E085: Remote Working Cultures

Hello. This is James and this is Jane, and

here we are again with another episode of a world of work podcast. What are we speaking about today?

Jane, well, today we are talking to a lovely guest all the way from Portugal, Gonzalo Silva, and we are going to be talking about remote work and asynchronous working. Cool,

that's pretty exciting stuff, isn't it? I mean, I think there's so much stuff in remote working and asynchronous working, something that people don't always speak about. So it'll be great

to learn more about that. Yeah, I think, I think he's got some really interesting ideas, and I think the organization that he works for for are trying to change the way we think about frenetic and instantaneous responses to work. So I think that's a really exciting topic. Cool.

All right, well, let's get into the conversation and see what we learn. Okay, so here we are in the main body of this podcast, and we're joined by Gonzalo today, and today we're really going to be exploring remote working, which is topical and growing around the world. And what we're going to be looking at is predominantly the role of culture in relation to remote working. But we're going to do a bit more before we do that, before we get into that, though, Gonzalo, could you introduce yourself to the audience and say a bit more about yourself and your background? Yeah.

Hi everybody. My name is Gonzalo. I'm based in Porto, Portugal, and I am currently leading engineering at duist. So I'm CTO of a fully distributed company. There's about 80 of us working from 35 countries all around the globe.

That's pretty cool. That sounds like you've got a good insight into remote working and being distributed around so many countries is pretty interesting in terms of who remote working works for, in terms of which types of teams, what types of teams have you seen really succeed when they've adopted a remote working approach?

That is, that is a great question. So there's some variation, obviously, but I would also say there are some common traits. When you look at different companies and teams being successful at working remotely, from buffer to duist itself to automatic like the early days of GitHub and everything, there are a few traits which I would say are pretty common along the folks building the products, and even the leadership, the way they act. So one of the, I think, core differences is really autonomy. So a lot of these people, especially the early people, as far as I can tell, they really value autonomy. So they thrive in a context where things might not be super specified, where they might not get real time feedback from their peers so they are able to make, you know, autonomous decisions act independently and drive change by themselves. So I guess autonomy and independence really, really play a role in this. In this case, another aspect which I think is super critical, is the also the ability to communicate asynchronously. And I guess we'll be covering this in more in depth later on, but I really think it's a trigger and a big, a big departure from the typical office setting where you sit next to your teammates and you communicate mostly synchronously and in real time. Yeah, that's

really cool. I've just written down asynchronous. It was definitely something that we'd like to come back and explore. If we're thinking about about, you know, autonomy and control and the importance of those aspects for people in remote teams. Do you think that teams need to hire for those attributes if they're in a location? I mean, is the hiring process different if you're trying to bring people

in? That's a good question. I think we can build a lot of these traits and help people grow within these roles, within these constraints. I've seen it happen many times, but we've also struggled to do this with every single individual, so we have had a few cases where, I mean, honestly, we couldn't make it work. And obviously, I'm pretty sure we could have approached it better in some ways or in others. But it's not entirely clear if you can grow into the role all of the time, because remote work, just like everything else, has some trade offs, right? And you individually might not be inclined to accept these trade offs. They might not work great for you the human connection as much as we can work around this, it's not the same as when you're right next to other people, right? So there are peculiar things that make remote work amazing for some individuals, but they can make it really hard for others too. Yeah,

one of the things that we see in some of the conversations we have when we explore remote work is challenges for individuals around things like mental health. Is that something that you've seen in your space, or how do you kind of manage through the mental health aspect of remote working?

Yeah, this is definitely a super important topic. In fact, something that I usually recommend to people exploring remote work within their teams and companies is to talk openly about mental health, which is. Is something that not a lot of co located companies do. It's not a fame usually, right? But in the remote context, I highly recommend being vigilant on this, creating a culture where people talk about their mental health, just as you know, as normally as they talk about really anything else. For example, we have a mental health month at duist, where we for it's actually, this is the month we're using this time around May. And we're talking, we talked about a lot of topics related with mental health that are exacerbated by remote work. If you're Of Missing Out Stress isolation, we try to be as upfront and open about these on you know, on a theoretical level, you know, analyzing this various situations, but also on a personal level, how are these affecting us individually? How do we feel about them? What can we do? How can we help each other? How can you support each other through these times, and especially now, with the whole Coronavirus situation, we have, you know, another stress factor in people's minds. So I would definitely recommend being vigilant about this and playing a proactive role on it, so before an issue actually happens or surfaces, just, you know, talk about it, even before there is any kind of problem. Because, you know, remote work is cool and everything. But after all, we're just all seeing it sitting at home or in cafes, working separately from each other, so we can really lean on body language and other signs to pinpoint problems before they become big, right? Like remote work, you'll only learn about it when it's an actual big problem. Yeah,

