For years, the debate around remote work has centred on productivity.

Can people work effectively from home? Does flexibility improve performance? Should companies bring employees back to the office?

Christopher Carter believes those questions overlook something more important.

The chairman and CEO of Approyo built a business that operates across multiple countries and time zones. The model gives him access to talent regardless of geography and allows customers to be supported around the clock. Yet despite embracing hybrid work, Christopher remains convinced that something important is lost when people stop sharing physical space.

The issue is not efficiency. It is visibility.

Building beyond geography

Christopher has spent much of his career around enterprise technology, SAP systems and cloud infrastructure. Today, much of his attention is focused on artificial intelligence, data security and helping organisations understand where AI creates genuine business value.

Like many businesses, Approyo reassessed its operating model during the pandemic.

Before COVID-19, recruitment was largely tied to office locations. Afterwards, the company realised it could recruit globally.

“We literally sat down in a room and we said, well, now we have the opportunity to get the biggest, best and brightest people,” Christopher explained.

The benefits were immediate.

The company expanded internationally, reduced dependence on office space and developed what Christopher describes as a “follow the sun mentality” for customer support.

Yet the same shift exposed a different challenge.

What gets lost when people disappear

Christopher agrees with many of the concerns raised by organisations bringing employees back into offices.

He believes physical workplaces create opportunities for interaction that are difficult to replicate online.

“I like to see people around the coffee pot having conversations and having discussions,” he said.

Those conversations matter because careers often develop through informal exposure rather than formal reporting structures.

A junior employee who solves a problem, volunteers for a project or shares an idea in person becomes visible in a way that cannot always be captured through scheduled video calls.

For Christopher, the office remains a place where relationships form and reputations develop.

“When you’re having a conversation like you and I are doing here, that’s one thing. But when you and I are sitting face-to-face in an office or a conference room or we’re brainstorming, things move at a different pace.”

The challenge is particularly relevant for younger professionals.

Hybrid work offers flexibility, but flexibility does not automatically create influence.

The people who progress are often the people who build relationships across an organisation.

Leadership becomes more deliberate

Christopher does not argue that hybrid work should be abandoned.

His own business depends on it.

Instead, he believes leaders must work harder to maintain connections once employees are distributed.

During and after the pandemic, he began scheduling regular informal conversations with staff. When travelling, he often arranged coffee meetings or walks with employees who lived nearby.

The objective was not oversight.

It was understanding people.

“It’s more personal and more in-depth conversations I have with individuals outside of that,” he said.

Those interactions often reveal concerns, ambitions and frustrations that would never emerge in a formal meeting.

The further people move from shared workplaces, the more intentional leaders must become about creating those opportunities.

“If you’re going to keep them hybrid, yes, you need to be attentive or you’re going to lose your people, especially your best ones.”

The same tension appears in AI

A similar theme runs through Christopher’s views on artificial intelligence.

Much of his current work focuses on helping organisations deploy AI responsibly and securely. He repeatedly argues that companies should rely on clean, contextually relevant data rather than assuming that larger datasets automatically produce better outcomes.

Technology can scale capability.

It cannot remove the need for judgement.

As Christopher puts it, AI should make people “bigger, better, stronger, and faster.”

The same principle applies to hybrid work.

Technology can expand access to talent. It can increase flexibility. It can reduce operational costs.

But it does not eliminate the human relationships on which organisations still depend.

An unresolved trade-off

Christopher sees advantages on both sides of the remote work debate.

Distributed teams create access to talent that many organisations could never otherwise reach.

At the same time, visibility, mentorship and advancement remain closely linked to human interaction.

That tension is unlikely to disappear.

Remote work solved geography.

It did not solve the challenge of helping people see, understand and trust one another.

For organisations building the workforce of the future, that may prove to be the harder problem.

A Crisis at the Top

Forty percent of stressed senior leaders are currently considering stepping down. That figure, drawn from research cited in this episode of The Responsible Edge, describes a leadership crisis arriving at precisely the moment organisations face their most complex operating environment in decades: climate risk, AI disruption, shifting employee expectations, and accelerating regulatory pressure.

