 All right. Smart Chris in the house. This is quite nerve-wracking actually. Smart Chris in the building. So for the last couple of years I've been doing a lot of workshops and facilitating conversations leading to an outcome. Today I'm going to speak to a bunch of founders about the world of remote work. In 1987 22 young entrepreneurs started an organization called the Young Entrepreneurs Organization in US and Canada. Within a few years membership grew to Latin America, Europe, Asia, Middle East and Africa. In 1996 they created an organization called the World Entrepreneurs Organization. Then in 2005 YEO and WEO merged to form entrepreneurs organization. This is known as EEO, a global nonprofit for entrepreneurs. EEO basically works as a membership. There's over 15,000 members and to be a member you actually have to have a business that makes over one million dollars in revenue. So why am I telling you all this? Well it's because I will be speaking today at one of the events. I've recently started a business and my business partner actually started and was president of the Vietnam chapter. So he asked me to speak about remote work. Today I'm going to facilitate a conversation between these founders about the world of remote work. I don't know how long I've been doing remote work but I've definitely been working on a hybrid model since 2015. Maybe not on purpose but I sort of fell into not coming to the office just because my company trusted me. So how am I planning to moderate this conversation between these founders? Good question because I don't actually know. All I know is that it's going to be a workshop setting where we're going to discuss and ideate on a digital whiteboard which I'm familiar with. Lucky me but how else is it going to go? I'm not really sure and I think the trick is here is to let people speak more, run them through some workshop settings, some workshop activities and then we'll see how it goes and hopefully that will provide me a really good summary of ideas in the room. My business partner basically told me there was two groups of people in this workshop. One, big fan of remote work, the other not so much. So how do we get to somewhere that both parties are happy and both parties have ideas on how to improve their working culture? I'm not sure, big challenge. So let's see how this goes and I guess I'll walk you through how I do it and subsequently what actually happens. So yay! I think I figured it out. Here's the plan. All right, let's jump into the computer and maybe we zoom into my face. We start at zero. I want to do a quick introduction about myself just to gain some sort of credibility and command some attention saying, hey, I'm not a rookie. I've done this before. Don't worry, you can trust in what I'm about to do. This is always really important to have a strong ish introduction and to tell them what your skill sets are and I'm sure that some of these people aren't going to be impressed, but that's okay. Just say, hey, I'm here and I want to lead you through this activity. Then we go to a quick intro number one. This is just for them to get comfortable with me. Also added an icebreaker question. What was your first job? That could be quite a fun question to ask and that usually helps people get comfortable and everybody's had interesting first jobs when we were kids. Then we actually go to the goals of this workshop. We're talking about the remote work. So the goals is to discuss the pros and cons and also ideate on some actionable things that we can implement in a hybrid environment. And then we'll go through some workshop principles. These are the ones from design thinking and they're pretty good to get the group started on the structure of this meeting, set expectations. Then we have the agenda. Of course, we've got to go through the agenda, so we're not wasting people's time so they know what to expect. All of that good stuff. Then classic warm up, just a bit of brain dumping. How many uses can you use a rubber band for? Really just to get them used to the tool and warm up so they know how to duplicate posters, delete them, etc, etc. And we can make it a bit competitive for these business leaders. Then we're actually going to zoom into the remote work topic and I want to start the conversation here with remote working models. There's a bunch that's been adopted by lots of different companies, so it'll be interesting to understand what they're doing now and why they're doing that. Then we're going to speak about the benefits. I think always start on a positive note in one of these sessions. We don't want to bitch and moan. Why do people do it and why do they think it's beneficial? Then we scroll down to here, which is tell us your top two. And this typically isn't what we do, but I'm trying to facilitate this element of discussion. So while they note down, I think it's important to let the group voice their ideas on the two top things they think are very beneficial. Then we group the ideas together in something called an infinity diagram. This is really to isolate the different themes and then we'll have the group vote using these sticky dots just to see what the general consensus of the group is in terms of what do they think is the most important. And this is just the FYI. We won't like ideate on that. What we'll do is move to challenges of remote work. And this is basically the same activity repeated, right? They brainstorm. They do a round table telling us their top two challenges. Then they group. So isolate themes yet again. And then they vote. And this voting is essential because we want to know what is the most challenging thing, what they're experiencing, right? And this is yet again based on the group. Then from there, we can pick the top three and have them use crazy eight a rapid ideation technique to then come up with ideas on how to solve that, right? One minute for one idea. And hopefully this is always a really fun crowd pleaser activity if they've never done it before. So it's pretty good. Then of course, I will summarize number four to six and the whole workshop itself. But to close, I would like to leave them with some nuggets and I found a really good article on Slack and it was talking about remote work. They did some research. So I'm just going to go through the research in terms of like the numbers, executive love numbers. So let's do that. Go through the remote employee index, what the employees think, because I think that's a different take on this. And then the top challenges, which the employees have reported, right? Not just the business leaders. And then there's some key takeaways from that research and of course, provide