Unlock Top Talent: Why a 'No Surprises' Culture Starts with Better Managers

Title: Barbara Matthews, Chief People Officer at Remote Date: Fri, 12 Sep 2025 10:00:00 GMT Duration: 00:14:52 Link: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/previ/episodes/Barbara-Matthews--Chief-People-Officer-at-Remote-e37c04k GUID: 49ad4ab1-2266-4e22-800d-9474bd4beb54 ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────

Barbara Matthews joined Google on a three-week contract. Twenty-plus years, several companies, and one global pandemic later, she's CPO at Remote — leading people strategy across 85+ countries. The throughline of her career isn't luck or timing. It's a consistent pattern of saying yes to the hard thing, speaking up when it would have been easier not to, and building a single repeatable initiative that she has deployed at every organization she's joined: a culture of no surprises.

Early in her career, Barbara witnessed a disciplinary decision that wasn't going to hold up — and she said so, out loud, in a room where that wasn't welcome. She pushed for the right outcome and got it. That moment became the foundation of her leadership identity: authenticity and values aren't abstract commitments, they're expressed in specific moments under specific pressure. She's carried that principle into her thinking on management development, where she argues that poor managers are the silent killer of employee engagement — and that fixing the manager layer is the highest-leverage intervention most HR functions systematically underinvest in.

Her approach to performance clarity is tactical and replicable: surface the calibration data, find the managers and teams where expectations are misaligned, and fix it before it becomes an attrition problem. It works at Google. It worked at Stripe. It's working at Remote.

• The "culture of no surprises" initiative — what it is, how to build it, and why Barbara deploys it everywhere she goes
• Poor management as the hidden engagement killer — and the specific interventions that actually change manager behavior
• Performance calibration as a diagnostic tool — using data to find misalignment before it becomes an attrition problem
• Ethical clarity under pressure — the early career moment that defined Barbara's leadership approach
• AI's role in expanding HR's strategic bandwidth — where automation earns its place in a people function
• Flexible work as a talent retention tool — why documenting norms matters as much as offering them

Previ is an employer network that provides private pricing for employees — saving the average employee $2,200/year on essentials like cell phone service and insurance, at no cost to the company.