As the Vice President of People at Oyster, Marina Farthouat is in the business of building something truly human. She leads the people strategy for the global employment solution with a focus on creating a sustainable, inclusive, and human-centric culture across a distributed team. With a wealth of experience scaling remote organizations like Clickhouse and Elastic, Farthouat is a leading voice in employee engagement and organizational development. But her journey to the top began with a job she wasn’t even supposed to get.
At just 22, Farthouat landed her first HR role at an international investment bank with a global headcount of over 100,000. The job posting required a master’s degree in HR—a qualification she didn’t have. However, the HR Director noticed she spoke four languages, a skill that earned her a spot in the interview room. That conversation, which included a pop quiz on employment law, paid off; she got the job.
This unconventional start taught Farthouat a valuable lesson that has defined her career: the importance of getting the basics right. As she learned while managing complex projects and leading sophisticated recruitment campaigns, a solid foundation is often more critical than complex work.
Looking back, she recalls reaching out to the person who took a chance on her to express her gratitude. It’s a moment that captures the spirit of her leadership—one that values the person and their potential beyond a list of qualifications. It’s a philosophy she now brings to Oyster, as she continues to build the kind of global culture she once fought so hard to get a chance to be a part of.
In our latest Faces, meet Marina Farthouat.
Who is/was your biggest influence in the industry?
At the risk of sounding like I belong to a different era, my biggest influence was probably the French author Simone Weil (1909-1943). Yes, of course, I read much more recent content and follow current academics and writers, as well as having read the usual books about workplaces such as Google, Netflix, and interesting biographies (such as Steve Jobs’, etc.), but let me explain why Simone’s work surpasses anything else I’ve come across. Unlike most authors and academics who write about the workplace, she decided that academic writing wasn’t enough: she wanted to experience all sorts of environments herself in positions that were hard to work in: for example, she worked in Renault factories with industrial workers in manufacturing, to experience it firsthand and then write about it. She understood that a topic such as work needs to be experienced, not only written about theoretically. She was one of the first people to understand experiential learning, which resonates with me and is one of the reasons why I started working as early as I could. (I took my first job at 13 and have always worked, in one way or another, since then).
Simone considered work as needing to be providing conditions that allow for attentiveness, dignity and purpose—not just output. Back in the 1930s, she was already calling for work to be humanized and for workers to be given as much freedom as possible. I feel like the more time that goes by, the more relevant her work becomes. It’s truly fascinating. Take the topic of “attention.” She wrote about this as well, in terms of how attention is a discipline that needs to be thought about and invested in. This is something I strongly agree with and find extremely important now than ever before. I think it will continue to be increasingly relevant to future generations too, because as time goes on, we become more distracted and less able to focus and pay attention to what matters. I see her work as making a comeback.
What’s your best mistake and what did you learn from it?
I never waited for permission to do the things that I thought needed to be done. Technically, it was often a mistake because that’s not how companies work. To do important things, you often need to ask multiple people and go through long processes. I understand that. I also respect that — but only if the process and rules make sense to me. That’s where the problem arose. If I found a process too long or impossible to overcome, I would change things by getting people involved directly and creating my own momentum. It backfired on me several times. Once, my manager took it so badly that they demoted me. Objectively though, every time I did this, it was beneficial to my teams and the companies I worked at. So overall, I don’t regret doing it. It also benefited me in the sense that by doing this, I naturally performed work at a level typically above my role, which led to my job title becoming more senior over time.
This approach may have led to one demotion, but it also led to multiple promotions. Promotions didn’t happen when I applied for new roles; they always happened to “officialize” the fact that I was already doing the work of a more senior role. That’s probably the most consistent pattern in my career.
What’s your favorite part about working in the industry? What’s your least favorite part, and how would you change it?
My favorite part is that people teams are at the intersection of business and people. At the heart of economic value creation as well as organizational psychology, with a touch of culture and diplomacy on top. It also contributes to providing opportunities to people and organizing structure around their work. Ultimately, policies rolled out internally in companies led by the people team impact productivity, but also people themselves and their lifestyles.
