How To Build Better Team Engagement to Help Spot Burnout Remotely w/ Valentina Thörner @Klaus

Here's the recap...In today's episode, I sat down with Valentina Thörner the Empress of Remote to talk about mental health and what individual remote leaders can be doing to improve the mental health of their team and create more transparent environments for sharing how everyone is feeling. In this episode, we focus on how you as a leader within a larger team can start improving your team's mental health if the company isn't yet focused on it. And of course, what you as a leader can be doing to support your own mental health.

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Valentina's Website

Klaus

Help yourself before helping others

In past episodes, we've spoken about using meditation, walks, and similar to help combat fatigue as remote leaders. Today we wanted to expand that conversation to who you can speak to as a leader. If you're doing things right, you're creating an environment where your team can share with you what's going on. But who do you share with? The first obvious answer. With your team. We've spoken about this at length about the need to lead from the front and to create an environment of sharing. Valentina lost her father a couple of months back. Rather than bottle it up, she shared it with her team. For example, when a day comes up where she's particularly emotional thinking about her father she lets the team know. Just in case she's involved with meetings with them, they can understand if she's not 100% with them or if something seems to be bothering her. Knowing this, her team can come to her side to be there to talk, lend a shoulder, or simply understand any lack of engagement.

Another idea Valentina shared is, that she has a 6-month running list of people she can vent to and others she seeks advice from. These are either friends or colleagues in similar roles/situations show can share helpful advice and insight into something going. Creating a peer group is a fantastic opportunity to learn and share with other leaders facing similar challenges.

You need to be Sherlock Holmes

In a remote environment (especially an async by default) you're not seeing your colleagues every day as you did in the office. So it's hard to tell when they look sad or like their kids haven't slept the past few nights. When face to face, it's easier to notice when something is off. As a remote leader, you need to intentionally find clues. You can implement tools like a regular happiness emoji poll (I use them daily and jump on any 😥 or any 😐 given 3 or 4 days in a row). If you create an environment of transparency these are extremely useful. Next is regular check-ins. If you're leading a team remotely and the only time you ask them, "How's everything going?" is the bi-weekly 1:1 you're doing it wrong. You should be asking questions like this at least 2-3 times every week. Especially for introverts who may not be super social/active in team Slack channels or similar you're doing.

Another idea is getting the team together on video for non-meetings. Whether doing something fun, co-working sessions, or similar. Be sure you're looking at both audio and visual queues. Is someone not engaging in conversation or what you're doing?

Scott - [02:43 - 02:46]

Hey Valentina. How are you today? Thank you for joining.

Valentina - [02:46 - 02:49]

Hi Scott. Nice to be here.

Scott - [02:49 - 02:54]

It's exciting to have you, where you calling in from today?

Valentina - [02:54 - 03:05]

I'm actually at home in Barcelona. Well, not in Barcelona, about 40 minutes outside Barcelona. And we had a store yesterday, so it's not scorching really hot. I'm actually enjoying quite a bit.

Scott - [03:05 - 03:44]

That's it? It's, it's, it's a good time. It's somebody mentioned on my team a couple of days ago. They're, they're an upstate where I'm one of like the slack communities and I forget what it was, but, they're in upstate New York. And I remember when I lived in New York, some of those days, like mid to late August, we just, just like a smell in the air where like, it's okay, you get the, you get that hint of fall. And then like mentally you start thinking, oh, okay. You know, leave changing and football or American football starts. And pumpkin spice like overwhelms everybody in America at that time and started kind of like starting to feel good. but yeah, I don't know what the temperature of it, gets cool over by you. But if you, are you close to the beach still, or are you kind of more awakened?

Valentina - [03:44 - 04:11]

Well, I'm about now 14 minutes from the beach. So it's still a little bit less humid that if you live right at the coast site, but it's really nice to have some brisk bite here. And actually, yeah, last week I visited Klaus in Estonia. I just came back yesterday and they are having 30 degrees at the moment. They are dying of heat because they are not prepared for that. Climate change is really interesting how it hits like different countries.

Scott - [04:11 - 04:24]

Yeah. And I definitely have been in parts of Northern Europe that don't normally get that hot, so they don't have air conditioning. so you need to kind of deal with those warm temperatures with the best, like a fan. And it's like, Yeah, no.