I guess that's right. I guess it's easier for people to mask low levels of stress or anxiety or other mental health challenges because they're not in that face to face environment. So if things like mental health are one of the challenges, or, I guess, risks associated with remote working for individuals, have you got thoughts on what some of the risks for organizations are of adopting remote working? What kind of things might they be concerned about before they go into it, or when they do go into it?

It's a good question. I think the first one is that a big part of the rule book goes out of the window. So we have decades and decades of amassed knowledge on how to build and run companies right like there's, of course, there's a vast number of methodologies, a vast number of approaches, but there's a lot of research and a lot of examples in history and written down in books and blog posts and talks that people can leverage and learn from when you're operating remotely. Not all of it, but a big chunk of it goes out of the window, because, again, like the way you collaborate, the way you work, the the soft skills that that play into the remote work lifestyle are quite different, or can be quite different. So that lack of research, that lack of best practices, can really scare some people off. I mean, even 10 years ago, remote working remotely was pretty much a fringe event. So there's a lot of new things coming into it. And, for example, a lot of one area where I think there is a big departure from the usual way of doing things. Is leadership. This actually is not specific to remote work at all, and hopefully we can all grow together, both remote companies and co located companies, as we learn from remote work. But a lot of the management styles and a lot of the management histories we have lean a lot on micromanagement, having a lot of control over the roadmap and what employees are doing, what people are doing and how they're doing it. If you try to apply something like this to remote work, you're going to have a really bad time. This is really not a system that works for working remotely, and instead, you have to build really strong bridges of trust and autonomy and help people navigate this kind of independence. And so, of course, this is not specific to remote work, because we can easily argue that autonomy and trust are as important in co located companies. But the kicker here is that micromanagement could work in a co located company, but it definitely does not work in a, you know, in a remote context. So, you know, really not having a strong rule book, I think is a big risk factor, risk factor for companies, because they will have to be they will have to innovate a lot. They will have to think from first principles very often. And this can be scary, right? Like it's uncharted territory. A lot of the times it

feels a little bit like there's going to be a gap between what people might have been taught, or what they have experienced before they became leaders, and then they're going to step potentially into leadership roles that are completely different from what they're expecting. We know you've said before, culture is king when it comes to remote working, and you've kind of alluded to that a little bit. What could you explain a little bit to the audience, what you mean by culture, exactly why it's so important with regards to remote working?

Yeah, the reason why culture is king is that I think to take advantage, to take real advantage of working remotely, of working distributedly, you should have a culture that is optimized for the strengths of this system. And this is an this is where I will. Circle back to asynchronous communication. I really believe that asynchronous communication is key to making, you know, remote to taking remote work to the next level. I would personally equate asynchronous communication as big of as a change as remote work itself. However, asynchronous communication is very counterintuitive. You know, we human beings, we have, you know, evolved over millennia to communicate synchronously, to talk with each other, to, you know, look face to face, to interpret body language. So when we switch to a way of working that relies mostly on sitting back and reflecting on things for hours on end, sometimes days before, crafting a response, a long form, thoughtful response. Doing this for most of our communication can be a little daunting, and this is a skill we have to train. This is something we can, you know, ingrain into our culture, but it won't happen accidentally, at least not uneventfully. So investing in our culture in a way that embraces asynchronous communication as much as possible so that we can maximize not only our productivity, but also the quality of our work and the quality of our discussions and the decisions that we make is something we need to foster within our culture. There are certain aspects, certain values we need to foster, we need to grow into, we need to collaborate and support each other as we navigate them and become better every single day. And not all of them will come naturally. So building this culture around asynchronous processes, around asynchronous communication, is key, but that requires you know, specific effort and a conscious effort to become better at it. Because, you know, generally speaking, a lot of the processes we use on traditional companies, on co located companies, are not asynchronous. A lot of the tools that we use are not optimized for asynchronous communication. Think, you know, Microsoft, teams or slack, and I would argue that, you know, it's not a behavior that comes naturally to us, generally speaking. So there, there is a lot of friction to making this work. But once you do, and I think we experience this at duist Quite often, and other peers we talk to as well, once you make asynchronous communication work, you can really take advantage of that. You know of those uninterrupted blocks of time to do your best thinking, to do your best work. And there is a lot of research on this, actually. So we have, for example, the the book on deep work, which basically asynchronous communication allows us to optimize towards deep work as much as possible and still retain the benefit, the usual benefits of communication. And as I said, initially the communication themselves, itself becomes high with you know, the signal rises. So there is a higher signal, because instead of as much subjectivity or knee jerk reactions or playing off of initial intuition, we actually embrace a workflow that allows us to sit back and reflect and craft our best response, so that allows us to have very high signal communication and make better decisions.

