 All right. Hello. That's better. Let's try that again. Hello. Ah, there are people here. That's good. Okay, cool. Thank you. And hello to the people that are watching online. So today I've flown all the way from the UK to come and talk to you guys about remote team management. And this can be for anyone, right? So whether you're a leader in an organisation, a technical lead on a project, whatever role you feel where you are, helping lead or manage people. There is a Q&A at the end, but I don't like the sound of my invoice. So if you do want to stop me and ask questions throughout, we can also do that. And that applies to people in the chat as well. I have a very glamorous assistant that is moderating the chat. So a little bit about me. That's me. There's maybe less gray in my beard in the picture. But other than that, I've got the big belly that the podium is hiding. So in terms of a work sense, I've spent the last 15 years within STEM industries across four different companies. My background is non-tech. I am a people person. I come from a HR personnel people orientated learning development background. And CIPD is a Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development within the UK. I'm a qualified scrum master because I needed to speak the lingo when I was working with scrum teams. Insights discovery is a psychometric tool that helps me to connect with people. And Belbin is around another psychometric tool that helps people connect and work as teams. I do this occasionally, standing in front of people. I don't know why, because it is nervous and I reckon. I do coaching with people on a one-to-one basis to help them with their careers. But my main day job is as an engineering people lead manager at Collabra. So I'll talk a little bit about who Collabra are in a minute. But what that means is I have a team of people leads who are responsible for looking after the wellbeing and supporting a team of engineers. I have 100 engineers that are across 35 different countries. A little bit about me that's not work-related. I've been married for 10 plus years. I say 10 plus because then my wife doesn't challenge me when I get it wrong by a year or two. I have two boys from the UK if you can tell by this lovely English accent. I'm a gamer, I'm a geek or a nerd, whatever the word is nowadays. I say that because we're talking about managing teams remotely. One of the key things is about giving yourself and letting people know who you are behind the work persona. I did a talk yesterday. I shared this slide and someone approached me afterwards and picked up on the board game part and wanted to talk to me about that. So I think it's really important, especially when we're talking about remote or post pandemic, we take away the corridor conversations, all of those networking opportunities. We go now straight to task when we get on a call or in a meeting or if we're emailing. Where possible, I tried to promote the personal side of me. I would encourage you to do the same when we're talking about how do we connect with other people. Three key aims for today. The first one is to talk about what we mean when we talk about remote working. What is the flexibility of remote working? Looking at creating different opportunities to help people connect. We're talking about managing teams remotely. How do we do that? We're finally really, really emphasising the point that you cannot communicate enough. If you think you are doing a good job at communicating, you need to do more. Because in a remote environment, it's so easy to feel alone or get lost or not hear something or keep up today. I shared the picture of me with a big belly. That's because I like beer, I like food and I'm lazy. I said I don't like the sound of my own voice. I want to do a raise of hands for those that are watching online, just put in the chat. Who was working with people remotely before the pandemic? I love this. In the chat, if you were remote, put remote, if you were not remote, put not remote. Raise of hands in the room, working with people remotely. Nearly everyone, bit half and half. What is the chat saying? Anyone chatting? No one is chatting. That's fine. They don't have me looking at them like these guys do you say? We just did this. Let's talk about Collabra. Collabra have 150 people. We've been going for 15 years, we have 100 engineers out of those 150 people. Like I said, we cover 35 different countries. The little green icons are where we have office locations. We have an office in the UK, we have an office in Montreal in Canada. If you're based in one of those office locations, we would normally hire you as an employee. We hire engineers as open source consultants. Collabra is an open source consultancy company. Our engineers work in specific domains, if you will. We have kernel developers, we have multimedia developers, we have graphics developers that specialise within a certain area of the different FOS communities. You can imagine covering 35 different countries. That's super hard to connect with people. There are different challenges, different cultures, different backgrounds, different expectations. Different languages. I don't speak the best English for English people. When I'm talking to foreign people, that's tough. But we were remote long before the pandemic. Long before remote was like cool. Now one of the challenges is how do we look attractive to people when we're hiring the next bunch of open source developers? Spoiler alert, we're hiring. Talk to me after if you want to know more. Collabra sent me here for a reason, people. When we talk about how we manage those people, one of the things is the mindset of what remote working means. Work from home. That's a thing you've heard of work from home. We don't think about work from home anymore. We think work from anywhere. It doesn't matter when we talk about remote working. As long as you can get an