Valentina - [04:24 - 04:29]

And once the heaters inside the house, it doesn't get out because the houses are designed to not let any heat out.

Scott - [04:29 - 06:01]

Yup. so before we jump into the topic today, usually we'll like, I, I like to do, starting off each episode is kind of just bring up something that's been in the news. that's not topic related for the episode. And I think like the easy one, coming mingle kind of contrast. So we'll go like the last week, yesterday day before apple made their announcement, probably from like the third or fourth, try over the last few years. Yes. People are coming back to the office in a hybrid model of three days and two days. And, spoken about that at length, quite passionately against it. But we'll, we'll hear from you cause I know you're very much against the ideas of this definitely doesn't work or this definitely shouldn't be like that. There's always flexibility. So I want to kind of dive into that, but on the other side, there was an, an article maybe about two weeks ago about Dropbox and all the kind of wins they have. But I wonder focus more on the idea of what they're actually doing with the office. And I think similar to what Salesforce is doing, where they kind of have completely redesigned their headquarters, totally guarded what the office looks like. And really, and this is something that I spoke about on, on season number one with a couple of number of people who were in the commercial real estate space about understanding what the new purpose about the office is and redesigning it for that. So we'd love to kind of your thoughts. what do we think is the furniture purpose in office? Should people be forced back into an office like apple is doing, should they not be, but let's just start rolling from there.

Valentina - [06:01 - 07:38]

So the whole idea of forcing people back in the office, I think that that already says it all because if you have to force people to do something, you have definitely not managed to communicate your intent in a way that it resonates with them. And one of the, the gripes that I have with HAI, the hybrid model as it's present in a lot of company is this very inflexible three days in two days out or the other way round and retail, which days those need to be also there's like people actually like about remote work, the flexibility that it gives you to, to make your life outside of work, work with the life at work. And if, as a company you define no, but we have decided you need to be in the office on Tuesdays and Thursdays and that's, it, it kind of runs against this flexibility. And then it also depends a little bit on how somebody works best and what kind of role they have. For example, if you are a salesperson and you have lots of, lots of calls on Tuesdays, why do you have to commute 40 minutes to the office to find a conference room there, do your zoom calls and then drive 40 minutes back because Tuesday is office day and we have decided that, and it just, it makes no sense. And it creates a lot of resentment for the employee because they very well know they could just have those conference calls at home drinking their favorite coffee and not having to fight with 700 other people for the same conference room, because there are never enough conference rooms available as people who need to be on video calls. Yeah. So like this whole, why are we doing this?

Valentina - [07:38 - 09:19]

And I have talked to a lot of companies who tell me, yeah, but we need to get them to the office two days a week because otherwise they are classified as a different type of worker. And we have to pay for different things that they have at work, which I mean, it's a reason, but then again, having to pay for the desk of the worker, but then retaining them another two years because they are not frustrated, like where's the trade off, but it's two different buckets within the company where the money comes from and these buckets don't talk to each other. So, so unless there is like a strategy around the fact that we are doing remote work this way, because we have thought about it and we think everybody should come to the office. I don't know on Wednesdays. And then on Wednesdays, we actually have team lunch together and we have specific collaborative things where people actually interact with each other because then the office can actually be a huge effort. And there are companies that have read, they are doing the redesign of the office, but that actually requires you to think about why do we have this office and what do we want to do with the time in the office? Because everybody's like, yeah, people get lonely at home. So they have to go to the office. But if you don't speak to anyone in the office, you'll be just as lonely. Or if you don't have time to actually hang out around the coffee where the innovation apparently happens, brought the water cooler. Like if you don't have time for that, because you're sitting in conference calls at the office, it doesn't make a difference. So like turning the office from a place into an opportunity creator, like that is actually the big, the big like challenge.

Valentina - [09:19 - 09:26]

And a lot of companies don't want to look at that challenge because it creates a lot of work for people who already are completely overwhelmed with all the changes.

