Lisette Sutherland

[00:00:15] to be here. And what I wanted to talk about today was how to navigate this new remote, let's say, normal, right? Like whatever that means this year. And just some tips for how to navigate this new hybrid way of working that we're starting to see emerge. Um, just a quick note, I am going to be using Slido during the presentation for a couple of questions, so you can access Slido from any device, just slido.com. And the number is 1224. Of course, as we get to the questions, I'll remind everybody of it again. But just so that you know, I am going to just do three poll questions throughout this and that so I'd love for you to be prepared. I can see people answering the questions already, so thank you so much. So yeah, we'll be doing so a couple of poll questions.
[00:01:00] So, as we're all experiencing, COVID sent us all home to work. And a lot of people that doubted whether remote working was possible, actually saw that when necessary, it actually was possible to work together anywhere. It has, however, been a really rough ride as all of us are learning that working at home during a pandemic is not the same thing as remote working. I mean, I've been working remotely for almost 20 years now, and even I have experienced significant stress and disruption during this pandemic. So, you know, uh, between working at home with our families, uh, online schooling, just navigating the different rules of lockdown and all the different tech, there have been a lot of reasons for a bumpy ride. But, many of us did it. And in the process, as we smoothed out the bumps, we realized that remote working wasn't just possible, in some instances, for some people, it was preferable. So, now some people don't want to go back to the office even when it's safe to do so. They don't miss the commute, they don't miss the office politics, they're more productive at home and they like the freedom that remote offers. So, for our first poll question of today, I would really like to ask this audience, when it's safe to do so, do you want to go back to the office 100%? Do you want to work remote 100% or do you want to do some sort of a hybrid situation where you're a part of part of the time at the office and part-time remote? So, again, we're at slido.com and the event code is 1224. I'm going to go ahead and show the results on the screen in real-time. So, with about 73% of the people that are wanting hybrid working and then it's pretty much split evenly between the people who want to work remote and the people that want to be at the office 100%. And to be honest, this is exactly the same numbers that I am seeing all over the world, um, for the last few months. It's pretty much the exact same split everywhere. We are seeing that the majority of people want to be hybrid, so some days at the office and some days remote.
[00:03:19] Now, we're hearing a lot on social media that the future of work is remote, but I think as we can see, the future of work is choice. And I think that people really just want the freedom to choose when and where they're most productive. Uh, and just to say it's not just up to the individuals, uh, to choose how remote they want to be, it's also up to companies to choose how remote they want to be. We've all seen probably and heard of the remote working scale, this one's by Buffer. Matt Mullinwag also had a wonderful interview with Sam Harris about the remote maturity model, highly recommended, it's one of the best interviews I've ever heard on remote working. Um, but the model basically just goes from, you know, where we're, now, level one is everybody is office-based and it goes all the way to, uh, that we're distributed around the world with moving parts. So there's with nomad. So we can be anywhere on that scale. And companies need to evaluate where on this scale that they want to be so that we can design our remote workforces for success. Because if you're going to be a company where you just are office-based with a few work from home options, you don't have to put all the things in place that allow you to be a globally distributed team with nomads. Um, so one of the things though is regardless of where we are on the scale, we want to be remote first, which just means that we have the systems and processes in place to be able to be remote in case we need it. And in the past, I would use examples like we have sick children at home or there's bad weather or a transportation problem, I never expected a global pandemic, but here we are. And all of a sudden being remote first has become imperative for company success. And now is really the time to set our teams up to succeed. So, in this presentation, I'm going to be giving a whole bunch of tips.