I think that's I think that's just absolutely fascinating. When I think about my engagement and the way I engage online. For example, there's a couple of member groups that I there are forums, and the way in which I will approach writing a forum post that I know is going to be visible and reflect my thoughts and opinions to a group that I care about, their opinion of me is completely different from the way I might chuck out a tweet or have a quick conversation with James on the phone or on Zoom. And that ability to reflect and that space and that time, it kind of feels like a throwback to when you know you had to put someone to the trouble of typing your letter, if you had a secretary, for example, the traditional officer, and you wanted to make sure it was right, because someone was going to do the work. Yeah, exactly

which is such an important idea. So you've mentioned a little bit about trust and autonomy already, but what, what do you think the key cultural factors are, and why and how do they interrelate? So aside from trust and autonomy, is there anything else that we should be considering, yeah,

for sure. I mean, we were just talking a lot about asynchronous communication, which, of course, you can think of loom or cloud app at this point, where people record screencasts of what they're doing, and that works fine, and it's a great tool. But I guess a lot of the a lot of the communication people would would be doing asynchronously would be writing. So actually, your communication skills, and particularly your writing skills, are really, a really, really, really good investment to make. So our content writer usually makes this remark that, you know, everybody, every remote worker, is a writer, and I think she's totally right. This is really something that should be key to anybody working remotely. How well can you write, how succinctly Can you write? It's really a skill worth mastering, and it's really something that should make it onto the culture where teams and companies working remotely have really, really high standards of communication. I guess we have, obviously, I believe in a value system that has more things into it, and we can go over those, but very specific to remote work. I think those three would be very crucial, autonomy, trust and communication.

Cool, I think that's a great sort of collection. Jane reflected a bit on the asynchronous working, and I think it's it's excellent as well. And as my career has changed over time and I've become increasingly asynchronous, I found that I do have space for deep work, and that's excellent. I'm looking at it a slightly different way. Do you know of any organizations that are not remote that have pushed towards a more asynchronous approach? Have you got thoughts about that? Is it something that people, if they are co located, can do to improve their asynchronicity? If that's the word,

I definitely think there is an opportunity there. I don't actually know any, at least very obvious examples of this happening. I do agree it's a massive opportunity, regardless of whether you are remote or not. The reason I think this is typical, more typical in remote organizations, it's become it's because it becomes a little more obvious, right? But I definitely agree. I mean, just because you are co located, it doesn't mean you should not optimize towards deep work and long form, thoughtful communication. There's really no reason not to do that, except for, you know, just being comfortable in the usual way of communicating, which is typically not in this way.

I've got, I've got a question. So I've worked in the past in sort of an international organization. It's not as distributed as yours. But one of the things that I find happens is, you know, when I get in in the morning, I tend to find that I'd have a series of overnight emails, and I'd sort of go in and feel this sense of full inbox in the morning, and at the time, I'd feel an urge to manage and work my way through those. And I'd feel slightly burdened and overwhelmed by this. If somebody's in a similar position to that. And you know, you started today when you've got all those things to do. How do you think you can manage yourself through that well? Or how can you culturally get to a stage where it's okay to manifest in your own times?