internet signal, we're happy for you to work wherever. We have people that are dialing in to meetings with our customers on a train. Whether they're super productive is maybe a different thing. But we go by trust. We empower our engineers to have that flexibility. I told you I had two boys. A little bit about me. Before the pandemic, I was working for an organisation that was fully in office. The pandemic hit. I was forced to work from home. Suppose COVID went away and we all had to go back into the office. I was like that's not for me. I realised what was important, things changed. Collabra offers us that flexibility as employees, as people. If I want to help out with a school run, which my wife appreciates, then I can do that. If I need to go and pick up some dry cleaning, I don't know who's doing dry cleaning nowadays. But you know what I mean. If you want to take a longer lunch to do a run, which I used to do, then you can do that. One of the key things, when we talk about managing teams remotely, is instilling trust into people. Give them the freedom they want to work. We don't have nine till five mentality. It's difficult covering 35 countries, because for some people, nine till five might be mid-night till whenever. We allow people to work when it's right for them, as long as they do the hours that they're contracted to work for. When we recruit people, we don't test them. We will talk to them about their backgrounds, but we trust people have the skills that they say they have. We trust that they can deliver that work. We trust that if they don't or they need help, they can ask. One of my roles and one of the roles of a people lead within the organisation is to engage with our people so they feel that they can be supported and ask those types of questions. We also empower people to make their own decisions. I don't know if anyone's heard the phrase. It's better to ask for forgiveness than it is for permission. For the benefit of people online, people in the room are nodding. Maybe you're nodding at home. There's another collaborator here at the conference. He found a course. He worked within our machine learning domain. He found a course on AI that he wanted to do. It was a time-limited offer. He was in Poland and his people leaders in a different country. He bought the course. He broke process, but he felt empowered to be able to make that decision and then talk about it after. That's the thing that we're talking about with trust is making sure that these guys are making the right decision. We're talking about a business and understanding why they're doing what they're doing. We talk about the flexibility, the trust that we give to people when managing teams remotely. That's super important. They feel part of something so they feel infested and brought into it. The other thing that I want to talk about is, and I did it before, giving a piece of meat. This is my wife, they're my two boys. Super cute, they get it from their mum, not me. I've been a collaborator for eight months. The first thing I did when joining was creating an AMA. For those who don't know, that's asking me anything. I say that because I created this meeting. I asked the questions and someone said, what does AMA stand for? I thought, you're a techie, you should know this, but that's okay. The reason I did it is because I was coming into an organisation. These people had worked here and I needed to engage with them. I needed to get their buy-in. I needed to make sure they understood my purpose within the organisation and how I could help. I gave them information about me. I talked to them about my work background and gave them the credibility side and then talked about the human person. Within Collaborate we have what's called the engineering framework. An engineer will be assigned to a project and that project will have a technical lead. That's who the engineer will go to if they have questions of a technical nature. We have a business strategy lead that looks after a certain domain. I talked about them before. Kernel, multi-media, machine learning, graphics, XR, who they'll go to if the engineer has a problem relating to that domain. Then you have a people lead who the person will go to if they have any problems personally. The people lead is there to work with stakeholders across the business, work with those business strategy leads, work with those technical leads to get feedback and really help those engineers develop. Whether it's a personal development plan, whether it's training, what's needed, it's all about connecting with the person. I created a session. I said, hey, guys, come and meet your new people lead. You probably think you don't need it because you're technical and this is all fluffy stuff. You probably don't want that. I told you that there was that we covered 35 different countries. I had to hold multiple sessions. When we talk about remote team management, you can't have a one-size-fits-all approach. You can't just say, hey, guys, let's have a project meeting and expect everyone to turn up. You need to adjust and think about different time zones. You need to think about whether people are morning people, afternoon people. Again, we talked about culture. Are you booking into a lunchtime when someone's maybe having a siesta? I don't know, but you need to consider different time zones when we're talking about remote team management and probably doing things more than once. I held multiple sessions. One for the time zone, but also to create advocacy. The best way I was going to get people to come to these meetings is if their peers said, hey, actually, Dave, he's all right. He's maybe not always funny, but sometimes you should just go and have a chat with him. Think about that. Think about giving people time and space to make their decisions as well. You can't wall with an iron fist. You can't force people. That is management 101. The