to do internal meetings in person once or twice a year, to get together as a team, as that personal connection is important to us. Having the ability to come together in person to do strategy meetings and just generally hang out and do activities together helps us get to know the team a bit better.
Why did you decide to employ a team remotely in North America?
Support across different timezones
As we continue to expand globally, we try to operate on a lean basis. Our membership is continuing to grow, and with this increase in demand, we need to have better support across different time zones and local knowledge in different regions. So, we are also looking at bringing onboard new core team members in the different regions. We wanted to expand into the US and bring on new core team members.
Why did you use an employer of record to hire your US employees?
There are different options for organizations when expanding to the US. We could do registration in the US and some organizations do that for you, but from our perspective, it was really important to make sure that we are fulfilling all the compliance and legal obligations during the various filings.
It's important as a business to have local expertise that really understands the context and the country you are operating in. We wanted to have local support available for the team in the US that can help them when they’re completing their tax filings or various things related to their personal situations. That was not something that we could offer our team members.
When you think of huge multinationals expanding to the US, they've got dedicated HR teams that cover and monitor all employment compliance updates and legal operations of doing business in the US. But Datacite is an organization that's trying to operate really efficiently in our US expansion, it just made sense to us to work with an employer of record to make sure that we have that expertise.
Additionally, the US is complex in the sense that every state has different labor laws. That's something that we certainly wouldn’t be able to manage alone. It was really important for us to partner with US experts who can support us in keeping on top of the US legal employment landscape.
What was the first role you wanted to employ in the US?
Our first hire in the US was an Adoption Manager, which is an outreach and engagement role. They also looked at technical workflows with some of the members who were looking to adopt our technology and implement it into their systems. This role was a global regional role in the Americas.
Another team member we employed when starting in the US was a software developer. They were previously based at a university and came onboard into our development team that is based in Europe. Both employees experience an overlap in timezones, but there are some perks; they have parts in the day that are a bit quieter just to concentrate and get some code written.
What advice would you give to companies employing remote workers in lots of different countries?
Use online chat channels to connect regularly
I definitely find it important to build a relationship and connect with everyone in your team. To help people chat regularly, we've set up shared online chat channels in Slack that we are all involved in. I try to encourage having one-on-one conversations with everyone.
It’s really important to build cross-links between teams and encourage conversations that are not related to work. So, we have certain calls that we cannot be at our computer for. This allows us to remove ourselves from day to day and just have an open conversation.
Have general conversations you would have in an office
The tools you have in any organization, where you track your strategy or planning, don't fall away in a remote environment. What does fall away is that connection and ability to actually relate and support each other.
That is why we as a team have a chat channel which is called “random”, and that's a channel for genuinely random things. For example ‘my child woke up at 5:00 AM. I'm quite tired!” or “the weather's terrible today”. Just the conversations that you would have naturally in an office and you don't have that when you log on remotely and are sitting looking at a screen. So, trying to build that human interaction is important when employing remote workers globally.
What have been the benefits of using an employer of record in the US?
Employment compliance support for US employees
I think in all areas from a financial perspective it was better for us to work with an employer of record. When you are expanding globally, the support to your employees is something that shouldn't be overlooked. Your team members want to feel that they can get the information that they need and that they are looked after from a compliance point of view.
Competitive US benefits package for employees
Looking after your employees is especially true when it comes to having the relevant benefits package in the US. You want to offer your employees a competitive package to attract and retain staff, but you can't necessarily as a small organization because you don't have the scale.
This is where a US employer of record comes in. Working with an appropriate EOR like PGC in North America really gives us the ability to give the DataCite team the best experience.
HR support in the correct timezone for our US employees
It’s also beneficial that there's somebody to support our team members that's constantly available in their time zone. For example, if our US employees are completing their tax filing and they have a question, we don't have the expertise to necessarily support them on that because every state and country is different. Working with PGC means they can just pick up the phone and talk to them to get advice. Where we can, we've always tried to work with an employer of record when expanding globally.
Did you have any concerns about using an employer of record in the US?
One of the concerns I think a lot of business leaders have when outsourcing employment is that their employees may not feel like part of the wider team because they're actually technically not employed by us. From a personal perspective, having been in this situation as an employee, but also as a teammate, I really don't see it being an issue.
I've never had anyone that's felt like that it's really on an administrative level. It's a big pro because of that and all I mentioned previously. You still go to team events and meetings and you're not treated in any different way.
In Germany, we have a legal entity and that's where we do have direct employees. Everywhere else, all our employees are under an employer of record. I don't think the team even knows who is on an employer of record contract and who's directly employed because everyone's treated in the same way. There's definitely no differentiation.
I think it’s important for organization leaders to consider when bringing on new team members globally through an outsourced provider, making sure that you work with people on the same basis and that there are some administrative contractual details. Day to day you should still be building a team culture. I can categorically say that everyone on our team feels part of the DataCite team and not slightly removed due to us using an employer of record.
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