Scott - [09:26 - 10:27]

Yeah, absolutely. To a couple of points I want to go on. I think the last one first, and it's something I've been saying for since this whole thing started was no big issue. People when hired the idea of hybrid, it started where people were moving that direction. It's because they, they look at it as an investment cost. Okay. We can kind of force people back in the office. We know how to do office culture. So for the three days a week, people are in the office. Okay. We can get that. Right. And the other kind of two days a week, we just kind of let model exactly and that'll work. But, and then the other side, okay. We understand where we believe that we need to completely redesign how we operate, how we engage people. Have we do. I mean, we had to up-skill managers with that. I mean, it's a huge investment in it. And people are scared about that, especially that they don't have that experience and understanding, especially how to do it the right way. I think there's a lot of fear for that. And they just kind of go with the easy option of, oh yeah. Let's just get people back in the office. Okay. We know what to do at three days a week. And the other two weeks, two days a week, we kind of go off, completely agree with that.

Valentina - [10:27 - 10:47]

Liked that you said, we know how to do the office in quotation marks because actually we don't really know how to do office. We just have been doing it for the last 50 years and kind of got used to a modus operandi that we now think somebody else ever thought it through. But I don't think that ever happened Exactly the color culture.

Scott - [10:47 - 12:41]

I mean, there's very, very few companies that know how to do culture writing. I remember there was like two weeks ago. One of these typical CEO posts, no, I'm very sorry that I had to let you know, 20, 30% of the company go and blah, blah, blah, blah. On their website. I just happened to look at their website on their career site and the whole image with arrows about we invest in our people and we happiness and engagement and fun and all these different things like this, like very much like we're very employee centric. Like that's our focus and in the CEO's message, the person's message was okay. And we had to let these people go because first and foremost, we have to take care of the company. And then after that, we have to take care of the investors and then whatever it was. And I thought to myself, well, the company is the employees. Like the investors are not important at all. I mean, the only way you build a successful company is if you have happy employees, right? Because happy employees make happy customers and happy employees make unhappy customers. So it shouldn't be the priority of every company to make, to be employee centric and to make everybody happy first. So you see it in this one side in a very much of the public image, oh, we're employees and learning development and fun. And that, that, that, that, that, and then here comes, the CEO was saying, oh, did the company comes first? And then the investors come second. And then maybe some point farther down the line, the employees come out and whatever. I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll avoid going down that brand death. But one of the point I wanted to make before we actually dive into the conversation today, was I had heard, and someone made sense for like the idea of if you're gonna do hybrid to make it specific days versus kind of get rid of flexibility, because if you're going to have people come in, let's say three days a week or two days a week, whatever it is, the intention in, in theory was in those two or three days, that's when you're doing like the collaboration, then your synchronous meetings.

Scott - [12:41 - 13:27]

No, please help me on that, that one. But that's where people were going to spend FaceTime together. So if that was the purpose, like, okay, I can understand that. But if you're going to have people come into office, like take advantage of like the FaceTime and relationship building. Okay. And if you do like the flexibility and some people, it comes on a Monday and when it comes into Wednesday and then like that whole purpose of getting people back into the office, like pushing them back to your office is completely gone because the reasons you're getting people back in the office was for like that FaceTime and relationship building. And if people are not there at the same time, then that purpose goes well. Yeah. okay. So let's, let's start off, let's move in the right direction here. Let's keep going, keep going on. w the way we start, every one of the episodes is just introduce yourself a little more. Tell us a little bit more about Valentina. Tell us a little bit more about clouds.

Valentina - [13:27 - 15:06]

so yeah, my name is Valentina Turner, which is like Tina Turner. We just write it a little bit weirder in German. my official role at the moment is, is, Klaus is Empress of remote and support quality, because I'm both in charge of making sure that internally, our processes are aligned with remote so that we can actually offer the best remote experience for those who don't want to go to the office. And also the best office experience for those who do want to go to the office. So cloud is hybrid in a sense that there are headquarters in Estonia, and about a third of the people actually live close enough that they could go to the office if they wanted to. But usually they go when there's cake for a birthday or something, which tells me that actually the remote setup is working because even the people who could go to the office go there when they want to socialize, but not when they, when they're in their conference calls and clouds is a platform for quality support within customer support teams. So, our clients are, companies who take customer service like really seriously, and who want to make sure that not only their customer support representatives get the training that they need, the coaching that they need, the support they need, but they also want to look at which process are maybe a bottleneck for our reps, which have, where are the PR where's the product really negatively affecting their, their work? Because at the end, it's like a spider net where everything is connected, and you can not only say we're going to improve here and leave the rest out of it because it all plays together. And, because we are remote ourselves and a lot of the people are from customer support industry.

