 We're so delighted here at TechSoup to welcome you to our future of work conference. Our guest experts will show you the tools and techniques needed to create resilient and sustainable organizations for social change, as well as the methods we can use in order to create a more equitable sector. First of all, we'd like to thank our community partner Roundtable Technology, who are helping sponsor us for this event. And now the moment you've all been waiting for. The remote working is here to stay. So how might we still be effectively and creatively collaborate, even when we aren't in the same room? In this session, we will discuss how to reimagine collaboration in the virtual world. We'll dig into pro tips on how to develop a personal connection with your team, despite being across the screen. Lastly, we'll discuss tools and technologies, as well as the long-term benefits of remote collaboration. We're so happy here today to have Marty Grimnick, a global executive, business executive, social entrepreneur and futurist designer. As the founder and CEO of International Connector, Marty has developed innovation processes to help companies design for the future of work, education and community. With the background in entertainment, she's an expert on creating engaging virtual experiences and programs for the workplace. Without further ado, I'll give you Marty. Thank you. I'm Marty and I'm really excited to spend some time with all of you today. So I am gonna kick the start. This is about virtual collaboration. So we're not just gonna sit here and you're not just gonna look at me, we're gonna actually collaborate together. So I'm gonna post up onto the screen a link and I think the team here is gonna help me out with this as well. This is to a mirror board, which I'll explain a little bit further, but I'd love for you to join me on there. And just a couple other things that I can mention as well is that when COVID hit and most of us started to go virtually, I was working with TechSoup to develop courses about this. So how can nonprofits worldwide digitize their work, their events, their community engagement? And so now we get to talk about how all of that kind of comes together with engaging with people. So let me also don't mind me looking at several different screens for a minute. I'm gonna share my screen and pull up the mirror board to entice you all to join me from there. And yay, I see people coming in from different parts of the world. I love that. All right, so you see this board? Can you see my mouse moving around? And cool, we've got a few people coming in there. Awesome. So I'm gonna zoom in. So for a second, here's the whole board that you're gonna see. We're gonna come up to here where it says, introduce yourself, zoom on in. I'd love to know who's here. You can copy and paste, control C, control V, what are these symbols? And you can then take it over to the board and pin yourself on the board. There I am over here in San Francisco. Let me know where you are in the world. Introduce yourself. You can tell all your name, your object. You can find, you can put a picture up if you want. Over to the side, you'll see there are these cool post-its. There are shapes that you can pull and you can pull those out and you can color them. Be as creative as you want. You can use different title links to say hi, whatever you wanna do. If you wanna just grab a post-it, if that's easier, you can just grab a post-it and put it on the board and put your name on it, do what you like. But I'm excited for you to join me and then I get to see where everybody is. And I love watching all the little tags and everything that are going through. So while you're doing that, I am gonna start a little bit. Also, I just wanna mention that I love answering questions. So please ask your questions throughout. Don't feel like you're ever interrupting me. I love to answer questions. It just helps reinforce and talk about what we're doing. And then if you do have other questions about how to use Mirol, just let us know. There's no wrong answer. Sometimes when you pull something up, it's really big and you might need to resize it. Okay. So now I'm just gonna move down to over here where I'm just talking about oh, why are we doing this? As you can see here, right? This is what we're used to. This is how we all used to be in a room together in some sort of format around this way. But now we've moved to this. So how can you collaborate specifically on this? Like how can you bring this stuff forward when you don't really necessarily want to, you can't just translate what was happening here in person to here, right? We need to really rethink what that looks like. And then what we also wanna talk about today is balancing that human experience with the technology. How does that interrupt or change or recreate what it is that we're doing? Obviously in the virtual world, technology is key but we can't 100% of the time depend on technology to do all the work or to magically solve all the issues, right? We have to remember that there's a human element behind it. So throughout this discussion, you're gonna hear me say a lot about balance, right? Balance is key, finding the right balance is absolutely essential. All right, let me just check and see how everybody's doing on these introduction spots. All right, people are putting things on. Yeah, you can also use