[00:05:10] And it's not because I'm some sort of an expert, I'm totally not. I struggle with a lot of the same things that other people struggle with as well. But I'm just super enthusiastic about remote working and I've interviewed almost 270 companies over the last six years about how they're working remotely and what are the practices and the tools that they're putting in place. You can find all of those interviews for free on the website in uh video and podcast form. And then of course, if you'd like to get the book, uh, all of the tips are have been collected in my book. You can also get that on the on my website. And I would just like to say that, um, I do have a remote working success kit that you can download at collaboration super powers.com/super kit. And if you download this success kit during this talk, I'll choose somebody from whoever downloads, uh, randomly for a free book. So I'll send you either a paperback or an ebook, it's totally your choice. Um, but you have to download the remote working success kit to get it. So it's again collaborationsuperpowers.com/superkit. Now, one of the things that I've learned from all of my interviews is that there's no one right way. Sadly, or I would sell the silver bullet formula and make lots of money and everybody'd be happy working remotely. Sadly, there's no one right way. What works for one team doesn't necessarily work for another team and sometimes the reasons we don't really know why they're not always rational. But, when we get it right, the payoff is huge. We as individuals get the freedom to work when and where we're most productive and to design our own lifestyles around the passions that we really love. And companies get the freedom, uh, or people, excuse me, people get the freedom to work when and where they're productive and companies get a stronger and more connected workforce that is not dependent on location. So that's actually really powerful. Before I get into the tips, I wanted to give an example just to show proof of concept that complex global remote projects are possible. And one of the teams that I interviewed was the Rloop team. A couple of years ago, actually a few years ago now, SpaceX announced a competition to design a hyperloop pod. Now, this is a super fast transportation system that can take uh a seven-hour commute and squeeze it into 30 minutes. You're basically being shot through a gravity tube. Now, I would not want to be the beta tester for this, but it sounds pretty cool as most of Elon Musk's projects do. Now, somebody on the online platform Reddit really wanted to join this competition, Tom here. And Tom reached out to people in the subreddit that he was in and he asked, uh, can does anybody want to join this competition with me? One year later, they had a team of over 400 remote volunteers and they came in finalists in the competition, and I think are still working on it. So, I like to use this because it shows that global complex projects are absolutely possible remotely and what I particularly liked about this conversation was, they were all volunteers. It wasn't even a company. They were just doing it because they loved it.
[00:08:19] So you can trust that it's possible.
[00:08:23] So while I said that there's no one right way, I feel like there are three areas of focus where when we focus on these areas, uh, that we increase the likelihood of success. And those areas are working out loud and define what is normal behavior for our team. We need to modify how we communicate and behave online and we need to be deliberate about team building. So those are sort of the three main areas. Let's dive into working out loud and defining normal. What does that mean? What does it even look like? Before I get into it, I'm going to be showing a lot of tools in this presentation just to just to expand people's minds in terms of what's possible. I'm not affiliated with any of the tools. I just want to state that up front. It's just I'm a slavish fan for some of these things. So, uh, so I'll state that up front. And it's not about the tool, it's about the behavior that the tool enables. Okay, but let's dive in. What does working out loud and defining what normal behavior is?
[00:09:22] So, the first thing that we need to do when we're working out loud is we need to make our work visible to our colleagues. Now, most people are already doing this in one form or another, right? We're using Confluence or Jira or Trello or Asana, uh, Basecamp, Zoho, there's there's hundreds of online project management tools out there. But the important thing is we need to visualize our work, um, and organize it in a way where it's accessible so that uh so that people can access it. That's really, really important. But it's not just about visualizing our work, sometimes we want to visualize ourselves as well. So there's now all kinds of virtual offices. We're kind of in a virtual office right now. Remo can be considered a virtual office, it's more like a a conference platform. However, there's one one of my favorites out there is called Wilo, wilow.space. There's also Sococo and walk about uh workplace, there's a whole bunch of them. But what it does is it allows us to have presence with our teams because you can see in this office right here, there's a whole bunch of different rooms and there's different people in the rooms. And you can only hear and see the people that are in the same room as you, but you can go just to another room just by double clicking on that room, just like you do here in Remo. So these kind of tools really help us to create presence with our teams, um, and to feel that sense of team, you feel like there are people around you. I work in a in these virtual office spaces almost every day with people, so they'd be I have office hours, people can come in and see me, and it's really just fantastic what we can do. When I come to work, I come to work in my browser. So that's new. But not only do we create presence just by seeing each other, but one of I think the key skills of remote working is learning how to use virtual whiteboards well because we also want to visualize our ideas, uh, with each other and brainstorm together. So the cool whiteboard kids on the block these days are Jamboards, Miro and Mural, those are sort of the three most popular ones, but again there are many, many more out there. But this ability to visualize our work and to communicate with each other, um, is really powerful.
