CNME Editor Mark Forker spoke to Dr. Tim Currie, CEO of AI consulting company Nova, and author of the book Swift Trust: Mastering Relationships in the Remote Work Revolution – in an effort to find out how there has been such an erosion of trust in our ‘work from anywhere world’, and how many organisations globally have been guilty of losing sight of the importance of human connections in the workplace.
Dr. Tim Currie has often described himself as an author, advisor and innovator, and that’s a fairly accurate depiction on what has been a remarkable career to date.
Currie first established himself as a leader in the cut-thrust world of sales and has generated more than $100m in revenue for the various tech companies that he has worked for throughout his career and include AWS and DXC Technology, to name a few.
However, over the last 10 years, Currie has worked with high-tech consulting companies that are backed by private-equity companies that have disrupted multiple industry verticals and enjoyed huge growth.
Currie quickly ascended to the top of AI-consulting company Nova, where he is now the Acting CEO, having joined the company as VP of Growth in 2024.
Currie was acutely aware of the fact that he was good at building sales teams, but he realised that he had a passion for driving organisational change.
That led Currie to begin a doctorate program, and his dissertation was focused on trust in the remote workplace.
Fast-forward to June 2025, and Currie penned another chapter in her remarkable career (pardon the pun) when he launched his book entitled Swift Trust: Mastering Relationships in the Remote Work Revolution.
I kickstarted our conversation by asking him what the term Swift Trust meant?
“The term Swift Trust came out of research that was conducted about 20 years in virtual remote teams. At its core, what it means is a very professional level of trust. It is very transactional, very surface-level, you trust me to get the job done, and I trust you to pay me if I do the job right. What they discovered with these global virtual teams was that attitude of I’m going to trust you do the job and together we’ll get this project done because I’m sitting in an office with people I’ve known for years and those are my strong interpersonal relationships, and those are who I depend on to be able to get things done. I’m going to trust you until I have a reason not to. However, what we’re finding in both my research and practical experience is that ability to compartmentalize your work life and being very transactional about those relationships is now working its way into a sort of permanent state, and that’s why you’re seeing studies emerge from Gen Z wanting to go back into the office because they want those interpersonal connections,” said Currie.
In his book, Currie cites an internal study that Microsoft conducted with 250,000 of their employees.
The results conjured up a quite staggering disconnect between employees and managers.
87% of employees surveyed felt they were highly productive, but only 12% of managers agreed.
Currie believe that the hidden cost of remote work has been the erosion of trust.
“I think it’s fair to say that smaller organisations handle remote working much better, quite simply because there are few layers, there’s not the same level of bureaucracy or organisational charts between you and the people that make the decisions that greatly impact your future. However, the same can’t be said of larger organisation and they struggle for a multitude of reasons, some of the issues are cultural, some are process, or organisational design related, and some of the are because of technology and how they use platforms to communicate within their organisations. As far as the state of play goes, I expect large organisations to continue to push for a return to the office, especially the non-tech businesses, but even some of the technology companies will proactively push for a return to the office,” said Currie.
The CEO of Nova stated that advocates of remote working can provide all the studies and statistics they want to prove remote workers are productive, but Currie is skeptical, describing it as a “red herring” when productivity is only measured in task completion.
“If you measure productivity based on task completion and task performance and have all your people on 10 hours of Zoom calls, then you’re going to get a lot of production out of those folks on task completion. However, what you’re not going to get is innovation and outcomes that ultimately drive the success of an organisation. The outcomes are what makes it an amazing place to work, that fosters an environment where people want to go to work there every day. You can’t convince me that being on a Zoom call with your camera off, scrolling on your phone and with a TV on in the background is productive because it’s not. The reason they are scrolling on their phone is because they have been loaded up with all these non-fulfilling, autonomous, task-oriented meetings because you as a manager, or a business leader have not built a culture where that’s not required anymore,” said Currie.
Currie highlighted how organisations have been guilty of trying to superimpose the old world on the new world.
“It just doesn’t work in my opinion. In big organisations they have lots of meetings with a lot of people and there is a huge volume of emails being exchanged, and I mean in some cloud-native organisations they don’t even use email. If you ask a question, then you get a response by an emoji in a slack channel, so it’s not a meeting and it’s not an e-mail. I think the cloud-native businesses, generally the smaller more tech forward organisations can operate at a much more shared level of consciousness. I think it’s a red herring to say that remote workers are highly productive, even though they might think they are because they are doing something at 10 o’clock at night,” said Currie.