Valentina - [15:06 - 15:29]

We actually also help our clients not only to use the tool itself, but also to review, like if they are, if they have decided to continue to be remote, I will come in and help them like to see how can we do this so that it works. So it kind of, we take the customer support and the remote part together, and then help wherever we can, because it is an hour inter interest that their customer support teams are actually successful.

Scott - [15:29 - 16:28]

That's awesome. That's awesome. so the focus today, the last couple episodes of season two, we're very focused in mind with the idea of the individual manager. It, what I like to call a bucket three remote company. I mean, I think I like to say we have three buckets of remote companies. You have the bucket, one, the O G remote companies, or the pretend pre pandemic, remote companies that have been doing this for a while, certainly pre pandemic. Again, it could be the buffers to get labs the so forth, or even these companies who launched within six to 12 months before the pandemic. they're doing, they're there, they're doing remote. They know how to do remote the right way. Bucket. Number two is you have the companies that would remote during the pandemic and said, Hey, this is pretty good. and we believe in this and we want to go all in and we're going to embrace all the best practices. You know, whether it's know async by default, before they work weeks and hiring everywhere and so forth. And, oh, fuck It.

Valentina - [16:28 - 16:30]

Let's do four day work week.

Scott - [16:30 - 18:01]

Maybe we'll get into that. and number three, which I think is a bulk and most remote companies today are the companies who went remote during the pandemic because they had to, or because maybe they believed, you know, this was, this was the right direction, but they're still very much holding onto the old ways of the office. They're not embracing asynchronous. The days are still filled with synchronous meetings and they're maybe not embracing the four day work week or whatever. It looks like they're still hiring in regions, but they're not embracing those getting best practices that you look at that are coming, you know, had they been coming for years from dualist and buffer and get lab and things like that. So the focus was in these, this bucket three for an individual manager who's sitting, Hey, I want to, I want to be the best of the best, right? I wouldn't embrace all the best of the future of work has to offer. I totally believe in it, but my company is kind of stuck in this, not there yet. so how do I, as an individual leader start making changes within my specific team to embrace those. And I think the topic we want to talk about today that be discussed ahead of time, was around mental health, around loneliness, around burnout, all these kinds of big picture type things, which has been a huge issue for many years, especially loneliness. no, every, if you looked at the state of re state of remote report that buffer had created for the last, however many years, like year after year after year, like knowing this was like the top issue. And then during the pandemic, it's broken all hell, broke loose with it, with everything else, with chaos and mental health things.

Scott - [18:01 - 19:06]

And kind of was, I don't think there's anyone on this planet that didn't have any kind of mental health issues myself certainly included. but now that the pandemic is kind of passing, hopefully, and people kind of starting to return back to life. We certainly don't want that idea of mental health kind of like falling off of importance because it's still important. It's still, people are still dealing with things as they have been beforehand. But thankfully the stigma has now kind of gone and really kind of like dive into like these ideas of, for a specific, specific individual leader. Like what tools can they use? How did they look for, for burnout? How did they look for frustration? How did they look for loneliness? What can they do? What tools, what, like all these bits and pieces to help this person who's running this team. And once you do the best that they can, because again, the company's not doing these company-wide things, right. They're not get lab and they're not doing no juice box chats. Like we had on the nurses. They're not, they're not, you know, getting people in that, not they haven't yet maybe embraced companies like poll surveys that, or whatever it is. So let's, let's start here if that's, that works for you. Yeah.

Valentina - [19:06 - 20:38]

And actually what I'm always surprised to hear that a lot of companies who came out of who became remote because of the pandemic, they, they see this, like either you are in office or you never, ever, ever meet your colleagues ever again. And I mean, there is a reason why buffer automatic, it led to regular meet ups where they get people together. Like they are, you don't have an office, but it doesn't mean that you never see, your coworkers. And I think like one of the reasons why it feels less lonely if you're going to the office is because you end up making friends with the people that you have something in common with, and that you spend time with. That's just how humans work. And if you are going eight hours a day, or however long to the office, you are, I mean, you have something in common at the very minimum when you have to work in common and you spend a lot of time together. And so you end up being something like friends with the people in the office. And then when you get out of the office and you have never learned to make friends outside the office, because you didn't have time, you were commuting to the office, then you were in the office yet you had lunch with the people at the office and then you commuted back and then the day was over. So I think a lot of, people who didn't choose by their own volition, remote work, they were kind of taken by surprise by the fact that holy shit, if the company doesn't choose my friends, I have no idea how to choose them myself. And that's a very, a lot of the loneliness comes from, especially for people who don't have partners or don't live with somebody that can kind of offset this loneliness feeling.