[00:11:28] So if you haven't used a whiteboard yet, uh, you're in for a pleasant surprise. They're very easy to use and very powerful. So this one, these are sort of the normal standard ones, and you can get kind of fancy. This one is Nareva and it's a whiteboard that is projected onto your wall. You can do all the same things that you can do on a normal whiteboard, uh, except for that you can, you know, you can add sticky notes and videos and drawings from the internet and your colleagues can access these whiteboards from their own devices as well. So these kind of tools really enable that hybrid collaboration in a powerful way.
[00:12:03] Now, I've said before, I've got hundreds of tools on my website, so please definitely check out this page collaborationsuperpowers.com/tools. There are hundreds of tools there, um, to explore. But again, it's not about the tool, it's about the behavior that you're trying to enable. So when you're thinking about the tools that you want to use, think about how do you want people to behave? And then choose your your tool accordingly, of course. So the other part of working out loud though is defining our expectations. And it's important because we're going from a time-based way of working to a results-based way of working. And so when we do that, we actually need to then define what does results, what does that look like? What does success look like specifically? What does failure look like specifically? Does everybody know uh what needs to get done? So it's very difficult. Sometimes we're just used to like, oh, okay, I need to work 40 hours this week and now we have to deliver. So it's up to us sort of all of us to think about how will you measure the results that you're currently delivering. For some, it's easier than others, um, but for those that haven't done it before, it's really a mindset experiment in this case. And one of the biggest things that I recommend for all remote teams is creating a team agreement together. When we work together in the same place, we know what people are doing because we can see them. When you arrive at the office, by the time you get from the door of the office to your desk, you've had a hundred plus micro-interactions, you've seen who's in the conference room, who's getting coffee, who's not feeling well today. Um, you really get a sense of what's going on. When we're remote, we don't have really any of that. So the way that we, uh, sort of tune our teams is by creating team agreements together. And just deciding what information do we need to share, where is it located? You know, are there security protocols we need to think about? How are we going to communicate with each other? What are the tools that we're going to use? Uh, in this interview with Beat Bulman, who is the head of Amaya for Evernote, he said, you would never email the fire department when your house is on fire, right? You would, you would definitely want a different tool for that. On remote teams, you want to also figure those kind of things out too. If there's an emergency on the weekend or after hours, is sending the email the right way, or maybe a WhatsApp is better, or a Slack message or a phone call, really think about which style of communication you need for your team. And then, how do we know what each other are doing? Or do we even need to know what each other are doing? Some teams, you know, can work really asynchronously in a way they don't really need to know. So, creating team agreements just takes away some of the basic misunderstandings that we're going to have with our remote team. Don't worry, there's always plenty more, but just get the basics out of the way.
[00:14:46] Uh, so, my next question in Slido, and I'm going to make sure to switch the poll. So my next question is for this audience, I'd really like to know, do you have a team agreement in place? And I don't mean just like a verbal team agreement with your team. I mean a written team agreement where you've sat down and you've talked about how you're going to communicate, the information that you're going to share, um, all of these things. So I'm going to go ahead and again show my screen, so we can see the results coming in in real time. Again, these results match what I see all over the world, uh, that most teams, we don't have a team agreement in place. Uh, and I would say it's funny because we would never get a sports team together and say, all right, go play, have fun, win the championship. Now we'd never do that with an orchestra either, but for some reason with our teams, we kind of just get together and we start working without defining how we're going to work together. So don't despair, most people, uh, I'm so curious about the other, I'll have to look at the chat later on. Don't despair if you don't have a team agreement in place.