comments. Those are another great tool, they're over here. You can just grab a comment, put it on the board and say hi or wherever you're from. I love it, thank you. You're making my day. Okay. Now, the main part of the board is over here. It's this realm, this like game over here and this is where we're all gonna collaborate together. Don't worry about my stuff on the numbers over there. That's just for me. I'm gonna bring those over. So here, start here. I've also laid out a few post-its if you need, if you're not sure where to grab something, you can always copy and paste. And then we're gonna zoom in on to number one. So how are you collaborating now and for what purpose? I would love to hear that. So I'm just gonna give people a minute to answer that. Right, one of the things, and I will actually move my little post-its over to start us off. See, these are my cheat sheets up here. But some of the stuff that people are using to collaborate with right now, a lot with like project management, social media or visual design, program design, volunteer client management. How else are you doing it? What are you doing? And also, how are you collaborating right now? I'm gonna give you all a few minutes to do that. Right, I'm collaborating with my team for daily coordination and project updates. I'm collaborating to keep things on track between time zones. Love to hear what people have to say on that. Oops, sorry, I'm moving things. Yeah, linking a network of 20 plus nonprofits, Zoom is a big thing that we're all using. Project planning, using Mirrorboard templates, great. Oh, good. So we've got some experts on Mirrorboard here. Fantastic. I'll let a few more people write in. It's also helpful for me to know how you're collaborating right now and what you're looking for. I think one of my biggest starting points for everybody is just how do you get your team organized? So I use collaboration for almost everything, right? When we're in the office, sometimes we don't even realize we're collaborating because it's just so much around us and so much a part of what we're doing. So then when you go virtual, we've all had to spend this time getting ourselves organized and how can I show up to the office, quote unquote, or how can I work virtually? I had to set up my space, my routines, my communications, but now I am here and I have to do that with a whole team. How can we get organized? What are the daily routines that are needed? What time zone is everybody on? On my team, we average at least seven to eight time zones to balance. So that means that we're not all gonna be working at the same time. So thinking about how are you collaborating now? How can you get synced? Key times to meet, tools to support and manage the work, communication protocols, right? How do you communicate? What are the processes? Where are you storing your files and data? Those are all things, async communication, absolutely. And do you notice that you can zoom in and out? That's just another thing in mirror here. Support my team with tech, absolutely. Daily teens bringing resources, advocacy for US women veterans and their family, fantastic. Love all this answering. All right, we're gonna, as we continue to put things on but we're just gonna keep moving up. You can follow the little stone road up to our number two. And we're gonna talk a little bit about what misconceptions or mistakes are made about virtual collaboration. I think maybe some people are gonna have some stuff about mistakes. What's something that was just a mistake when you were doing this? And I'm gonna, again, sneak over and grab my little cheat sheets of what I was writing before. I have lots of things here. So I'm gonna start this one off with, we can't just do what we do in person online. We have to really think about the tools and think about how to translate to a screen and to a situation there, right? There's different dynamics. There's different energy levels when you're on a screen than when you're sitting in the room with people. So that quick translation to that is just, it's one of the easiest mistakes to make. Yeah, misconception. People think they need to be tech experts. You don't have to be a tech expert. That is another great misconception. So another one is that because I'm working, I always expect that everybody else is on the same schedule as me. And that is another big mistake. Everybody now that they're working in their different environments, they're not on the same location or like the same schedule as everybody else. So that is a huge one that comes up. Being online means being available. That's another great one. People need to be on video to be involved. Yes, my mistake is that it will be easy. These are so great. Not supporting asynchronous work. Not spending time to onboard and train people on tools. That is a huge one. Okay, we're going to talk about some of these, but this is fabulous. You guys are helping me do the whole presentation. Mistake that I can multitask when trying to pay attention on Zoom calls. I can always tell when I have a team member who's not paying attention on a call. Oh, I love the emoji. Thank you. You can also throw in pictures. I love this. Okay, what else did I put here? Oh, overdoing the let's get creative and add more excitement to the schedule. Sometimes we can overdo things and just add in too much because we're like, oh, we have to change