This is really about asynchronous communication in itself, right? Like our like we define internally asynchronous communication, maybe not in the way you would expect. We define it as posting a message or starting a thread and not expecting an immediate response. So when everybody embraces this kind of behavior, this kind of workflow, I mean Fear Of Missing Out and that sense of overwhelm does not entirely disappear, but it can definitely become much more manageable, because you're able to prioritize much, much more, and you don't have as big of a nerd to go to inbox zero, right? Like obviously you need to keep up. That's expected, but there is a lot more margin for you to optimize. How do you keep up? You don't need to do it every morning. You don't even need to do it every day, depending on what's happening around you. So while it doesn't entirely solve the problem, I do think that if everybody is playing the same game, so everybody is really has agreed and is trying to make asynchronous communication work, it's a little bit different than trying to be mindful about this just on your own, without collaboration and support from your teammates. If it's a collaborative effort, and it's much, much easier to make it work.

Yeah, that sounds that sounds good. And it feels like I, in my past working life, would have benefited from some of that, I guess, sort of agreement at a team or organizational level about those ways of working. If, if you're speaking to people who are, who are looking to get better at remote working, maybe looking to get better at improving their asynchronous working how, how do you advise them, or what things can you think of it would help them adopt this type of culture and then to bring those traits to life for people in their teams,

I think they can make some great arguments about why this is an area worth, you know, experimenting with and researching that there is a lot of research around working remotely, and there is quite a bit of research also around deep work. So you know, either if you're interested in one or the other, or maybe both, I really think you can make a strong case within your team or within your company, or to management, whoever you want to make a strong case to that is built upon data and actual research on why it's worth experimenting with these things. And another thing I would recommend is starting slowly, like you know, there's no need to adopt all of the best practices all at once. In fact, it can be very overwhelming. Personally, I've been doing this for almost a whole decade, and I'm still learning. Thing, like, there's a lot the way I work today is very different from what the way I worked a year ago. So, you know, taking it easy, one step at a time, and just making sure to adopt processes that make sense for you, your team and your context, would be my recommendation. That's

good and and do you find that organizations that do this successfully, do they codify those thoughts? Do they have, you know, documented ways of working, or principles, or anything like that, that that people refer back to, or is it a sort of organic, unspoken acknowledgement of a way of working?

Yeah, so now is the time that I go back a little bit to when I referenced three values that I thought were essential for remote work. There is actually a fourth one, which is transparency. And transparency really requires a lot of things, but not only discussing things in the open, but also documenting things, so that things become, you know, expected, so that they are commonly understood. And when there is something to challenge everybody you know, kind of like, knows where it is and how to challenge it. So I really think these things need to be written down somewhere. For example, the way you do things, the way you work, the way you are expected to communicate, should be written down somewhere. An example I have is that even though you communicate asynchronously, and you have all of the flexibility in the world to you know, communicate in a way that suits you, it's probably a bad idea if somebody asks you something and you respond one month later, right? Like there must be some kind of expectation of what's acceptable and what isn't, even if you embrace the async culture, and this needs to be written down. Similarly, all companies will have a set of core values they they want to uphold. They that they want to uphold, in the way they work, the way they communicate, the products that they build, whatever that is, we also have our own set of values, and this needs to be known across the organization, right, like people need to understand this, because this, these core values will guide your decisions. They will guide your decision making. They will guide your choices. In some instances, they might even guide your road map. So being explicit about what you value is very, very important to bring alignments to people from A to Z within the organization, if, if everybody's in agreement of what the core values are, the decisions and the processes and everything that's happening around you suddenly will make more sense, especially, of course, if these values are being actually used in practice, which is a given, I guess. So I would definitely circle back to add transparency to that list of three. So that makes it four, and a great way to maintain transparency is through documentation, documenting, documenting how you reason about things, the decisions you make, why you make them, and just making sure that these documents are visible to everybody and that people can challenge them and ask questions. This part of the culture is really, really key to making it work, both remotely and asynchronously.