[00:15:50] I have free templates available on the website, uh, that you can download and use. You don't have to follow the templates to the letter, they're just there for inspiration to give you the questions maybe that you don't know you need to ask. Um, so please just definitely go ahead and uh download those templates on the website and put a team agreement in place. I promise it will help make your online life a little bit smoother and it's a nice place for everybody to discuss their assumptions. All right. So that's pretty much covering working out loud and defining normal behavior. That's sort of an easy one. Now I want to move on to how do we modify how we communicate online when we go remote.
[00:16:29] When lockdown started, a lot of companies tried to mimic the office online somehow, and what it resulted in is endless online meetings, right? Soon we started hearing about Zoom fatigue, uh, or just all kinds of virtual fatigue. My neighbors were complaining about the three-hour uh conference calls that they were sitting through without any breaks. I can't even imagine. My bladder would never hold. So my next question for this audience, the last question is, how many hours a week are you spending in meetings right now? Is it just a luxurious zero to two? Two to five, five to 10, more than 20? Have you lost track completely? Where where are we out with this audience right now? Let's see how many hours a week we're working, or how many hours a week we're in meetings.
[00:17:17] Oh man, 20 plus for the majority of the audience so far. Have I got some tips for you? Oh, makes my heart hurt. That's a lot of meetings. Some have lost track completely. There's always a few. Oh man. All right. All right, let me give you some tips for that because it's not sustainable.
[00:17:40] So, what we're learning is that some things, I'll get out of the way of my text, some things don't translate well online. Remote working is a different medium of work than in-person work. And I like to make the analogy between radio and television. Both are broadcasting mediums, but you would design your content for those mediums quite differently. The same is true for remote and in-person. They are not the same thing. In when remote, we have different ways of expressing ourselves.
[00:18:12] Different ways of giving feedback, different ways of showing appreciation and building trust, and the structure of our work day changes. Now, one of the keys to this new remote medium is to be more conscientious about how we're using our time. A really easy place to start is to take any of your meetings that are an hour long and shorten them to 45 minutes or 50 minutes and take a 10 to 15 minute break in between. And actually when I interviewed NASA five years ago, they had already, uh, coined the term virtual fatigue at the time. And in the meetings that NASA had, uh, their rule of thumb was every 40 minutes they took a 10 minute, 5 to 10 minute break depending on how long the overall meeting was going to be. Um, so that's sort of the low hanging fruit. That's really easy things that you can do right away. And I just want to say one thing about the breaks.
[00:19:04] What a lot of us are expe uh experiencing right now is that we're spending way too much time in 2D. Right? We're going from meeting to meeting and maybe in between meetings, we're checking emails or social media, and then after we get off work, we're watching Netflix or YouTube or any of those things. So, uh, and what we're seeing is that it's really bad for our mental health and our well-being. And so what I would encourage people to do is during your breaks,
[00:19:29] Set your phone aside, it's really hard. I've been months practicing this and I'm still really struggling myself. So I'm not some I'm not standing here on any high horse at all.
[00:18:53] how long the overall meeting was going to be. Um, so that's sort of the low hanging fruit. That's really easy things that you can do right away. And I just want to say one thing about the breaks.
[00:19:03] What a lot of us are experi experiencing right now is that we're spending way too much time in 2D. Right? We're going from meeting to meeting and maybe in between meetings, we're checking emails or social media and then after we get off work, we're watching Netflix or YouTube or any of those things. So, uh, and what we're seeing is that it's really bad for our mental health and our wellbeing. And so what I would encourage people to do is, during your breaks, set your phone aside. It's really hard. I've been months practicing this and I'm still really struggling myself, so I'm not some, I'm not standing here on any high horse at all. uh, incorporate some sort of movement in your break. So whether it's going up and down the stairs of your house or uh, uh, doing some laundry, whatever it is to move your body and if possible, take your breaks outside. That's even better. Even if you're just standing and doing some squats and jumping jacks on your balcony, even that is better, um, than just staying inside the whole time, especially during winter. So just to note, right now we're really overdoing it in 2D. I'm getting uh, companies from all over the world contacting me about well-being and mental health. And this is one of the easy places, well, easy, um, it's something that everybody can do. So I just really encourage you to uh, to take some breaks. And uh, oh man, I'm I just noticed the chat. I shouldn't be looking because it's a multitasking. I'm seeing some really, really a lot of meetings. So shorten your meetings, take breaks in between, you will notice a difference.