this up. Let's just throw this in. And then let me see, what else did I say? Yeah, here is a real dichotomy that I find with people. I'm happier working from home in my own space or my mental health is suffering and not seeing people. So I don't really know which side that is, but we have, I hear both of those, right? That's a real like two things that really contradict each other, but yet we hear that all the time. This is awesome. Okay. Oh, and thinking people don't wanna collaborate digitally. These are great. All right. So as you can probably guess, let me see on my notes here, make sure we've covered everything on it to cover there. Okay. So now we're gonna work our little way over, follow the stone path and work our way to number three. What are the benefits of virtual collaboration? All right, collaboration is more than a connection point for my team. It's also, this is the source actually where we find efficiency, right? Faster results with creativity, new approaches, new ideas. I can bring in more diversity to the conversation through my team, through different ways of working just by efficiently and creatively doing this type of global collaboration. For example, here, right? We're all different types of learners and yet Miro, what's nice about this Ford and why I chose it is that there's different ways to respond, right? I can get all kind of cool shapes if I want. I can just add text if I want. I can throw up a post-it. There are templates that help me integrate things and bring up different types of wireframes, mind mapping, all sorts of stuff that help enhance the situation. And so that pulls an excitement in from lots of different types of speakers, participants, learners, et cetera. I'm gonna talk a little bit later about the storytelling but the visualization, the stories, again, they help, there's so much more that I can do than just throwing up one whiteboard where we're all working off of. Like how can you engage people? What are those benefits? All right, let me read some of these. The ability to work from anywhere, working from home or being able to work when somewhere else, absolutely. Totally agree that there's something for the introverts. I love working from home, yeah. I know introverts are so excited about all these different ways. Finally, something for introverts, so good. I love it too because as much as I do public speaking or talk and lead meetings, sometimes I don't wanna always answer in front of everybody and I love that I can throw up stickies or throw up something and put my answers forward onto different things. Ability to go on a dog walk between meetings, absolutely. My dog is sleeping next to me right now, I agree. People can work together on their own time, not just in the same place, work best at night and my coworkers best in the morning, that is great, right? You can pick up where somebody has left off. Easier screen sharing, note taking, meeting recordings, time to create, time to review and iterate, not as time or place found, amazing. These are such good answers. Can revisit and revise as needed. I hope everybody likes this mirror board, by the way. I don't know how to get emojis for thumbs up, but that's what we wanna see. So I also think that communication, there's improved in communications through an effective brainstorming collaboration, any types of these tools. Digital tools also help translate between in-person and virtual. So some people are dealing with hybrid work situations, right? And these tools can help bridge between that. So also some of the offices that are coming back together, you still need these same types of tools because our workplace is so flexible and fluid these days. So we need to think about something that helps support us no matter where we are and the type of work that we're doing. And my last thing is just it's easier to scale. It's easier to scale things when you're starting to work in these more digital spaces. Okay, so we are gonna head over here to number four. And now that we've spoken about where we are now, we're gonna journey into the next realms and I'm gonna break these down into two different sections. First about technology and then to the human experience. But we're gonna stop here at number four at the bridge. And we're gonna just talk about what technology platforms are you using for collaboration now, right? And this is an easy one, grab that posted note and throw them up there. While you're doing that, I will sneak down and show you on the screen, we have a little technology platform section. Now I could add so many to these sections for all of these categories. I just threw up a couple in each category, right? Microsoft Teams, Basecamp, Asana, for video conferencing, right? I just heard Zoom gather cosmos, a mural, mural, padlet, communication, Slack or Discord, volunteer learning management, crew for all. I'd love to hear up here though, like what other tools are you using? Yeah, let's look at these as sets. Asana, Zoom, Slack, Riki, Great, Google Workspace, Zoom, iMessage, Google Hangouts, Chats, Google Meets, so many different ones. Canva, yep. I'll let you throw some of these up for a minute because that helps me see where everybody is working. And there are lots of tools for different reasons, right? I've posted a few of them below that were like from project management, communications, video conferencing, volunteer