Thanks for that. I'm really interested in this is something you mentioned earlier, and I think I've spotted it in your organization, on some of the information you put out as well. This idea of a calm workplace, which at first glance, feels almost counterintuitive to what we are told. I think the narrative is sometimes about what a successful, thriving workplace is. And I'd just be interested in your thoughts on what, what you see as the major benefits of creating as calm a workplace as possible, and whether that is central to this, to the whole need for asynchronous working? Yeah,

this is a great question. I guess this is one of the biggest challenges we have, at least us as a company, because we want to prove that we can scale, that we can grow, we can have a large impact in the world while having a calm workplace, so a workplace where people don't feel overwhelmed. Where they, you know what they need. Obviously they there's high standards of work, but in a way that's sustainable and balanced. And we think asynchronous communication plays a huge role here, because one of the things that's very expensive to many people is context switching. So if you have, you know, ambitions, and you have a big plan for the week or the month, but then you go in and you jump on your email, you spend half an hour there. Then you try to focus on work a little bit, but you get a notification from slack or whatever. You jump back into Slack, you reply to whatever needs attention. You try to go back into work, but somebody pulls you in from whatever other medium, maybe a call, and you spend your whole day context switching back and forth. This really adds up in terms of stress levels, and by the end of the day, you will have struggled to do any kind of meaningful work. If you have a culture based on async, you know the playing field changes because you can really block. Out time to do every specific thing you know. Shallow work is also necessary. You need to reply to emails and to, you know, everybody else's messages. But if you do this in a structured way, if you have a block of time to do this and another block of time to actually do whatever creative work you are doing, you will usually end the day with a much more, you know, with a bigger sense of fulfillment, and you will be able to achieve your goals more commonly. So I guess the calm workplace is a bit of a lot of this that I just described, paired with the notion that, you know, we should be basically working eight hours a day, five days a week, and that should be enough to build really, really great products.

It just, I mean, we, we James and I talk on a regular basis about the emerging productivity gap, particularly certainly in the UK. I'm not familiar enough with the rest of the world, but it just, it strikes me that the concept of shallow work versus deep work, and the concept of how we how we as humans, attuned to this tick things off, is a bit of a challenge for us. I think one of the things that

we talked a little bit about at the very beginning about some of the resistance to remote working that organizations sometimes feel because they're not comfortable, and one of the things that often get cited from leaders, particularly leaders who maybe aren't confident in this space, is, well, how will I know what's happening? How will I How will I have an understanding of how my team are doing? So what are your thoughts on how leaders can manage performance remotely and can sort of track what's going on without becoming a micro manager?

I think there is a big shift between basically the management style, especially for these individuals that want to know what people are doing. It's really tough, because you're not supposed to know what people are doing all the time, and we need to find ways to live with this. Arguably, this should be the case even for co located companies, but in remote, remote it's especially true. And I think it's much more interesting. It's much more fulfilling for everybody involved, the leaders and the employees, if instead, there is more work done from the perspective of autonomy and trust. So if people have a goal, a goal that you know, they a goal, that they align with a goal that's important for them, and they are given ownership over whatever the goal is, they will usually perform a lot better. And people don't need to be on top of what they're doing or how they're doing, doing it. People don't necessarily need to be monitored to do great work, right? Actually, I would argue the reverse. If you need to monitor someone for them to do great work, you have a deeper problem. So there's maybe a misalignment with the mission, maybe a misalignment with the task, and these things need to be discussed and ironed out. So if you base your productivity on, you know, basically alignment and transparency. It's just you're gonna, you're gonna get much, much better results. So the research is out there, actually. So this, we have this actually on our blog, there's some research around this. I would highly recommend people research this topic on micromanagement versus autonomy, and see for themselves. If the goal is really to build a happy, fulfilled and productive team, then micromanagement, in a traditional sense, is really not the way across the industry, and it's worth reevaluating.

Yeah, and I would as a passionate supporter of self determination theory and then role of autonomy in that I would wholeheartedly endorse that's encouragement for people to understand and read it. So last, last question for me, if there's people listening in maybe smaller organizations that are sitting at home right now thinking, Okay, so COVID and lockdown has changed the way I think about my team. They've been great. I'd like to make this, optionally, a more permanent thing. What where do they start? What's the because, obviously, they've done it at the moment as a response to things, but they actually want to make them more proactive. Where would they start? What would your tips be on how to start moving towards this slightly, or this very much more calm, asynchronous working, and that approach to remote working? Yeah.