[00:20:28] Now, the next step is to evaluate whether or not you even need that meeting to begin with or can the conversation be done asynchronously? For example, if you're just meeting to give status updates, then perhaps it could be posted in a slack channel or done over email or even just sending a video. Or if you're joining a meeting where somebody's gonna be giving a presentation, consider recording that presentation before the meeting starts to give everybody a chance to, uh, digest the information and then using your valuable time online for discussions and decision-making. The same is true for brainstorming. You know, no need to get together to brainstorm. Brainstorming should be done individually and then collectively we actually talk about that. So, getting better at asynchronous communication means less interruptions and more control over our workday and a lot less meetings when we get it right.
[00:21:22] It also, the side benefit is that it really gives people time to process information. Some of us, I myself included, it takes me a long time. I don't do well in just in the moment stuff. It takes me some time to process things and so if, if work is done asynchronously, you just have a little bit more time to process. Now I've got this yin yang symbol underneath the question mark to remind myself to mention that the ratio of asynchronous and synchronous work in every company is going to be different and the difficulty is finding what is the right balance for you. But I would just argue right now for those that are spending 20 plus hours a week in meetings, I would definitely consider getting better at asynchronous communication just to reduce as much time as you as is possible. So the key concept is, we want to reduce the number of meetings that we need and we need to improve the meetings that we're having. So because there is, we do need to meet, but when we're meeting online, we also need to improve what we're doing. Because right now, meetings are going on way too long and there's some really bad meeting facilitation out there.
[00:22:30] One of my favorite quotes from the interview is uh, from Agile Bill Krebs and Agile coach in the US and he said, people think that they want to be co-located, but what we really want is high bandwidth communication. We want to be able to talk to our remote colleagues as if they were in the same room with us. And I like the analogy with Star Trek, right? We want to be able to just push a button and say, set to the bridge, report. And from anywhere on the ship, I get a report and there's no coffee shop sounds or barking dogs or screaming children in the background, there's just crystal clear communication. The other part of this of high bandwidth is we want to make it easy to move from asynchronous modes of communication to live ones. So for instance, if you're in a text and it's starting to get heated or complicated, you want to be able to quickly move into like a video call or even just a phone call. So one thing to say about video is that uh, a lot of people don't like to turn their videos on, but I will say that having your video on makes it way more engaging. I'm going to do my little party trick here just to show you because if I make myself completely disappear, all of a sudden it's just slides and a voice, right? You can feel the engagement going down when I remove the video. And then when I make myself larger again, oops, I don't have to be so large, but when I make myself larger again, you can see that the engagement goes up. And that's because we're programmed sort of to respond to each other visually. So if you're finding engagement is lower on your team, just try turning the videos on in your meeting and seeing how that increases things.