a source link. So then they could go and read that and try and implement some of these things that we've come up with. And hopefully that will be an hour, an hour, half of a good an hour is a bit of a tight squeeze. Let's see how it goes. I just did this really quickly. So I don't know if it's going to work. Never spoken to an EO group before. I'm a bit nervous just because I don't know what to expect from the participants. Usually I know what the goal is here. Today, I guess I'm just making up the goal. There was not too much direction apart from a moderated conversation in a workshop format. So if this works, feel free to use it. I'll leave a link in the description to this board and hopefully you can use that. I guess three, two, one, cut to the workshop itself. Hey, hey, folks. How's it going? While we're just getting everyone set up, maybe I can just show you the awesome tool that Dave was talking about, right? Did lots of these sort of collaborative sessions aim to bring a group to a certain outcome, right? Whatever that is or facilitate some sort of discussion where we can agree on some things. Tell me your name, what you're currently doing and what your first job was if you remember that far back. Oh, two paper rounds. That's good. Cool. Wow. Impressive. Today's discussion is about remote work and is in the format of this design thinking workshop style. Don't know if you've guys have done it, but typically before we start sort of this session, we go through some of the principles that I like to talk about when it comes to these kind of collaborative sessions. So what does today's agenda look like? Okay. So this activity is really, really simple, right? So as an example here, who has the most ideas? Blue. Daniel in the blue. If you guys want to throw some of these wild ideas, I mean, what's the, what's the weirdest idea you got, Daniel? Don't worry. There's no winner or losers here. It's fine. You're good. So let's talk about remote working models. There's a centralized one. Everybody's in the office and then you have the fully remote. Those are your typical four. There's probably things in between. It would actually be really interesting for me to just get an understanding of where you guys are that there aren't any office aficionados or office advocates here. Everybody loves the office. Is it just the situation we're in? As there's a lot of us that prefer the office, I think maybe the next activity is not to talk about the benefits of remote work, but maybe the challenges of it. Like as we're living through it, we won't go for number five, we'll go straight to number six. I want you to list out as many challenges as you found while remote working, like running your company, things you've had with your staff, just all of those challenges. All right, so five minutes on the clock starts now. Well, that looks like we should get back to the office as quick as possible. Right? How do we group them together into their sort of natural relationships? Right? And then basically force rank them or force prioritize them. All right, I think we're pretty good, right? We have connectivity. We have one about tools, also a culture challenge. We have one about trust. There's the collaboration issue. And then finally, we have the working environment. And I want you to basically vote on the most critical problems you see. Cool. Everybody allocated their dots. Okay. So these are the top three problems voted by this group here, brainstorming, no culture and not working. And then what we're going to do is this rapid ideation technique on how to solve these challenges. Well, for brainstorming, you could say, hire Chris as a consultant. You know, that's a legit idea. Okay. So, you know, this is obviously a really short workshop. It is what it is. We just had limited time. But basically, what we did was we spoke about the different types of, you know, working models, what we're going through based on the challenges. And we said brainstorming, you know, the coming together of ideas, because we're not in person, the fact that there is little to no culture as we are all, you know, but by ourselves behind a desk. And how do you know that people are being productive? The answer is you don't. But how, how then do you try and make that transparent for the whole company and definitely for yourselves and, you know, the bottom line, of course, right? Lastly, I really want to talk about this research that Slack does. And this is based on employee data, right? So us as business leaders, of course, there's things that we favor, but also it's important to, you know, hear what the employees are saying about hybrid or, you know, remote work. Most employees think that it's great for work-life balance, right? But their sense of belonging just sucks as we talk about this no culture aspect. So that is reflected in what we said as well, right? And then finally, the key takeaway from this research is people prefer choice, this flexible sort of thing. Remote work is net positive, basically higher satisfaction for the workers and the office workers, but it's not for everybody. It really depends on your seniority, your role. And then, of course, relationship matters, right? As humans, we kind of want this connection. So that is it. That's it in a nutshell. Thank you, gents, for your time. I know this was super quick and maybe a bit all over the place, but I hope you found it useful. All right. Well, that was a really, really quick workshop done in like 45 minutes. Overall, I felt it went well. People were participating. They got into the workshop and started coming up with really good ideas. We missed the whole activity of the benefits talking about the positive side of remote work. I think we probably should have spoke about one of the things that's quite worrying is that these business leaders have been forced to adopt a hybrid working model, but they're not really used to it. And actually they think it's affected their business, specifically productivity, culture, and collaboration. Business leaders are still lacking trust in their employees. A lot of, are they doing what they say they're doing? We prefer office more just because we know what's going on. I think a culture thing is really important. Your employees' well-being and satisfaction will lead them to a higher productivity. That's just a given. That's research based. That makes sense, right? Yeah. That just makes sense. That is it. That's me planning some random workshop with entrepreneurs organization group, the Vietnam chapter. If you want to see more workshops and stuff, then you know what to do. Smash all them buttons till next time. Some random design thing. Peace.