management, but I love to see that there's stuff up about design or CRM or files, right? Choosing the right tools for your team, they have to come together, right? You have to do some simple planning first, right? There's no shortage of great platforms out there, but not every platform works for every company. And each tool set, each platform offers different benefits and they have different looks and feels and ease of use depending on how you think and how you run things in your company. And they also have different price points, which is a really important thing to think about. So in general, what I wanna see you do if you're new to working on some of these tools or trying to get a more cohesive team together, I'd like you to start by thinking about your communications tools and your project management tools and then find a set of tools that work and integrate together. And we're gonna talk a little bit more about that. But let me look up here. Microsoft Teams and 365 Suite not well used currently. Okay, I'd love to know that is a big key area. So this is what I mean, ask me questions where I'm gonna riff off your answers from everybody. Establishing that plan, right? At the very beginning, you over here, you heard me say something about get organized, get synced. That is super important, right? Once you've decided your set, sorry, I keep clicking on things, your set of tools, you need to have a plan and an organized way of establishing that with the team, right? Looking at how can, how do we communicate through these platforms? Where do we keep and file our information? How do we open up a collaboration? When do we use a mirror board or when do we use a tool that's in Microsoft Teams? Casual communications always goes through what channel, right? Thinking about how these things come together is a really interesting part of the scenario. And thinking about it as a puzzle, right? A puzzle piece has to come together in terms of where all these things fit together and so that you can map out exactly where this information lives, how you use these tools and then how the whole team agrees to do that. So Marty, we have one question here. So there are so many different tools out there. Where do we start when we're feeling overwhelmed? Where should people start? Absolutely. So there's a lot of different things that I can say about this and not to plug something, but we go into depth on this in some of the TechSoup courses. So I would definitely recommend taking some time if you really need to figure out those tool sets to zero in on some of the courses that really dive into remote working or event management or volunteer management depending on what your needs are with the company. But the two areas that I would start with, right, is communications and project management. So there's a couple of tools listed down here, like Microsoft Teams, Basecamp, Asana. There's a few others that exist out here. They have different looks and feels. That one's showing up blurry, sorry. This is what the dashboard looks like on Basecamp. This is Mondays.com, another one. This is Asana and this is Trello. Now, I'm not showing these to confuse you. I'm showing these because people think in different ways. And if I'm choosing a place, I need to pull into something that doesn't make me feel overwhelmed, but that works both in functionality, but also visually eases things for me. I think that's really an important tool and an important way to think about your tool set. I think price point is an important way to think about it. And a lot of these companies and platforms have integrations. They have free trials. They have free versions for limited numbers of people or projects. Those are good ways to get a feel for it, but establishing it. So right now our team uses Basecamp. We also use Teams because we do a lot of work with companies who use Teams. So we do bounce between the two and I use them for specific reasons because of the integration with communications tools. So for me, instead of going to have a Slack channel on top of a project management tool, I chose tool sets that integrate the two. For some people, they start with a Slack channel because that to them is the most important thing. They need communications going with a team. And so if you're starting with the Slack channel, then start to look at what integrates with Slack. So this moves us on actually into our next question set. Like how can you leverage or enhance your current tool set? So thinking about everything as a puzzle, right? I start, and this is continuing to answer that question, I really do map out in puzzle pieces every single functionality that I need with my team. So when I'm thinking about that, then I'm starting to have an understanding of how we're communicating, what types of things we need to communicate about or manage or collaborate on. And then I start to look at the platforms that exist and match a tool set to my needs. And that does help a lot. But these free trials that these programs offer are such great things because you get on them. And if you're really struggling with how to navigate through this, then maybe it's not the right platform for you. And you wanna try something else that maybe simplifies it for you. Okay, yeah, so if you are using certain platforms right now, how can you enhance that, right? Their platforms have everything from, I think most of us