[00:24:00] So, it's not just the individuals though that need to improve our infrastructure, right? As individuals, we need to have a good webcam, a great internet connection, don't spare money there, um, you know, a headset, a comfortable space to work in. And since we're going to be going to this hybrid way of working, we need to update our offices and the infrastructure in our offices as well. If you're working in an office with one of these old spider phones sitting in the middle of the conference room table, you know, when you have to lean over, be like, hey Bob, it's Lacette, can you hear me? These things need to be replaced with more modern technology because in this scenario, the remote participants are like the mosquitoes in the room. Right? You kind of know that they're there, you can hear them a little bit, but you really wish they weren't. What we want to do is we want to update our conference rooms to something a little bit more like this. And what's important about this setup is that the remote participants are present, they're like large, you don't have to be huge, of course, that's another, that's something else. Uh, but you know, you want to be life-size. Um, and you'll notice that the in-person participants are facing the remote ones, so that there's more inclusion and conversation. So there are tools out there, of course, that can help with this. One of the most popular on the market right now is called the Meeting Al. It's a 360 degree camera and microphone that here at the top, you'll see that the remote participant when they call in, they see everybody in the room and then it uh auto focuses on the person that's speaking. So these kind of things can replace those old spider phones and just help to create more inclusion and more presence for the remote participants. I'm going to go a little bit far out though and show you some of these uh, uh, sort of more out there tools. One of those is telepresence robots. These are basically life-size drivable robots where you beam in just like on Microsoft Teams or on Zoom, any video conferencing tool, but now you can drive yourself, moving the arrow keys on your keyboard. So you know, the up arrow is going forward, the left arrow is going to the left and so on. And uh, if you have an office that has a lot of stairs or a swimming pool or elevators, this is probably not the tool for you. But if it's a long flat office, then this is a great one. And the folks at suitable technologies, the people who make the beam Pro, they actually have 50% of their workforce in the flesh and 50% of the people beaming in via robot these days. And in fact, during COVID days, they, uh, they mostly did people beaming in via robot because of course, why, why would you not?
[00:26:32] And then the last technology that I want to just show off and talk about is virtual reality. Which has been around for over 20 years, but it has been extremely difficult to use. Now with the Oculus Quest, you can actually within five minutes, you can put on your Oculus Quest, download the meeting VR software. This is this is my favorite tool right now. It's called Meetin VR. And you can be in a meeting with other people in virtual reality. So you're sitting around the table, you can hear who's to the left and who's to the right of you. Uh, you can pull up a screen and just show people something on YouTube and then throw it out or write on a virtual whiteboard together. Absolutely amazing what's possible and the costs are coming way down. So if you have an Oculus Quest, I highly recommend trying some of these technologies out. I know it's not viable for everyone, but I just want to show people where the market is headed. And then there's one more example after this that I won't show, uh, but I just want to mention that holograms are right around the corner. Speaking of star, I made the Star Trek reference, now this is kind of a Star Wars reference, but uh, holograms really are right around the corner, they're coming up with all kinds of technology, it's just really expensive at the moment. So, the idea is,
[00:27:41] we want to reduce the number of meetings that we need and improve the meetings that we have. And we can do that by really exploring what can we do asynchronously and then how do we update our technology at home and in the office to help create more presence and to make for those Star Trek conversations.
[00:28:00] One last thing about this is, if your team is really struggling, consider getting training for your team. This is a new medium of work. And we all have, you know, everybody thinks of umbrella drinks and working at the beach when they think of remote working because of all those terrible stock photos that we see, but if you've ever worked at that Andy, about that Andy, the sun on your screen and sand in the keyboard, it's not the dream that people make it out to be. So if you're really struggling in this new medium, there's some great training out there from my company, of course, but also from other companies out there. Um, so I'd definitely recommend training your team in this new skill. skill.
[00:28:36] Okay, we've talked about working out loud, defining normal behavior. We've talked about how we modify how we communicate online. And I want to briefly talk about team building.
[00:28:47] So, T, you know, team building is one of these things is uh, is it go it kind of decreases over time, the longer that we go remote, sort of the, the team building goes down on the team. And the most important part of it is that we really do need to be deliberate about our team building and proactive on it. One of the uh, positions that I recommend in their new offices, their new hybrid offices is to have a remote office manager. You know, in the office we have an office manager, but remote, we don't ever consider that position. But an office manager can be somebody who helps keep the files in good order, who helps schedule these team building sessions, maybe virtual lunches or virtual coffees. Um, somebody that just pays attention to make sure that these things are happening, because if we leave it to chance, chances are that it'll get left behind.
