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In today’s hyper-connected, global economy, a company’s talent pool, customer base, and market opportunity are no longer restricted by geography. For business leaders, this reality presents a clear imperative: To thrive, you must stop thinking of your culture as centralized and start building a culture without borders. At Armis, we serve a global customer base from Fortune 100 enterprises to national governments and our people are as distributed as the attack surface we protect. Team members across continents serve customers in every major region. This global structure might seem like a challenge, but I see it as one of our greatest strengths. For too long, companies have focused on the potential hurdles of a worldwide team, including time zone challenges, communication barriers, or cultural misalignment. I’m here to tell you to flip that narrative. The benefits of a borderless business far outweigh the complexities, provided you build an intentional framework to support it. The power of distributed talent and perspective Featured Video An Inc.com Featured Presentation A global workforce is not just a necessity; it’s a competitive advantage. It ensures that your business can operate 24/7, providing real-time support for a global customer base. Crucially, it infuses your organization with a diverse array of perspectives, which is fundamental to innovation. When your development, sales, and marketing teams include individuals from every market you serve, their inherent understanding of local nuances, business practices, and customer needs is a powerful asset. You move from a single, centralized viewpoint to a rich, global mosaic of insight. But harnessing that power requires a delicate balance of connection, a seamless rhythm of in-person and virtual collaboration. Equally critical is transparency. It’s the connective tissue that keeps a distributed organization aligned. In a borderless culture, employees must not just know what decisions are made, but why they’re made. Transparency eliminates ambiguity, builds trust, and ensures that every team member, regardless of geography or level, feels empowered to act with clarity and confidence. When information flows freely, people move faster and make better decisions on behalf of the company and its customers. The hybrid cadence: Intentional in-person, effective virtual For a global culture to flourish, you cannot default to an all-virtual approach or cling to outdated notions of everyone being in one office. Our approach is a high-impact, hybrid cadence: Intentional in-person meetups: While daily work is distributed, strategic, in-person gatherings are non-negotiable for bonding and strategic alignment. This isn’t just a corporate offsite; it’s an investment in relationship capital. We bring teams together, both globally and regionally, to focus on big-picture strategy, celebrate major wins, and most importantly, build trust. Trust is the essential ingredient that makes virtual collaboration effective. When you’ve shared a meal, collaborated on a whiteboard, and spent nonwork time together, the relationship can withstand the inevitable friction of a rapid-fire Zoom meeting. Effective virtual collaboration: The day-to-day rhythm must be seamless. This is where technology steps in to bridge the distance. We rely heavily on our collaboration stack, but we are extremely intentional about choosing the right tool for the right job, particularly when it comes to fostering culture. Of course, culture doesn’t just cascade through memos or systems, it starts with leadership. In a global organization, leading from the front means being visible, accessible, and accountable, even across time zones. Leaders must model the behaviors they want to see: showing up to late-night calls for international teams, sharing context openly, and embodying the same level of discipline and empathy they expect from others. Leadership in a borderless world is less about hierarchy and more about presence, demonstrating commitment through action, not just direction. WhatsApp: The unexpected cultural glue While tools like Slack or Teams are essential for task-oriented communication, we’ve found a powerful, yet often overlooked, tool for nurturing culture and informal connections: WhatsApp. For a company like Armis, with employees spanning dozens of countries, WhatsApp serves a critical function as a shared, low-friction, high-engagement space for the “water cooler” conversations that traditional offices provide. Humanizing the team: We use groups not just for urgent alerts, but for sharing personal milestones. This continuous, informal connection makes our colleagues feel less like distant digital avatars and more like real people. It lowers the barrier to reaching out for work-related queries because you’ve already maintained a human connection. Speed and accessibility: In many international markets, WhatsApp is the dominant communication channel. By meeting employees where they are with a tool they already use daily, we increase engagement and ensure information, both strategic and cultural, is shared instantly and reliably, regardless of the employee’s location or bandwidth limitations. Break down silos: WhatsApp groups focused on topics (e.g., a new product launch, a shared interest like fitness or books) naturally connect people from different departments and time zones. These cross-functional, nonhierarchical conversations build social capital that directly translates into more efficient collaboration on a work project. Your mandate: Build systems, not just offices A culture without borders is not something that happens by accident; it is the direct result of deliberate leadership. It requires moving beyond the mindset that “culture is just what happens” to one where culture is a strategic operating system. If you are a business leader looking to scale globally, here is your mandate: Prioritize the human connection: Invest in strategic, high-impact in-person meetings that foster meaningful connections. Use that time to build the trust necessary for remote work to succeed. Embrace cultural agility: A global culture is not a monolith. It must be a flexible framework where local teams are empowered to implement core values in ways that are culturally relevant to their region. Choose your cultural tools wisely: Use formal tools (email, Teams, Slack) for documentation and project work, but actively adopt low-friction, high-humanity platforms (like WhatsApp) for maintaining the informal connections that fuel camaraderie and a sense of belonging. Finally, to truly build a culture without borders, you must embrace radical openness. This means creating an environment where ideas, feedback, and even dissent can travel freely across levels and regions. Radical openness dismantles the invisible barriers that often form in distributed teams, the hesitance to speak up, to challenge, to innovate. When people feel psychologically safe to contribute their unfiltered insights, innovation thrives, and the organization becomes not just global in reach, but unified in purpose. The world’s best talent and largest markets are now available to you. The leaders who succeed will be those who stop seeing geographic distance as a challenge to overcome and start seeing it as an advantage to leverage by developing a culture as expansive, diverse, and interconnected as the world itself.