Well, I think the good first step is, as we discussed a little bit earlier, is making a good case based on the available data. Luckily, there's quite a bit of research around the topic. But something I think it's super important to realize is that actually there are two things which I think are key to this transition. The first one is that I don't think what most people are experiencing now is working remotely. What they are experiencing is working from home during a pandemic, and that that is quite, quite a bit different even us. I mean, we've been doing this for many years. And we're struggling a lot more now than usual. So there is a difference flow to remote work when you're not stressed all the time, when you're not anxious all the time. So I mean, there's that. Another one is that I think there is a lot of hype right now around remote work, because, you know, a lot of companies are adopting remote work. Some of the big players are making big bets. You know, we've seen Shopify, Twitter, even Facebook is discussing having all of them, or most of the workforce, able to work remotely in the future. But actually, I think there will be a very dangerous period. I'm not entirely sure when this will happen, maybe in the end of the year, maybe beginning of the next but when some of the organization, a part of the organizations, will move back into the office, and then you'll have a hybrid scenario, where some people will be working in an office, other people will be working remotely. And actually, I think this hybrid approach is very, very, very hard to make, to do right? Because it's very, very tough to have a strong culture around the same topics we discussed today, communication, documentation, and so you risk creating second class citizens, where the people in the office are on the inside, they are on the loop, they are informed, and, you know, they're able to contribute early on to ideas and initiatives. And people on the outside, working remotely, they become a lot more blind to this. The thing is, when everybody is remote, it's very hard not to talk about things. It's very hard not to document, because everybody benefits from this. But if you have a portion of people in an office, this starts requiring discipline, because now you you have an option. You might talk to your colleague next to you and then announce whatever decision you made, or start whatever initiative you discussed. But if people are remote, they will feel blind to this. And I think this will be a very tough challenge that maybe, you know, the companies that are experiencing remote for the first time now are not seeing it coming, but I do think it will be a bit of a bumpy road once you know, officially we can start moving back into the office. And some companies decide to do that, partially because I feel that suddenly remote work will not work that well for them, and they might not really understand what's happening.

You know, I've heard, I've heard that described as remote first first before, and what was meant by that phrase is, when you're looking to work remotely, if you do have a mixed team, you need to make sure that the remote, the remote workers, are first in that and that even if you have people in a building co located, you put the remote working first as an effort to fix that. But it clearly seems like it's, um, it's a real challenge that people will face, and I'll be interested to see what comes out of over the next few years as we move back to offices or not. Yeah,

and I think some some of the big like some, but some people are thinking about this. I am very inspired by what I read from Shopify, specifically because they are already planning. They are moving remote, but they are already planning a partial return to the office, but they have really some really interesting rules about this. Like, for example, if people meet in the same room. They are supposed to. Each and every one of them are supposed to be in their own computer, in their own phone booth, or any decisions need to be documented in writing, in their communication tool, none. No decisions can be made outside of this. So practices like this, I think, really help reduce this risk. But I'm unsure if all of the companies are thinking about this, or even in a good position to consider these shortcomings and these risks. Yeah, it takes foresight. I was just going to

mention it was really interesting. So I worked with a couple of organizations that have had that mix for a while, and everything you've the much smaller organizations, and everything you've described was the experience of the remote workers that they felt it was really bumpy, and they felt excluded. And one of the things about this period is that, for the first time, leadership seemed to have real empathy for that mixed experience, and how, how sort of difficult it must have been for them to be sort of not in the room, so to speak. And and it will be really interesting. I think those small organizations that I know will be really organizations that I know I'll be really interested to see where they go to next, because they seem to have learned so much about the divide when some people are co located and others aren't,

yeah, and this can be the difference between a happy and productive organization and, you know, a lot of frustration.

Yeah, all right, well, I'm afraid we are pretty much out of time. I think we've covered a wide range of really interesting topics there. And it sounds like and it sounds like you're working on some great things, and clearly have some some good insight and reflection and focus on trying to to really make this work before we go. Is there anything that people could do to learn more about you, or what you do at duist or or learn more about your thoughts on this?

Yeah, I mean, I try to be active on Twitter. So my handle is a bit complex. It's Goncalo as Silva, but I guess I can send it to you, yeah? I will share it, yeah, definitely, yeah. I try to be active there, around engineering, but also remote work. But maybe much more important than my Twitter handle is the our blog. So do its blog at duist COMM slash blog has a lot of content, a lot of content on asynchronous communication, a lot of content on working remotely. A lot of content on what we call the workplace of the future, you know, with a different set of values, that works slightly differently. So we try our best to document our experiences and do our own research. And I really think it's a high quality blog that I really recommend people interested in these topics to visit and see if maybe there's an article or two they're interested about, because I'm pretty sure there's something for everyone there that's

excellent. Well, we've certainly learned a lot on this call. I think it's been excellent. So it's just time to say thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. I had a great time.