are familiar with Zoom. So let's talk about that, right? There's, we're in the middle of an event and you wanna throw up an emoji because you're excited, you're happy. There is, you wanna give that reaction point. Zoom allows you to play videos. You can do polls. They have a new whiteboard feature. There are other programs that you can integrate with it that allow ranking or voting. And so that integration with your apps, instead of coming and all of a sudden deciding, hey, we're gonna just change from Zoom to WebEx or we're gonna change to Gather or we're gonna change to Cosmos, which yes, offer lots of really different cool features, especially things like Cosmos and the Gather. But are there things that you can do that already exist on your current toolset? And learning that toolset more in depth can keep you in the same place but making changing up how you're doing your meeting. So we could break off into breakout groups and then come back together and think about adding that breakouts as now part of our way of collaborating, right? And we could vote on things through thumbs up and through emojis through, I think they even on teams have like gifts that you can put in just to be silly and have fun. So thinking about what tools are there and those integrations of the apps are really important. Actually, I'm gonna slide over and grab one of my little cheat sheets that I put up. Marty, there's another question. We were wondering if you would be able to discuss the integration, for example, with Slack with Outlook and Asana and how to use the different integrations with Slack and the apps? Absolutely. Most of the stuff, I did a little picture here if I zoom in and this is taken, this is actually from Teams, right? When you pull up integrations, they're app integrations and they have many more than this but these are just some of the ones that appear. And as you can see, there's a lot of things that you can add in to Teams to make it more functional for the stuff that you're doing. Sorry, so Asana, can you give me the integration again that you were asking about? Asana and Slack or Outlook and Slack. Okay, perfect. Yeah, they all, so Slack is great because it does integrate with a lot of things and you can pull, it will automatically pop up, right? So for example, I use Box for a lot of our files and I actually, we also do Google Drive and we do OneDrive ridiculous in terms of our projects but whatever cloud drive, like that's probably one of the easier ones to do it, Slack will always pop up an announcement to us to say, hey, you've just put up a file from here, do you wanna integrate this? And what happens is that these systems will then start talking to each other so that you can easily refer to and find files that you're looking for or send that information back and forth. The specific steps, if there is that you need to just click on their marketplace, sometimes it's called, sometimes it's called apps, sometimes it's called integrations depending on the platform, but what they do is they've set up these APIs that talk to each other and so once the things are connected then you can use them in coordination with each other. So depending on what feature it is that you wanted to connect, it will speak to each other. Another integration that I've used is something with Monday.com that I was tracking people through different status, right? If they submitted a document or once they finished something then they got an email sent to them. They have automations set up that if I change the status on somebody, if it green to red, it would automatically send out an email through say our Outlook system or our Gmail system. And so those types of integrations happen depending on again what you're looking to connect together. Okay. So now what I'm going to do is I am gonna move us up to number six. Now we're gonna start moving into some of my favorite stuff to talk about. I wanna talk a little bit about how are you, what are your current routines and meetings and how to enhance collaboration techniques within them? I think coming back to where we started with like misconceptions and mistakes is that a lot of times we try to create something new. We're gonna do this new system and this new system is gonna do X, Y, and Z. Let's work from where you are. When are you meeting together? How are you coming together? What is the routines like and what you do? So for example, I have a team meeting once a week with the entire team, which I tell you is a big feat with all the different time zones, but it's a really important meeting and we all come together to collaborate just to build awareness of what's going on across the company and different projects and just to see each other and build that connection. But in that meeting, I usually send out or a team member will send out an article ahead of time. Because we're all together, we like to use that time to discuss something. And yes, we're all across the screen, but what we do is we read the article, it's usually something related to our work or some really interesting thing that's happens in the world and we bring that to the meeting to discuss it. And that really builds a connection point between us. And so we're enhancing our meetings by doing that. So people know coming ahead of time that this is gonna spark something in them and that it makes the meeting something that they don't wanna