Valentina - [20:38 - 21:21]

And for managers, the, the difficult part here is to figure out when is somebody actually, when, when does somebody have mental health issues? How much can I help? How much should I help? Because managers are usually not psychologists. So there is a limit to what you can actually do, as a manager. and how do you actually figure out that somebody needs help? Because when somebody comes into the office, like with eye bags to their feet, like three days in a row, you know, that probably something is wrong, like, or the kid isn't sleeping or whatever. And you just ask, but if you don't see your people and many companies now have their company calls actually with video off. So you look at like, no, no visual feedback. Like how do you figure that out?

Scott - [21:21 - 22:53]

Yeah. Yeah. Th th there's so much good news he had to start with. but let's start maybe on the loneliness side and making friends, but yesterday it was very interesting. So the company I work for cloud app, is putting together a book around asynchronous work, kind of a very holistic view, kind of diving into teams and all different things like that. So we had a meeting yesterday kind of talking about asynchronous because the company is not asynchronous by default mighty. My two teams are, I run my teams asynchronous by default for the rest of the company, isn't run that way. we were a company that was office-based pre pandemic, and then went remote during the pandemic. So there is potentially a similar to Klaus, a good chunk of people are in and around where the original office was, which is now gone. And one of the questions that had been asked was around, the idea of, of having an officer know office, a number of people had mentioned specifically, Hey, we missed that opportunity of coming into the office to see people, to kind of hang out, to have lunch and kind of build those relationships. and as you said, when you were in that environment and people who were there, and those were really the people that you socialize with kind of the most of your entire day, that's where kind of your friends were. but now that you're not in that environment anymore, and you're still kind of working nine to five or nine to six, if you don't have those people around you, like, how can you recreate that? I know I I'll later go into how I personally recreated that at my time individually, because I'm very much an extrovert.

Scott - [22:53 - 23:11]

so I needed to recreate those opportunities, but at least maybe start off of like your thoughts for people who were kind of in this. And especially for like a leader who is leading teams of people who used to be in the office or friends were in the office. Now they're kind of like, what, what can a leader be doing now to kind of recreate those opportunities for engagement?

Valentina - [23:11 - 25:00]

So I'm an introvert myself. So, so for me, it was, I would say maybe even a little bit harder because I don't naturally go out and bring people into my life, basically if I can help it because I'm finding my cave. so, but I have been working remotely for over 10 years. So I had to figure out that pretty, pretty early. So one of the things that as a leader, like you definitely have to have regular one-on-ones with all of your teammates. Like I would say once a week, at least every second week, so that you can figure out what is happening in their lives and make those, one-on-ones not just number related because those, you can see at some on some dashboard anyway, but like, make sure that there's time in there to figure out, like, what how's the family, what are, what do you do in your free time? And when you consistently get like nothing or only reading books, or like, if there are no other people in that, what are you doing on time, then maybe it's an option to like probe. So like where do you get new ideas from? Or whom do you rubber duck with like, whom do you just talk through your thoughts to see like how much a social connection they do there? Because even the most introverted person has one or two people in their lives that they talk with. And then if they do want to, if they do feel the lack of interactions, then there are some things that you can do as a leader that is giving them ideas on how to connect with other people, even reading books on like how to make friends, because these are you like skills and helping them in terms of if they are extrinsically motivated in terms of accountability partner, by next week, you need to have visited three co-working spaces and see have any of those was like close enough, convenient enough price, price point, okay.