Okay, so you are back in the room with us now, with Jane and myself, and that was our conversation with Gonzalo Silva from dewist. We talked about some good stuff there. Did you have any strong takeaways that you'd like to reflect on? Jane? Well,

perhaps unsurprisingly to the audience, the idea of a calm workplace was somewhat appealing to me. Yeah, I think, I think it's really interesting, because we, you and I were talking a little while ago about the idea of creating a vision of the workplace you want and working towards it. And it just struck me as he was talking that I can't imagine anything more lovely than turning on my laptop and taking time to browse people's thoughtful, considered responses to various issues, and then cracking on with work, and then over the day, thinking, reflecting on what I might suggest or be able to add to that.

Yeah, it feels kind of like a counter move or a response to the frenetic nature of a lot of life at the minute and and it really feels that there is a lot of waste in that frenetic energy. I mean, you just kind of burn off wasted energy. And it's, it's interesting. I think there's something really interesting in that, for me, one of the things that really stood out was asynchronous working. And asynchronous working is kind of an enabler to that aspect of calm. You know, if you, if you don't expect to reply to your emails right away, then maybe you don't write for responses to your emails right away, and that gives you time for measured, thoughtful response. And you know, what do they say? Measure twice and cut once or less, haste, more speed and things like that. I can really see benefits to adopting that type of working. Yeah, I think

one of my biggest frustrations always in the workplace is email chains that splinter. They're speedy, and people are just tapping and they're writing as if they're talking. And I think his focus on the skills of writing and the way with which we choose to respond and how and when and with what is really, really important. And I think we need to move away from this concept that you need to have a reaction from me instantly, because, and we've, we've been empowered to be able to do that through the tools that we've we've now got over the last 4050, years, through phone and it and internet and the various tools we now need to step back and say, what of that is useful and what isn't? Yeah,

I know that I've certainly wasted a lot of time with those instantaneous replies. And there's one of the challenges is that there's quite a sort of adrenal response, right? And it's great to get things off of your to do list and clear your box and and that can be really helpful, and there's that immediate reward that we get. So I guess there's something about framing ourselves to be willing to slow down the reward that we get, to get a better reward for ourselves and others in the future. It's it's interesting, as you were talking about this, it strikes me, or it's kind of re emphasized to me what Gonzalo said, which is that culture really is king. So if somebody expects an immediate response, and if somebody sends you three emails, if you're a leader who sends out five emails when one will do, you'll almost certainly get five responses when one will do, and you'll get them in a rapid fire way. So it's that sort of mirroring behavior that presumably is part of the cause and part of it enabler for change in this arena,

yeah. And I think, you know, I always, constantly have this conversation with people, just keep an email open and write everything that you want to write into your two or three team members, and then keep it open for a couple of days, and then go back and decide if it's all still relevant, and if it is, then they get one email, great. And if it's not, delete it.

Yeah, I was speaking to somebody. I can't remember what it was. It was a while ago, back in the days of newspapers, and they said something like, you know, I don't read an article when it's the first day it's in the newspaper, if it's still there the next day, you know, if that subject's still there the next day, then it's worth paying attention to. And I guess maybe there's some. About that longer view of things that's helpful in workspaces to some extent as well. Yes, I think so. Well, that's about it for this week, isn't it? Yeah,

I think that's us. It's been a pleasure as ever. So it's just time to check out. You can get in touch. We've had some great emails recently. It's lovely to hear from people, and hear all the good things people are up to the projects we're working on. It's always great to hear people's endeavors to make the world, world of work, a better place. You can get in touch with us on email, hello at World of work.io, or you can get us on Twitter. Where are we on Twitter? Jane so

you are a a, you are at JG, carrier, and I am at Janey, underscore s, and I would just reiterate, we've had two emails in particular that have come in recently that have utterly buoyed me when I've been having a day. So thank you for getting in touch and letting us know that the stuff that we share is useful. Great.

All right. Well, until next time, it's just time to say goodbye and we'll be back again in not too long. Bye. Bye, bye.