miss. And then we can always throw out something fun within the meeting to change it up, right? We can put up a padlet if you haven't used that. It's a really easy tool to take a survey on or to do something similar to a Miro but a little bit faster in its setup. You can also have a minimeter or mini meter, whatever that's, I'm getting the name wrong, polling and voting that happens. And that just changes the dynamic of the meeting. So there are different ways. Like again, what are those things? Another thing that has changed up our routines lately is that we all, if we were all in an office, we would know when people were coming and going and it's just casually, I'm gonna go out for lunch or I've got a meeting, I'm doing this and doing that, whatever. And so what we've started as a routine is that our team signs in and out in a group chat. And it's not about micromanaging or how much time are you online? It's nothing about that. It's like, hey, I'm online now if you need me or I'm available or I'm here working on something. That type of routine has built a lot of connection points with our team. So let's see what we've got, making sure quiet people aren't left out. Yes, absolutely. Sorry, I'm just trying to read all these things, training and time schedules to lose people down in the other areas, come on over. Give me some, you can put up some more stuff. But yeah, like enhancing that. And you'll notice now that we're still in this technology section, right? This whole area, but you'll notice that I've moved quickly towards human connection. So this tells you how important this part is. The tech has to support that human connection. And it kind of pull all these pieces together. So as you're thinking about how do we know how, what routines you have that you can enhance with technology or enhance those meetings, let's move on to like how might we humanize the experience up here on this bridging area. I don't know if you can hear my dog in the background, but for those of you talking about a dog before, there she is. So humanizing the experience, right? We're all people and we don't want to stare at a screen all day. That Zoom fatigue as we've heard people say are utilizing it, it's not just Zoom, it's all this video conferencing. How might we change that up so that people are feeling the connection and not just feeling drained by staring at a screen? We just finished a card in a couple of minutes ago before the call where one of our teammates just had a baby and it's so exciting. So we all got together on a virtual program to create the card and sent that off. We're celebrating people's achievements, their birthdays, all the things you would do in an office that kind of break that up. When we have a new teammate joining the team, especially interns, right? We make sure that they set up one-to-one meetings with every single team member. And this basically helps bridge the gap when you're working together, right? That time getting to know each other. During different times that we've done, shared Spotify lists, recipe books around the holidays, right? Sharing these common experiences, like we want to take all the fun things that we would do in an office and figure out how to translate that to a virtual setting and utilizing, again, utilizing the tools that we already have to do that. All right, now I've lost a couple of things on my screen. We have another question. So what about for colleagues who are uncomfortable with constantly being on the screen? How do you still continue to have that human connection even though you're not necessarily seeing the person's face? So they don't want to, so they don't want to go on like a video call? Am I understanding that? Like putting on their camera? Yes, that's the, okay. Yeah, that's a really good question. I think, again, like making sure that people are, like finding the times when people are participating and when people aren't participating is important. We talk a lot about in our team, like being an active participant in the team and bringing stuff forward because we don't know what's going on in their, you know, home setting or how they're working or when they're working. We encourage people to bring that stuff forward. But I think you could create a time and place. Like my instinct is usually if people can't turn on their video, I might be making some misconceptions there that either there's a lot going on in the background for them or they're disengaged. And again, that may or may not be the reasons why, but those would be the reasons that I'm addressing. And so I would look to see if it's too many meetings that they have to be engaged on than maybe limiting or talking about it. This is the time that I really need you engaged and participating and talking in this meeting even if your camera's off and or to a type of collaboration or work process for project management that doesn't require that active participation in a meeting, right? Like you're all actively participating right now multitasking doing different things on the screen and that's fantastic. And that is still very valid way of working. So I would look for types of scenarios that allow that. But when possible and you can pull a group together and it's, you know, again, it's like, okay, I understand and not everybody loves to be on screen all the time for this team meeting once a week, we'd really like to have everybody