Valentina - [25:00 - 26:28]

Et cetera. So I like to help them to move towards actually getting those social connections and with coworking spaces, I've had a lot of very good experiences co-working spaces and also very bad experiences. It's a little bit like with the gym, there are some gyms you go and people go in and do their stuff and go out and never talk to anyone. And then there are gyms that kind of, that kind of created this. And afterwards you linger and like talk to some people and compare trainings, plans or something. And so by just finding these, or even the library, like every library has a cafe, like if you're working there and then like, hang out in the cafe, often enough, you'll figure out what the other people who hang out there all the time. And you kind of can create these social connections based on something that you have in common, which might be the gym or the library, like love of reading or whatever. Because even just being around people, isn't enough. Either you need something in common. If it's not work, you need to figure out something else that you have in common and not everybody will enjoy the pottery class. So like experimental is super interesting. And as a leader, I think because you get the input from everybody on your team, you potentially have a lot of more ideas, how people can actually be social. So like by stuffing out in your team, like who's social in which way, and then making the connection say, Hey, somebody else on the team is doing this. How about you try this and really encouraging people to try out these things helps them too, because no one needs to reinvent the wheel all over again again, because we know it's round.

Valentina - [26:28 - 26:32]

So like just how can we get this round nose into the rest of our day?

So I'm curious, how do, how did you do this because as an extrovert, like the need is I guess a lot higher.

Scott - [26:38 - 27:23]

Yeah. So, for me personally on this, I'll go by my personal history, then what I do with my teams. So when I worked in an office many, many moons ago, I try to avoid thinking about those days as much as I can. at least once or twice a day would go to Starbucks with a colleague and friend every hour, I had to go get up, go to someone's desk, you know, meet at the water cooler, just to kind of have that conversation. And for me, those were like a core fundamental part of my day. Like I needed, that was for, I guess, my energy throughout the day. And when I went remote, like there was in theory weren't possible anymore because without the physical space, no physical space mentors, no physical people, which meant that you couldn't have those easy interactions That at the beginning of the pandemic, No, this was 10, 10 and a half years ago. Yeah. Yeah.

Valentina - [27:23 - 27:34]

Okay. Because I think there's a disclaimer. We have to give to everybody who started with more during the pandemic, forced work from home. It's not remote work. It's a completely different animal.

Scott - [27:34 - 29:05]

Absolutely. But we've, we've hit that point. God knows how many times on this podcast and, and everywhere else. so at my type of division, what I started to do was on slack. I kind of go to the list of people who were online for that day. I kind of closed my eyes. I'd scroll randomly like click some random person and say, Hey, Hey Don, Tina, I'm Scott I'm in Israel. You want to jump on a five minute zoom call and people absolutely loved it. They loved That. They loved that spontaneity. They loved that. Having just kind of a short conversation, like as you would at a water cooler, right? At a water cooler, it's not a 30 minute meeting, right. A short conversation, like how are the kids? How's the game, how's this, whatever. And it was just like that, that opportunity and also to see a face and hear a voice cause most communication over in remote teams that wasn't meeting related always happened through slack. So getting out of the text in a box and seeing me seeing a face and hearing voice people loved it to the point like after the first or second time with random people, they would start messaging me saying, Hey, when are we doing the next five minute FaceTime? Because they loved that opportunity so much. so can continue doing that for a long time. what I've been doing now with my teams that I run at CloudApp are a number of things. Think you hit one on, at the beginning of what you were saying. So as I mentioned, I run, my teams is Concilium. So the work portion of our one-on-ones and books, our team meetings are done asynchronously. So like any type of meeting, I create a Google slide of whatever data points I want to share with my team.

Scott - [29:05 - 30:31]

I record a cloud video of me walking through that Google slide. I share it with them on a Monday and say, Hey, individual or team, you have two days to share feedback in the slack thread, questions, feedback, whatever it may be. We can tackle that asynchronously. If something's not addressed, we can bring it up. We have that synchronous time in the calendar for one-on-one and team time on Wednesday. And if anything isn't addressed, we do it then on the Wednesday is for team time is if we play a game where we do a show and tell like, it's all about team building, it's all about relationship building. Does nothing, really, anything about work? I'm very much focused on just getting people together on individual, the one-on-one time. It's also very much of like, Hey, how's it going? How was your weekend? Like, did your kid make the soccer team? Like, what are you reading? How was the trip? All those kinds of they're very much focused on getting to know you as a person, getting conversation, relationship, building, things like that, professional development. so we've been doing that and it was interesting that number of months ago, I had canceled one of the team funds because I think two out of six people at the time were out that day. And I was thinking from the wrong end from, from, oh, I didn't want those two people to collect, miss that interaction with the rest of the teams as, okay. I'm going to cancel it. Okay. So we do daily stand-ups we'll we'll get to later also do like a bi-weekly standup for the more in-depth one. And one of the feedback points I got was, one person that said, I feel sometimes we're too asynchronous to the point where I was like, I really missed that team.