other thing you need to consider when we talk about remote team management is introverted people, right? How do they react when you're trying to engage with them through a screen? Probably used to it maybe in terms of typing. We use matamos as our instant messenger. Don't tend to use a lot of email, but again, some people don't want video calls, right? So what I did with the AMA was I created a structure, because if I had just said, hey, guys, come and ask me anything, it would have been radio silence, a bit like when I said hello this morning and I got like three hellos back. That's what it would have been like. So I created a structure to that session to engage with them, to start getting them to open up. The other thing that I did was what's called the balance wheel. Has anyone heard of the balance wheel? Okay, cool. So it's a coaching technique that I learned, and it really looks at two things. So the first one is it looks at the wheel of life, and it asks people to rate how they feel on a scale of 0 to 10 in each of these different sections. So this is an average of the scores that we got from our engineers Now, you know, some of those lower scores, right? When we look at fun and leisure at 6.1, this is October 2021, right? So, you know, COVID, okay? COVID is still a thing. You know, countries are sometimes still in lockdown. It depends. Boris Johnson in the UK is still eating cheese and pie. But like, but, but, but there's reasons why, right? And when I did this exercise, I also reported on the minimum and maximum. So it was very confidential data. I, you know, I got people to send me the wheel so I know whose responses are whose. But then when I shared it with my business, I kind of averaged it out and anonymized it. But it really allowed for a very quick way for me to come into the organization and see who needed help. Where were people feeling that they needed support? And the other balance wheel is the wheel of work. And that looks at, you know, some different sections. And actually I'm really, really proud that the work collaborate do because people were already super, super engaged and happy at collaborate. These scores are the highest scores I've seen within an organization when running this exercise before any intervention comes along. And so I want to drill down on that a bit, right? So, and you know, the slides are on shared if you want to, like, download them after. But feel free to take those of the slides or of my glamorous face, I don't mind. And feel free to use it, right? And connect with me after and I can talk about how to get a better way of doing it. So this is October 21. And then six months later it goes like this. So you see the difference? Oi! So it gets bigger, a bit like my belly, right? So colleagues went up by 0.8 as an average, right? So 8.3, 9. Bad maths there, it says 0.8, it should be 0.7. If you saw it, I saw it. And the reason why is we started doing more engagement with people. We call them cluster calls and I'll talk a little bit about cluster calls in a minute and there's a couple of people in this room that saw me speak yesterday that heard me talk about cluster calls. But we started getting people more connected, right? Because we talk about managing teams remotely. How do we get people together? We have 100 engineers that are working on various different projects. So it's really easy to fall into the trap of feeling quite isolated on the project and then not knowing what's going on across the business or with other project teams. So cluster calls were a way of removing that. Leadership, right? They saw some active involvement. So we have had a huge period of growth, right? And we were hiring engineers ahead of hiring people to support those engineers. So now with this initiative, the Balance Wheel, they saw some real kind of engagement from leadership and support and so that resonated with them and that's why support also increased. I'm super proud that, you know, the average is 9.1. That is a huge, huge average number. Challenge and interest went up, right? Compensation went up. Unfortunately, not because of the Balance Wheel exercise, that's the annual pay review, right? I can't claim anything for that really. Personal growth and development went up. I talked about the aim of the people lead, gaining feedback, sharing that with these people. You know, I talked to you at the start about communication. Whether you were working remotely before the pandemic or after the pandemic, people are feeling alone when they're in a room by themselves. So if they get feedback, that's going to really resonate with them. They're going to feel that. Now, feedback is a gift, right? I'm going to say this, good feedback and bad feedback, right? Feedback to gift is however it's processed and taken. You know, good, constructive, whatever. But think about the last time you gave feedback to someone that you were managing or supporting and how that can then help them develop. So the reason why this segment probably didn't go as high as it should is because I was this, like, extroverted guy coming in from a non-technical background going, hey, let's chat. I needed to build a relationship with people, right? Before I started talking to them about their personal development. So about 20% of our engineers now currently have a personal development plan for the next one year, three year, five years. The reason why it's that low is because I'm not forcing it yet. We're still building relationships with people, right? It needs to feel natural and ready. By the end of the year, I'm hoping that's 100%, that's my aim. But I need to take it slow and steady. When we talk about managing people remotely, one thing you need to think about is everybody is different and you need to treat people like individuals. Matches with values, so this is a business matching with their own personal values and obviously we're open source