The inception of remote working did not begin in March 2020 as a direct consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, but there’s no doubting it was a major force in our remote work revolution that has ensued in the time that has since elapsed.
Currie pointed out that remote working in the technology industry has existed for over a decade, but crucially there was a culture, whereas now he argues that in our current remote work world there is no culture being built.
“It’s not a new thing for us in the tech industry to be working remotely, but there was a home office, there was a regional office, there was a satellite office where people showed up every day. Things got done and that’s where the company’s culture was built. But if you were working remote, it wasn’t because you didn’t belong in an office, they expected you to be with a customer. But when the customer is not in the office, and there’s no like local office, or point of presence then the culture doesn’t get built. In consulting we would also say the more time you spend with the customer the better. As a sales team, delivery team or as a consulting team you wanted facetime with the customer. If you could embed into their culture so much that they wanted you to be with them off hours then that was considered as the Holy Grail because you’ve built all this trust, but that’s all gone now, and as a result the outcomes aren’t happening. All these things that for 100 years drove relationships between producers and consumers and how people built their careers are gone or have shrunk down so low that they’re highly commoditised, so your relationship now with your customers, peers and managers is all transactional,” said Currie.
Currie believes that under certain circumstances and for certain companies they are going to insist on workers returning to the office.
“I think CEOs and boards are going to make the call where they say we need people back in the office. We need to have a traditional approach to business and understand that we might lose that great consultant that lives in Oklahoma, or some of the sales team that don’t want to be in the office, but that’s the way it is. You’re going to win some and lose some. I know personally that customers and partners that are hybrid you’ve really got to orchestrate a lot to get their time face-to-face because when they are in the office everyone wants to speak to them. It’s a tricky dance, and we haven’t figured it out yet and AI provides a sort of ominous backdrop to all of it. I’d tell anyone that is vehemently anti-office because they enjoy as we all do the autonomy and the flexibility of working from home to get back in the office. If they spend all day doing their job without ever being on camera, and without having to make hard decisions that requires them to trust and engage in human interaction then I wouldn’t get too comfortable, and I’d look to get back into the office as soon as possible,” said Currie.
Although Currie isn’t holding any punches when it comes to his unwavering viewpoint that remote working doesn’t deliver productivity that is outcome-driven, he does believe that hybrid work is here to stay, but that the system needs a complete reconfiguration across the board.
“The future is hybrid, but my primary concern with hybrid work is that businesses are not approaching it thoughtfully from what I’m seeing in both my research and in my practical experience. How many stories have you heard about people going into the office, and their commute taking them over an hour only for them to discover that the people they need to speak to are not in the office that day. They jump on a Zoom call with somebody that’s sitting somewhere else, it just doesn’t make any sense. For a lot of people that is their in-office experience now because they don’t have what I would describe as the infrastructure or culture when it comes to hybrid work, the current system is totally dysfunctional across the board and needs to be completely reconfigured and carefully thought-out,” said Currie.
However, Currie does have a remedy for hybrid work dysfunctionality.
He believes organisations need to become ‘hyper local’ — to differentiate the in-office experience, otherwise why go back to the office?
“I believe that organisations need to become hyper local. If I have an office in Chicago where I live then there has to be a reason for that office, and if I’m going into that office then I have got to be talking to people, and have to be directly communicating with people that are focused on the Chicago market and customers that are based and operating out of Chicago. What happened during the pandemic was that many businesses reorganised their sales teams, so they are vertically aligned, but not regionally aligned. So, your boss is in Washington DC, and the rest of your team is in Seattle, but in my opinion that sort of business model needs to get reengineered. It’s an organisational design structure that I believe not a lot of businesses are ready for, but the change must happen, and businesses need to become hyper local, otherwise why go back to the office? Before the pandemic people were much more focused locally in that office and region, but everybody is virtual nowadays, so people can go after talent that lives outside of our core hubs. However, what that creates is less reasons for having an office, but also it lessens the opportunity for you to regain what you lost, so hyper local is the answer,” said Currie.