Scott - [30:31 - 30:45]

Fun, that team building on Wednesday. Like I missed interacting with the team. I missed hanging out with the team and I was like, holy crap. Like, you're right. Like I can't not, I can't cancel it for the people who are gonna miss it. Like, it's, it's important for the people who were here to have that opportunity. Yeah.

Valentina - [30:45 - 30:51]

Because you're taking away an hour of fun and adding in an hour of work basically, which is not a nice exchange.

Scott - [30:51 - 32:10]

Absolutely. Absolutely. So I said, okay, I'm never going to make that mistake again. And I said, okay, well, we also need to be getting together more as a team than more than once every two weeks. So I said, okay, what else could we be doing? So we started doing like one or twice a week, half an hour hour, depending on what time, how many times? Like a coworking called session. So it's basically like an open mic where people they can join. They can not join. They can leave. Come on, late, leave early. And it's there. If you want to talk about work, do you want to talk about work questions about the team? Great. If you want to talk about anything, that's not work. That's great too. But again, it's also just the idea to get people together, see their face, hear their voice, talk about something again, in this case it could be work. It could not be work. but again, just having those opportunities, because again, there's the number one word. That's come up over all this time for, for remote work intentionality. If you don't create as a leader, if you don't create these opportunities to connect, being very intentional with them is you've also said they're never going to happen on their own. so it's something that, again, I'm always looking for things. If you have ideas, I've been asking my team, like, what other things do you want to do? Like what other opportunities? So I'm always very interested in like, what else can we try to get the team together? Just to know each other, maybe partially asynchronously, partially synchronously. Like if you have some ideas, I would love to hear them.

Valentina - [32:10 - 33:53]

I love that you like, basically have structured in a way that these interaction just happened without anyone having to like actively make it happen. Because whenever you depend on people making something happen, then inertia just takes over and it doesn't happen. I think the one thing that a lot of people always claim the officer's better at it's like the serendipity that you do end up speaking to people that you would not speak to just because you have the same, like the same, I don't know, lunch, lunch break or whatever, which on the other side also means that in the office, after all, you also end up interacting with the same five people all the time, because you only interact with the people that have their coffee break at 11, you never run into the people who go and have a coffee at 1130 because we are all creatures of habits. So in the end, you also, if you observe like an office from a bath, you also end up after a week seeing like the patterns who goes, where, when, and who talks to whom. And I think in an, in an online environment like you did, you can create the opportunity for serendipity to happen, but somebody has to create that structure. And there's a team lead, at least for your own team, you can create this structure. And then the next step would be to kind of lobby slash Teads. The other team leads that are on your level to also try this out with their team and make very clear, like this is a little bit, work, more work for you. Yes, yes. But you will also have a much more engaged team. And next time you have a team meet up, you won't have to like convince anyone because they will already know each other so well that they will look forward to meeting all of these people.

Valentina - [33:53 - 34:23]

Because I think that's an interesting thing. A lot of people say we do meet ups and people can then take that social energy to like survive until the next meetup. But it is also true the other way round, if you F already had a lot of fun with these people online, you want to see them in person. And that makes them the meetup actually successful. And you can like a little bit jump-started quicker because people already know each other and you don't have to start with the weather you can directly start with so that your kids managed to get into that football club or not.

Scott - [34:23 - 35:54]

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, this was a point in a couple of years, like, what's that It's like a loop lately, both types reinforce each other. Yeah. Completely completely correct. A number. I think it was like one or two episodes last year may have been, spoke about like these IRLs and the importance of getting people together. And as, as you said, for us to remote leaders, who've been doing this a long time. Every one of us says getting together as often as possible is absolutely critical. And again, what happened during the pandemic is obviously nonsense. so having kids, so if you do an IRL once a year or twice a year as a team, like, okay, what are you doing in between those get together to continue either building a relationship to kind of wind in the sail or as you said that, to create those relationships beforehand. So then when you meet in person, like there's so much, so much stronger. And when I went to an envision IRL in 2019, it's very interesting. I'll let this last point and we'll move over to the mental health. it, every meal was a, an interesting sociological experiment. APAC sales team sat with apex sales team. iOS teams sat with iOS team. Exactly. Like you said, people who kind of have the habit of sitting and talk, they're going to be the ones who socialize. So for me, either again as an extrovert or being the first employee at envision, so literally everybody there came after me and I never interacted with 90 something. People there, every single one of the meals, I sat at a different table. I didn't sit with my team the entire time I purged. I made it a point to sit with a different group of people every time.