consultancies so a lot of our culture manifesto matches that. And in a working environment and that's again creating kind of virtual ways of people working together. So a couple of other things we did. So virtual kitchen. So I didn't do this at clab, but I did this at my previous organisation. I told you that that was a fully office environment and we went into the pandemic. So what we did was we created a Zoom room half eight till half nine in the morning. It was a predominantly UK company. And we said, hey look, just come and chat, right? And the first meeting we did, which was two days after we'd got all sent home from the office, we had half the business on Zoom, which was a bit unruly and not great, but it was a great way of people staying connected and seeing each other. I told the business it was for the people and it was the business's benefit. It wasn't, I'm an extrovert, I just wanted to talk to people, right? I did it for me. But it was a great way of keeping people connected. And then we learned and adapt, right? So initially it was daily and people started tailoring off as they got used to working remotely. And then we changed it to Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Then, because we were British, we did an afternoon tea. We did one at two o'clock. Not everyone's a morning person, again, remember, adapt. And by the end, we were doing two a week after a year and we had 10 people coming on, right? A massive drop compared to the first time. But it showed you that there were 10 people within the organisation that still wanted some way to connect with other people. So again, when we talk about remote team management, how do we connect with people is finding different ways. And this was still a way of doing it. We also have a meet-up. So this was taken in 2019. Every two years, we get together for a party. It's like four days. There's like one business meeting. And then after that, it's just play, right? So we have a maker's room where people fiddle with hardware. We have Lego where people build loads of Lego that we've bought. We have a jamming space where people do a band. We have alcohol. Always the way. And it's a great chance to form relationships. So again, when I talk about remote team management, is there a way you can actually see people face-to-face? Not all the time, right? But is there a way that we can do this? I got asked by a collaborator, should I do this talk online or should I do it face-to-face? I think there's benefit to coming and looking people in the eye and seeing people smile and then I realise we're wearing masks and that's not happening, right? But I can hear laughter. So collaborator, every two years, tried to get the business together to connect, right? Because there's a difference in connecting face-to-face versus virtual. Our next one is next year in Europe. I can't wait because I didn't go to the 2019 one, but I've heard great things. So they don't want to talk about classicals. There's two people in this room that saw this yesterday, so they can't play along. Does anyone know either of these characters? It's not a trick question. Nope. Two fairy. That lady right there is a two fairy. So in the United Kingdom, and I imagine in the US, because the rock played it in a film, there is a two fairy. There is a little fairy that comes along and takes the teeth from the children and leaves money. In Argentina, it is not so. There is Raton Perez. There is a giant rat that comes into a child's bedroom and takes the teeth and leaves presents. I don't know how he carries the presents, but he is some super strong rat. He, in France, they also have a giant rat that comes into a child's bedroom, takes their teeth and leaves presents. And I give you this because I wouldn't have learnt that if we hadn't have had what are our classicals. So these are meetings that are run once a month by one of the people leads, and we get about five engineers together from across the company, so across different domains or projects, cultures, time zones, and we get them to just chat. Now again, when we talk about technical people, they might not want that. And actually we found when we did this originally that there was about 60, 55% participation rate of our engineers coming to these calls. We're not mandating them, it's just an opportunity for people to engage. And so what I did was I created a structure and I started with technical stuff. What are you working on? What have you been working on technically since we last met? Because people will feel confident, especially if English isn't their first language. I'm in the minority at Calabra that I can only speak one language, just about. Whereas a lot of people are either bilingual or trilingual within Calabra. But if you start off talking technically, people open up a little bit more and then we go into the discussion about, okay, what else is going on with you? Have you got anything else to share? And then you have some really interesting discussions. We've talked a little about Indian schooling. We've talked about different traditions around Christmas and holidays and this thing about that coming into the room which just terrifies me. So then the last thing I want to talk about when we talk about remote team management, please don't see this as screaming. You should not scream at people. But it's really interesting because I'm talking to people now around their performance. You want to try to over communicate. You want to make a conscious effort to let people know what you've been up to because they might not see it. You kind of got to get a bit better at blowing your own trumpet or celebrating the success of your team. Because if you don't promote the great work that the people you're doing are managing you, people might not see it. At Calabra, we are super good at communication. We have a very open and transparent culture within communications. So anytime