[00:29:37] So, we want to schedule our serendipity. Because unless you're working in a virtual office or in one of these telepresence robots, you're not going to accidentally bump into people online. So if you want to hang out with colleagues, uh, we've got to make an effort and schedule that. Most companies that I'm seeing out there now, they're doing virtual lunches, virtual coffees, drinks and uh, quiz nights, there's all kinds of things that we can do. Um, just make sure that it's always optional for employees because not everybody wants to, you know, after a long day of meetings, the last thing you want is a virtual drink or a quiz night, right? You want to get off the computer and spend time on your own hobbies, hopefully offline. Um, so definitely Another thing that I can recommend is really playing games together.
[00:30:21] Pictionary is one of my favorites online. You can play Pictionary within five, seven minutes during a meeting. Everybody has a really good time and you learn how to use a virtual whiteboard, which has an added benefit. So you can see from these scratches, I'll bet you can recognize which one is the banana, right? And it's not necessarily a good drawing, but even with bad drawings, it's really powerful what we can, what we can portray. So I've got a huge list of team building activities in the resources section, of course, that you can download or just check it out. There's speed typing tests, board games, virtual museum tours, all kinds of things that you can do together as a team. Um, so definitely be sure to check that out. And then the last thing that I'll mention about team building, especially in these times and uh, especially crawling towards December, I think everybody's feeling very tired after this year. is I would just encourage you to check in with each other. If you notice that people on your team, if you haven't heard from them in a while or you're just not sure how things are doing, especially if you're a leader on the team, I really recommend just calling and seeing how people are doing and seeing if there's anything that you can do for each other. So at the moment, you know, we're heading into a, into winter, it's been a hard year, it's not going to get any easier for the next couple of months. We should really be there for each other. So I just want to put out that last reminder of like just each other.
[00:31:41] So, it looks like the future of work is choice. The freedom for the individual to choose when and where we're most productive and the freedom for the companies to choose how remote they want to be in the future. Netflix famously, uh, the CEO of Netflix famously wants to bring everybody back to the office when the pandemic is over. And I think, great, if that's the company that he wants to have, I'm sure there are plenty of people that want to live in the Bay Area and work in an office every day and so he, they will find those kind of people. Um, for the ones that want to work hybrid, they will find other companies. So it's really about the, it's about choice for everybody and I think that that is, I think it's wonderful actually to have that kind of choice. So, to just say there's no one right way to work remotely. Sadly, it comes down to experimenting to figure out what is it that's going to work for you and what is it that's going to work for your team. And when we get it right, the payoff is huge. We get freedom to work when and where we're most productive and to design our lifestyles around the hobbies and the passions that we love the most, and our companies get a stronger and more connected workforce that is not dependent on location. And now is really the time to set ourselves up to succeed. Because it's uh, we're going to be here a while, it looks like. The vaccine is coming, but it's going to take a while. So, just another reminder, there's still time to download the remote working success kit, again, collaborationsuperpowers.com/superkit. Um, you can get they've got virtual icebreakers, time zone tips, meeting facilitation tips, all kinds of things there. Um, and I'll choose somebody to send a copy of the book to. Um, if you don't get chosen for the book, you can still get it at uh licettsutherland.com/book and the code WTA30 will get you a discount. So I hope that you'll use that. And then one last thing that I'd like to promote is uh, my, I have 70 facilitators that are giving workshops uh, and for collaboration superpowers. Uh, and they have gotten together and put together what they call the workshop extravaganza. So on the 16th of December, we're going to meet. There are 10 workshops being offered. Everybody gets to choose two out of the 10. Uh, we're going to be doing some fun virtual icebreakers before and after and just spend a short afternoon together, uh, workshopping. So they're all engaging interactive online workshops. So if you're interested in doing something like that, they are some of my best facilitators and some of the best workshops. So definitely check out the extravaganza. All right. I'm going to end things here. I know it's Friday night. And I really appreciate you being here with me tonight and I hope that there was something useful in the talk, um, that you can take back to your teams and that will help make the next few months a little bit easier. And may hopefully more fun.

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