Indirectly, it impacts families, lives and mental health too. If someone has a terrible manager, for example, they might close their laptop at night feeling down and not even able to enjoy their private lives fully. It’s serious. It has consequences, and you can produce positive impact, but you can also do harm if you’re not careful. It’s not too dissimilar from leading a country with multiple communities that have different interests but need to cohabit and work together, whilst helping enrich everyone along the way—economically, intellectually and socially. You get to see absolutely everything that companies handle. Nothing is hidden from the Chief People Officer. It’s truly interesting work, every single day.
My least favorite part is that I still find too many HR professionals consider themselves to be a “support function” and act accordingly by taking direction from others instead of being the driving force in their companies. HR is not a support function in my view—it’s the core of the entire company. How ironic that people have positioned the most strategic function as an “order taker.”
For example, I’ll hear CPOs saying things like “the CEO wants me to be more commercial,” “the CEO wants me to be more strategic,” etc. and they try to fit a mold. If you tell the CEO exactly how to think about certain topics in your domain, and act as their thought partner, they’re not going to tell you what you should be “more of” or “less of” – unless they do so in a helpful way and you do the same for them. The CPO and CEO both need to have conversations on an equal footing, as partners, and that’s when value becomes tangible. I wish people teams were more confident in their own ability, and I wish they would act more confidently.
This situation reminds me of a known quote, which I cannot recall on top of my head, but which pretty much states that the problem with intelligent people is that they doubt themselves too much. HR teams doubt themselves too much.
It sounds like through your experience you really care about people, and you want to help them feel safe and comfortable, which is important in the industry. Please elaborate here.
One of my friends asked me many years ago how I could do a job that made me “fire people.” They added that they could never do something like this and it’s “too horrible.” My response to them was that firing people was far too serious to be done by people who don’t take it seriously and that’s why I wanted to do it myself. At the time, I genuinely felt the weight of its importance — and that sense of significance has stayed with me ever since.
As a people leader, your decisions impact other people, either positively, neutrally or negatively. I have enjoyed being a positive influence on many people and their lives over my career. Most of the time, people don’t even know that they benefitted from my decisions and that’s how it should be. This ranges from making sure that people are not dismissed without valid reasons, to making sure that severance packages are generous. This is also ensuring that policies make everyone’s lives easier and not harder. It’s also about taking decisive action in the face of unacceptable behavior. It’s also being honest with people. I’ll never forget a senior director of HR early in my career, telling me “Marina, when you dismiss someone, never apologize to them. You will look weak, and it will undermine the action itself.”
I thought this was a ridiculous statement and was really shocking to me. How could I dismiss someone and not say I’m sorry about the situation? Of course I’m sorry. That doesn’t mean I’m to blame, or that the decision was wrong — it means I recognize how devastating this is for them. The reality is, they’re losing their livelihoods, and that deserves acknowledgment. It costs nothing to make people feel a bit more supported. Just like good “bedside manner” makes a huge difference in the medical profession, so does thoughtful communication in HR.
How can HR most effectively demonstrate its value to the leadership team?
My answer may sound flippant, but I will be true to myself and be direct: if a leadership team doesn’t understand the value of HR, they have a much bigger problem than the HR leader needing to demonstrate their value. The narrative of “is HR useful?” is long dead and in good companies, it never existed in the first place.
Where do you see the industry heading in five years? Or are you seeing any current trends?
Work is already moving at a dramatically accelerated pace, elevated by AI-driven orchestration that’s enhancing the content, quality, and scale of what’s possible. People teams will continue to be architects of the workplace. Flexibility in work location and schedules will continue. People will continue to integrate multiple careers, activities, and specialties over time.
What are you most proud of?
Giving talented people access to great roles. Being on the lookout for talented people and ensuring that they get promoted and grow their careers. I call it “talent spotting.” I have absolutely loved that about my roles. Having worked with certain people multiple times in various companies – just because we do great work together and have fun in the process.
Do you have any advice for people entering the profession?
Observe and learn from others but always form your own opinions. Challenge rules that don’t make sense to you. Don’t accept the “we’ve always done it this way therefore it must be right” approach but be sensitive to the fact that most people are emotionally attached to what they have done before. Try to grasp the difference between what you need to learn from doing versus what you can simply read about and learn academically.