we win a new customer or a new project, it goes out to the business. Whenever we have a weekly sales call, we talk about new customers, pipeline projects, anyone is allowed to come to that. We have quarterly videos that are recorded by our CEO that go out. We have monthly operational updates that go out from our CEO. So we are constantly trying to give people as much information as they want. The only time we won't share information is if it's legal or HRE type of stuff. But I think we do video, we do email, we do MatterMost, where we talk about new starters, new levers, projects, development. We encourage people to take ownership of channels if they want. We have something called guilds. I talked about cluster calls, which is like a people meeting. We also have guilds, which is a technical specific meeting. Anyone can create a guild within Calabra. They will become a guild lead, as long as there is interest from other people in Calabra. We have a kernel guild. They meet every two weeks. There's about 20 people in that guild. They'll do lightning talks about what things they've been working on in the kernel, or what project have they been doing that's specific to them and sharing their stories. We have a Rust guild. We have been investing heavily in Rust training because everyone at Calabra seems to love Rust. That was an interesting juxtaposition when listening to Linus yesterday. I hope it works. Guilds are another way. You've got the people side, and then you've got the very much technical side. Again, trying to adapt and communicate and share. Let's close off, because you've probably heard enough from me. Remember that start that I talked about? Work from anywhere, instead of work from home. Think about flexibility. You shouldn't expect people to be 9-0-5. If you allow them to work when it's best for them, you will get more from them. Understand that people are different, and there's different ways to engage with people, and trust and communicate as much as possible. Any questions? Thank you. Go on, shout and I'll repeat it. For the benefit of people listening, it was what is the format that I used for the AMA. The first thing was, this is an AMA, that means ask me anything. What do you guys want to know about me? It was literally a slide that said, what do you want to know? Tumbleweed, pretty much. I was like, they don't want to know about me. I feel unloved. Then I said, okay, work. This is who I am. This is my background. It led me to be in front of you at Collabora as a people lead. I said, this is about me as a human being. This is what you need to know. Again, I talked a little bit about my family, my background, my interests. I'm a Cub Scout leader. I talked a little bit about how I see that as a way of giving back to the community. Then trying to relate to them my understanding of community versus their understanding of community within a forced environment. Then I talked through how I wanted to help them and showed them the balance will. I showed them my personal balance will. Again, it's about being open. I shared my balance will and said, look, this is me. Can you do yours and send it to me? It will be anonymous, but it will help me understand you. Then I talked about what I will do next, my three month plan. I talked to them about setting expectations one to one. Understanding the projects they're working on, looking at their balance will in detail. Then I said, I'm here if you want support. That was the structure of that 45-minute meeting. It's a great question. For the benefit of those online, it was how do you communicate good news and bad news? I think it's about understanding the channel. There are multiple different channels for communication. That's a whole different subject and talk. You are not going to necessarily communicate bad news on that most with some emojis. That's just not the way to do it. I think it's about situation, urgency, and which channel is most appropriate. We'll do the room because people came to the room. We'll get to online in a minute. What's the time difference? Then I would say bribery. Incentifies. Joking aside, I think it's trying to show them the benefit. If they're not willing to do it, why aren't they willing? Do they understand what the aim is? Do they understand why it would be beneficial to them to collaborate? Joking aside, if someone ends their day later to accommodate for the other person, then they start the following day later. Talking about flexibility. I think that's probably the best thing. If not, and you have to go down, I'm a big believer of servant leadership and there's a whole difference between leadership and management. This is talking about managing teams remotely and I wish it said leading teams remotely. That's on me because I chose the name of the talk. I think if you can't influence them to show them the benefit, then I think it's okay trying to make it fair saying you guys you're going to do it this time and then the next time and then just sharing it out like that. Okay. Hey dude. It's so true because what we find with our developers is that they love what they do. So they're working and then they're continuing it for fun as a hobby and they're so committed so I have someone in Romania who is working for someone in the US, a company in the US. We found out he went on to a call at 2am his time. And I'm like, dude, don't do that. That's not okay. He was working, he was going on calls at 8pm because there in Silicon Valley and that's late for him so 8pm his time. But 2am is a totally different story and one of the things that we really focus on wellbeing and when I spoke yesterday I was talking a lot around we have a wellbeing committee. The people leads, what we do is we look at hours logged so because we're in open source consultancy we ask people to log their hours. And some of our engineers are working an extra 20 hours and then that allows us to