E101 | Inspiring More Workplaces To Become Progressive with Pim de Morree

If you’ve ever sat in the pub and dreamed of quitting your job to go in search of a better life, then this week’s guest, one half of Corporate Rebels, Pim de Morree, is a guy you need to listen to. Because Pim and co-founder Joost Minnaar didn’t just write down their plan on the back of a beer mat, they executed it too. 

“We worked in outdated workplaces characterised by inertia, bureaucracy and a lack of motivation. We simply couldn’t accept that the world of work, for far too many, is a place full of misery and despair”. 

And so they simultaneously quit their jobs in January 2016 in order to research progressive workplaces. Their aim? To travel the world and visit 70 inspiring workplaces to see how work could be more fun. They created a bucket list of some of the world’s most inspiring workplaces and set about visiting each and everyone to learn what it takes to be considered ‘progressive’. 

So far they’ve visited over 150 workplaces, worldwide, combining their practical insights with academic findings from their PhD research, sharing everything they’ve learned along the way on their blog, on their podcast and in their book. 

In this episode, Pim chats about some of the trends they have found from visiting progressive workplaces all over the world. The place of values instead of profit, the place of network teams instead of hierarchical pyramids, and the search for talent and mastery over job descriptions. He even reveals which businesses were disappointing, not living up to their progressive hype. 

This is a great conversation, we hope you enjoy it as much as we did.

On today’s podcast:

• The genesis of Corporate Rebels
• The benefit of no business model
• Their bucket list of organisations
• How to measure the success of progressive workplaces
• Why self-managing won’t work for every workplace
• The 8 trends that they’ve seen
• The problem with copying