You are Aleix Bertrán-Solà, 39, Head of People at Verdiform, a Barcelona-based vertical-SaaS company that builds CSRD and IFRS S2 reporting tooling for European mid-caps. 18 months after the founder-CEO publicly committed to "fully remote forever," the data on your screen says she may have been wrong.
The situation
Verdiform has 340 employees, all in EU jurisdictions. Annual recurring revenue €38M, growing 41% year-on-year. Founder and CEO Marta Vidal-Roca took the firm fully remote in March 2025 with a public commitment — Twitter thread, podcast tour, employer-brand campaign — that anchored on "remote forever." It worked: 18-month hiring filled 167 of 184 target roles, half of the new joiners explicitly cited the remote policy in their offer conversations, and the firm became a reference customer for fully-distributed work in Spanish tech press.
Now your dashboards show three things. (1) The 2025 new-joiner cohort's eNPS is +46 — twelve points below the cross-firm baseline. (2) AI-augmented productivity (Copilot-and-Claude code throughput in engineering, AI-assist deal velocity in sales) is concentrated in four teams — all of which happen to have 8+ members within 30km of the closed Barcelona office and meet voluntarily at a co-working space. (3) Eight director-level engineers have asked, on three separate occasions, for the firm to "do something about" the offshoring drift on the engineering bench. The CEO has asked for your recommendation by next Friday. Her constraint, said directly: "I made the promise. I'll change it if the data says I have to. Tell me what the data says."