have a conversation and ask why. Okay maybe if it's an isolated case then that's fine, we understand whatever but if it's a recurring thing then we need to talk about are we resourcing the project correctly. It's very much checking in with the people promoting wellbeing, promoting work life balance and trying to have that conversation and that's one of the roles of the people lead. I promise I'd come to you. Great question. Yeah. We have welcome lunches which I love. So we have like a virtual lunch in someone's first week where people get to meet and have lunch with people in their geography and we have most channels that are geography specific so obviously we have technical channels and off topic and other stuff but we also have somewhere for UK people to chat somewhere for French people to chat Indian people etc etc so on the first day what we normally do is if you're in a technical role you'll get your laptop and we'll ship your laptop and you can put whatever distro you want on it so our engineers can configure their machine to what they are comfortable using we don't mandate that again, we're talking about trust and flexibility we have a desktop support engineer that's on hand if they need to log in once they've gone through that process we'll ping in the collaborate chat and say hey welcome to this person our desktop support person will say hey welcome to the collaborate and then literally Malmo just gets flooded with hey hey hey like and that's been an interesting thing cos is that good or is that bad right but it's a way of making that person feel welcomed then they'll have a meeting with one of our we call them people operations not HR because there are human resources that's saying there are people so we want to have a people focused team so they don't have a meeting with them on their first day so they've got set up in a way they want that they're comfortable with they've been introduced to the business they've met our people team they've been given an onboarding ticket so we use fabricator as a way to manage tasks they work through the onboarding ticket and then they'll meet their people lead and then we have a buddy system and we go from there so like another engineer that's on hand that's been through that normally that's within their technical and then when they get on to a project their first project they'll have a kind of mentor on that project well loads of questions um yeah yeah um so pole EV is really good and I saw someone again using it yesterday so it's a bit like Mentimeter and you you can embed it into like powerpoint decks um and you know you just scan a QR code and you answer questions right um on zoom I use the pole functionality um if you are using Seam I think breakout reams are a great way because it can be quite daunting if you are in a call with 10 people right and you're asking people to participate so if you break that into groups of 3 or 4 and then and then come back and debrief that's a way of doing it um maybe like ice breaker stuff just to start with that's a bit of fun maybe checking with people and just a quick how are you or what did you do yesterday that's not work related right just something about them my favourite thing if we're in real life but you know it's remote right well and people take as many sheets of toilet paper as they want some people are going to take 1 some people are going to take 10 then they have to talk about one thing about themselves for each sheet of toilet paper um so yeah um is that enough okay yo ah yeah I didn't re-ask a question for the first audience so this one um the question was how do you promote discussion and bonding amongst a bunch of different Malamaze channels um that's a great question I think so one of the things that we allow our engineers to do is you know when we talk about time logging if people are spending a bit of time you know they can claim some of that time right like because if you spend 3 minutes in the chat here and 5 minutes in the chat here and 4 minutes in the chat there that time over a day adds up right so you know one of the things I do is I normally end up logging about 25 minutes a day on chat we don't want people to feel like the chat is a burden we want them to feel like they can they've got permission to go on there right like so again it's about when people on board and the people he's talking to them and we're looking at their time logs and you know one of the people lead responsibilities is how are these people spending their time um each month you know if they're using that and just promoting that and just encouraging them to use it as a discussion tool and then finding other ways right I've not in my entire time seen anyone say we need to stop this chat get back to work right like it's just not a thing you know and we have our CEO on the chat asking people for ideas you know what's next in remote working he wanted to one of his ideas was shipping out VR headsets to everyone and having meetings in VR right like but you know across all levels so it's about demonstrating that behaviour I think that's a key thing when we talk about remote team management and leadership it's about role modelling the behaviours and I think if staff are seeing you know our top level managers right and it's it's not very hierarchical at the collaborate you know it is very open um and transparent but if they're seeing people role modelers behaviours they feel empowered to do it at the back I don't know yeah you so for the benefit of people online the question was long that's alright so the question was no no I'm joking you know I'm joking so the the question was around people not engaging with with activities and does that indicate burnout or lack of engagement in culture and company and I think it goes back to what I was saying yesterday and also today right is everyone's different um I think that just because someone doesn't want to engage