there. And that may encourage others to start putting on their screen. And you know, thinking about it again over here at number eight, right? How do we add games, novelty, surprises, fun to the routine but without forcing socialization, right? That's a little bit of what we're talking about there, right? We don't want to force socialization. Like if you're having a happy hour every week people may not really want to do that, right? So just thinking about that thinking about how to have some fun but yet do it in a very mindful way, right? What are some visuals or storytelling that you can add to? We've added story into this just to jazz it up, make it more interesting. We're journeying through these different realms. We have the visualization. Those really do help to bring people's energy to something. It's not just your standard format in terms of, you know, like check the box here stick the post-it note up here, right? Giving somebody something to work off of that sparks their excitement to the whole thing. I am just reviewing my notes as when I'm looking for a second. Okay, so yeah, looking at these things I'm just mindful of the time as well and I wanna cover a couple more things. This is actually one of my favorite subjects like yes and we're gonna talk about. So as a leader, I need to establish a positive work atmosphere and in this positive culture for collaboration. And that is like one that celebrates diversity. It builds trust among the team. That's really important. It fosters creative ideas. It encourages open communication. It challenges the team to think bigger and to think bolder. And that applies whether it's project management collaboration or creative management and creative design. So think about these principles in a lot of different areas. So that's where yes and comes in. And this is a improvisation technique straight from theater and I have a theater background. And what we do is there's a one rule and when you're improvising and it's to say yes. So when you're on stage your partner may suggest something absolutely crazy. And instead of shutting down the flow, the dialogue and the storyline by saying no or pointing out something that's logical about the idea. Just say yes, yes and. So take that crazy idea and build upon their original idea. So what does this have to do with work? If your initial reaction to any conversation or idea is no, you actually will shut down the flow of ideas and the flow of the conversation. And it doesn't mean that you're saying yes, we're gonna go implement this. It just means we're gonna put all barriers aside right now on new ideas or opinions or building block. We're gonna open the door to these new ideas and to allow teammates to emerge and to build upon each other. And we, you know, typically you find in an initial discussion or an especially to create a brainstorm, the first ideas offered are often not brilliant ideas. They're rather safe ideas or safe opinions or they're off the wall, but that's okay. The ideas, they say yes, that's great. And we can add to this. And when you're thinking about collaboration and you're thinking about pulling all this stuff together, you wanna build trust in your team. And trust is really essential when you're working remote because we don't know people's situation. We don't know their productivity. We don't know all the ins and outs. And so this collaborative method and having that yes and culture really helps cultivate a cohesive, supportive creative team. And lastly, my last question for you, like what is something you can implement today with your team? You know, start small and continue to build. So what does that look like? And I think I can answer any more questions that are coming up. I love watching everybody. If you have questions, please feel free to put them in the Q&A section. Awesome. You can see again, like we started halfway through the technology talking about that human side, right? There's a lot of more questions and thoughts about that. So really thinking about it, like the platforms are really a small, super important part of it, but you need to start with that functionality first. So what are some of those things? And I do have, you know, just some takeaways that I can talk about, right? Finding the right mix of digital tools, keeping things consistent, but throw in some novelty and have some fun to change things up here and there. Don't 100% depend on the tech. Always add that human element. Don't force engagement or socialization, right? Leverage these tools, the meetings, the routines that you already have to find the right places to add in these connection points. Coming back to where I think you should start is be super organized with your team. Get in sync, talk about it. Talk about what works and doesn't work and communications. Now I didn't drone on about communications, but I will a little bit right now. It's just consistent, simplified, communicate everything. I don't know what's going on with all of you right now behind the computer. You don't know what's behind me here, right? So we need to remember that when we're working with the team, communicate, communicate. And yes, and build that creative environment, that open environment that allows for trust and builds that communication flow between team members. So my big takeaways for all of you today. So we have a question from Cara West. Do you