The conventional response to leadership burnout is resilience training.

Adrian Ferraro’s argument is that resilience training, delivered in the same environments that produced the burnout, is insufficient.

The intervention has to be structural, physical, and away. His evidence is eleven years of taking people into places where it rains on everyone equally.

Formation

Adrian spent two decades building STC Expeditions, a specialist school expedition company he founded in 2006. Over eighteen years he oversaw more than 300 expeditions to 25 countries, taking over 8,000 teenagers to deserts, rainforests, and six-thousand-metre Himalayan peaks. He navigated the company through the 2010 ash cloud, the Arab Spring, multiple recessions, and the pandemic, before selling to his business partner in October 2024.

The Bioasis, which Adrian founded in 2020 as a pandemic pivot, was the domestic version of that logic. Working on a 5,000-acre private estate in South Devon, it delivered off-grid adventure and conservation programmes to school groups and corporate leadership teams across three self-sufficient base camps.

It planted 3,100 trees, removed two tonnes of plastic from the estuary, and won the Exeter Sustainability Awards in 2025.

The through-line from STC Expeditions to The Bioasis is consistent. Adrian has spent his career designing conditions under which people discover what they are capable of, first teenagers on six-thousand-metre peaks, then executives on three-day immersions in ancient woodland. The proposition in both cases is the same: remove the familiar environment, and people see things differently.

The Argument

Adrian’s case for nature-based leadership intervention is not therapeutic. It is operational.

His starting point is time. “I don’t think we have ten or fifteen years,” he said, describing the lag between educating young people about ecology and seeing that thinking affect boardroom decisions. Working with businesses, by contrast, produces immediate results.

“A business can come in, C-suite group on a retreat with us on a Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. They can go back to the office on the Monday and go, right, we need to change things here, here and here.”

The off-grid environment does specific work. Hierarchy flattens.

“It doesn’t matter what your title is,” he said. “If it’s raining, it rains on everybody equally.”

Shared physical challenge builds team cohesion that a conference room cannot replicate. Conservation work creates a direct, embodied encounter with long-term consequence: decisions made now, outcomes visible in fifty years.

Adrian is careful about the proposition. The Bioasis was not Bear Grylls. “You don’t have to skin rabbits and sleep under a hedge to become more resilient,” he said. The design principle was type one fun rather than type two: uncomfortable enough to stretch people, comfortable enough to bring them back.

The Structural Problem

The leadership burnout article frames the crisis primarily as a stress problem. Adrian frames it differently. The leaders who are burning out are, in his reading, often the most capable ones: high-achieving, purpose-oriented, willing to take on complexity. They are not burning out because they are weak. They are burning out because the demands being placed on organisations have accelerated beyond what any individual can absorb.

“I don’t think resilience is completely the be all and end all,” he said.

The deeper problem is structural: organisations are being asked to respond to climate risk, changing workforce expectations, and technological disruption simultaneously, while operating models and leadership cultures remain largely unchanged.

He cites a Harvard Business Review finding that nine out of ten people would accept lower pay for more meaningful work. His claim is that purpose-driven organisations attract better people, retain them longer, and perform with more resilience over time. Leadership burnout, in this framing, is partly a symptom of organisations that have not yet made that transition.

The nature retreat is not the solution to that. It is, at best, the condition under which a leadership team might begin to see it clearly.

What Remains Open

The episode’s underlying question is whether organisations will create the conditions for their leaders to think differently before those leaders choose to leave.

Adrian’s answer is measured. The case for stepping away from the office is not intuitive for most executives.

“It feels like I’m stepping out of the office and therefore I’m not working,” he said.

The reframe he is proposing is precise: stepping out is not absence. It is the work.

Whether organisations accept that reframe quickly enough to retain the people making the forty percent calculation is, as of now, open. The structural pressures are not easing. The expectations on leadership are not narrowing. And the evidence, from ecology to organisational psychology, consistently points in the same direction.

“We’re all better humans when we spend time outside,” Adrian said. “We treat people better. We are more calm and relaxed. We make better decisions.”

That argument has not yet moved at the speed the problem requires.