with an activity doesn't mean they're they're wrong right you know our culture promotes uniqueness one of our we have what's called a culture manifesto and one of the things there is be true be you right we're hiring people and we're kind of checking them at that stage we appreciate people for their differences we are stronger as a team and as a company if we have different voices around us right if we were all the same or we were all for the same way now I'd be boring and we couldn't move forward um so we appreciate uniqueness um I think sometimes if I'm honest it could indicate burnout right like and that's what mine and my team in terms of the people leads that's one of our things that we need to check right and that's why the business has realised there's a need for this this hybrid role that sits between our technical leadership and our people operations team you know that's where I fit or squeeze or however you want to call it right like because that's that's our responsibility to understand and make that judgment called is it burnout wherever the culture question is are we doing enough right as a company I think if we can try and offer different ways people will engage with one of those ways and if they're only engage with one then they're only engage with one if they engage with 10 then they engage with 10 right if they don't engage with any maybe we're not doing we're not doing it right as a company or maybe we need to have a conversation with that individual and understand why cool cool no worries one down here and then I'll take from the back but it is easier said than done so what do you think about that so for the benefit of the online people it's how do you how do you manage where life balance in a remote environment right and you know one of the tips I gave people early on when we went into to lockdown that struggled with this is walk walk out your front door walk around the block and walk back in create some kind of physical way of differentiating home and work right also try and create a proper set up so don't you know so many people especially when we went into to lockdown right it's about making sure you have the right environment to work so you're not in your living room or your bedroom or at the kitchen right try and find that space and that's easier said than done as well in terms of of money and where people are at and things like that but it's about trying to create a separate space how can you try and create a physical separate space to change that mindset I think that's one way again the people needs a layer to check to pulse check our people and understand what's going on with them I'm really bad for it I leave my laptop on right don't do that that's just because I mean I do it so I can escape my children but I have an I have an office so I'm a two story house I have an office which was our spare bedroom my wife hates it because I've now filled it with Lego and my work stuff and we'll go and bath them and she'll bath them and I'll go and work because I've left my computer on so stuff like that turning turning things off shutting stuff down because then you're turning work off I think it's still a I think it's it's really about self-discipline for the individual as much you know we can talk about managing people remotely but there needs to be an element of self-discipline as well do you want to take sure you do one question at the back I've got another question here oh thanks do you guys you guys can go if you want like don't feel okay all right we'll do yeah great question so how do you how do you encourage people to recognise as a group different working cultures right by talking about it by raising awareness so an example is we have some people based in India right and we have some people based in the US right and they are and then the European the customers in Europe so we had to change the way that we were running calls so that we could accommodate the people in India still started going on to the US schools which was like 9pm their time right and then I was getting asked why are the why are these people still going on the calls and it was a conversation around we've told them they don't need to but they want to and it's trying to educate people within the business and the company and people that you work with about those different working cultures I think it's an education piece okay let's try and do these virtual ones real quick yeah honestly I don't mind if you guys want to go get lunch you can go get lunch I won't find it rude okay let's go yes there is a so at Collabra we promote open source right so we use open source technologies as a tool but I can't think of it off the top of my head so I will try and update my slides that are on shared with some information ask Logan what he means by that okay great question but most of our conversations in a personal sense are done one to one right so on the cluster calls where people are opening up I think one of the big things that I try and do is kind of create a created contract and what I mean by that is a verbal contract where people agree what's discussed on this call stays on this call right that we are open and I ask them to add to that contract and then when we talk about what's said if it's anything that is specifically personal that's related to them we will probably take it offline so I was running a leadership development program workshop someone shared something very personal about their father rather than pursuing it within that group of eight engineers I then took it offline we had a separate meeting so I think it's about again understanding the channel and the sensitivity of the topic so that you don't have the issue of over hearing and break of trust cool yo great question and I've run out of water I think I don't have an answer to that I would need to think about that cool alright thank you for giving up some of your lunch cheers guys