have any recommendations for tools that are offered in multiple languages or tools that are easily translated? Absolutely. That's a good question. We deal a lot with different languages all the time. Most of the toolset that we're using is that like you can, it works in different languages. So I don't know if all the instructions are in different languages, but you can add things in and put things in that are all in different languages. So for example, Crew for All, which is our learning platform and our volunteer community management platform. We have our program in three languages right now, Arabic, English, and Spanish. And we're translating it to other languages. Slack and Discord, we have multiple channels that are supporting obviously whatever language people want to be on. And same if people want to communicate in different languages on base camp or Teams or Astana, that is all possible like through all of these. Miro, it's just a white board and you can set it up any way that you want. And they just give you templates but you can change out everything that's in them. I do feel most of these platforms are very helpful for that. Might just stop sharing for a minute. There we go. You have any tips on engaging and training those who are resistant of using? Start small. Baby steps, right? So find, it is hard if you're not used to communicating through technology, right? So figure out what they are doing. Tances are they're doing a lot more communications offline like in their personal lives, through different tools. So maybe they're using text messaging or they're using FaceTime or Slack or WhatsApp or not Slack, sorry, WhatsApp. So again, like figure out where they're at and then baby step it from there and then incorporate a tiny bit more and incorporate a tiny bit more. I think those are usually the best thing. If you throw it at people all at once and change everything all at once it's hard for them to digest and to effectively use it and to remember where to do it, right? Like I might set up a whole filing system and then I come back to it and I can't figure out what I've done let alone translate it to somebody else. Just remember the way you're thinking about something may not be as simple for somebody else. So baby steps and start where they're at. And what do you think about virtual workspaces like wonder.me? Yeah, so it depends on bandwidth. That is always a big thing, right? Figure out what your team's WiFi setups are and I would start there and then figure out what's going on and whether or not some of these platforms work. So we did, we work with youth all the time all over the world and we did a trial last week on Cosmos which was super fun and it basically mirrors like you're in an office and you can jump into little spaces and you can go to the water cooler and you can go to the, I don't know, badminton or pool table or whatever it was. You know, it is cute, but it takes a lot of bandwidth and it wasn't as great of an experience on mobile. Some people in that process. And yeah, the ones who were on, it had a very unique dynamic to the situation compared to what we can do on Zoom but it's not worth losing the people. So again, like Zoom has been optimized to help with some of these bandwidth issues. So think about that. And if you can, then yes, they're fun and but again, pick your tool and use a consistent set. It's fine to trial things here and there or make an event about it to bring in something else but the consistency of tools so people become familiar and you're not always having the like, those original moments where everybody was getting used to being on Zoom and going, I don't know how to put my camera on. Can you hear me, you know, that you're limiting that stuff because those are barriers to great collaboration. And we have time for one more question. How would you suggest creating a team schedule? So, you know at a glance when each team member's standard schedule is. That's awesome question. So we have a team calendar that we use and everybody has it on their calendar and it's just for when people are in the office, quote unquote, or out of the, you know, or it's blank when they're not on. So I can see my entire team schedule. I mean, I'm not dealing with hundreds of employees so that might get a little bit crazy but in that case, you might wanna do departmentalized groups like people who have to connect but in general, I can see at a glance when people are gonna be online and when they're working and that helps me. And then I do the routine where we're like, hey guys, I'm online. You know, I just got off, I'm online, I'm having my, you know, we make it fun. And again, we don't make it a micromanagement thing. We make it more like, yeah, we are in different places. My entire team even before COVID has always been virtual but, you know, we've been on the road a lot. So managing people, it's hard to know when somebody is gonna be online unless we have these tools and then kind of understand and gauge how to connect all those dots. Hope that's helpful. Yes, that was very helpful. Thank you so much, Marty. That your presentation was really insightful and I hope that everyone has enjoyed it. One of the things I love the most, I'm also an improviser as well. So yes, and is such an important feature that applies to all aspects of life. Thank you so much everyone for joining and thank you again, Marty.