“You will not fail if you surround yourself with the right people, have the right leaders in place, and find the correct way to drive your team toward success.”
— Ryan Bolton, Vice President of Product at Simpleview
“At the end of the day, the culture has got to be authentic, and it’s got to stand for something that’s meaningful to the people who work there, and that’s more than just getting face to face. Is it something they believe in? Is there something that comes with that brand and leadership that they can buy into?”
— Mike Gamble, CEO at SearchWide Global
It’s January 2023, and office vacancy rates in downtown Toronto and Vancouver are climbing quickly as well-known businesses like PricewaterhouseCooper (PwC), Air Miles, and Plenty of Fish work as fast as they can to shed unneeded space and right-size their physical footprint in an increasingly digital world.
Canada’s The Globe & Mail newspaper reports that office vacancies in major cities across the country are three times what they were before the pandemic began. High attrition and the necessary push to greater digitization have created a hyper-competitive recruitment market for destination organizations.
Two big questions:
- How do you cut through the clutter regarding recruitment and retention?
- How do you inculcate corporate culture in a predominantly remote workforce?
Mike Gamble is a friend and ally of this industry. Gamble is the CEO of SearchWide Global, an executive search firm primarily for the travel, tourism, and venue management industries. His work to include, expand, and future-proof the industry is manifest in projects outside his core business that he has shepherded and, at times, spearheaded, like the nonprofit Tourism Diversity Matters, a force for good established in 2021.
Ryan Bolton is the vice president of product at Simpleview and has been in tech and innovation senior management for over two decades. His career has run the gambit from being employee number 24 at a VoIP/TTS Telco startup to leading product teams at Google, managing both on-site and remote teams on mission-critical digital projects and products worldwide.
Both bring lots of insight to this conversation about recruitment, retention, and cultivating workplace culture in this episode of the Future of Tourism.
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