Scott - [35:54 - 36:44]

And my team was kept on hub. Why aren't you sitting with us? Why aren't we sitting with something like, listen, I talked to you every day. I know you, these people here, I've never met them. I've never heard about them. If it wasn't for this opportunity for these like three, four days here, I'd have nothing to do with them. So I'm going to take this opportunity to just see who they are and get to know them and build some kind of relationship. Then hopefully now that we go back to remote, we can kind of continue a conversation here. so yeah, I love that idea of, as you're building this within your team, as an individual leader and seeing that success, then sharing it with other leaders within teams that are excited of you getting them to do it. And then trying to kind of, I guess, collaborate across the team leads and say, okay, we're doing these interactions together. How do we bring the, our 2, 3, 4 teams together for a team fund or to make those little kinds of milk coffee chats or something like that? absolutely.

Valentina - [36:44 - 37:05]

That's why it's also helpful to actually document the things that you do because, because when you share this with someone else, the first reaction I get is it sounds like a lot of work. And if I can then say, well, but here's a template that tells you when to write which message and slack to start getting it going, then it suddenly is like a little bit less daunting.

Scott - [37:05 - 37:48]

I completely agree. So let's kind of pivot now more towards like the mental health side, the burnout side of how leaders again now in a remote environment where you can't in theory, see the person's face all the time again. Yeah. We have zoom. So we can take advantage of that. But what you've been doing as a leader for your teams that you don't see to get a sense of how everybody's doing, how everybody's feeling to kind of potentially catch burnout, to catch loneliness and different things like that. would love to hear some of the things that you've been doing personally as a leader over the years and what other leaders can be doing. Just small little things again, that somebody could start again. We can talk about tools. Maybe we'll talk about after, if you want to include that. Now we could, we could go there too.

Valentina - [37:48 - 39:34]

So, I think there's actually three kind of, risks. Like one is definitely loneliness. One is burnout because lonely just means I'm not seeing enough people as I need from a personal perspective, then the burnout is there is too much to do, or I'm overwhelmed with the amount of expectations that are set of me. And that is very much like leadership influence. And then the third one, which is kind of a combination is like this resignation of, I don't know what the fuck I'm doing here. This is horrible, but I don't, I'm quite comfortable here. So I'm also not going to look for another job. So I'm just sitting here doing what I'm supposed to do, men like getting to the expectations, but I'm not going to go the extra mile because I just can't be bothered. And, yesterday I think I read an article that this is quiet. Quitting is kind of the official word for that, which I think is like an interesting definition. And I think that's the most difficult one to actually figure out, but all of them are reflected in communication on how people communicate. And I know that you should only read like the most important slack channels and like manage notifications. And then again, me as a team lead, I actually read almost everything that like my people read and, even in channels that I'm, I'm not really interested in series, but like if three people or something are regularly watching, whatever series is at the moment, I will be in that channel. Just like to see how the upper flow ebb and flow of the communication, because when people's communication with yourself, but also with each other suddenly changes, something has happened And it might be an event like that has really impacted them.

Valentina - [39:34 - 41:16]

Or it might just be that they have come to like an internal event that was kind of like a breaking point. And now they are recalibrating about how can this all make sense to me? And there there's no real science behind, like I'm not counting the number of messages, but when I see this, okay, this person always used to like crack a joke at this kind of topics. Or this person always edit new emojis. And now they haven't added one to slack and like three months, like what happened there. And then it depends a little bit, like if you have a good relationship with that person one-on-one and you can pinpoint like blank, ask, like I have realized that something has happened. Is there something that is like worrying you that, that we, that you'd like to share with me and otherwise it can also help to kind of start looking into what are they still talking about? Maybe also, what are the writing on like public pages, like on LinkedIn, for example, like what are the topics that they are, they are, they are about with others and then see, where does this come from? Like maybe it's something really huge. Like I put, for example, on LinkedIn that my dad died about a month ago, because that was for me a huge impact. And it really threw me out of my lane for like quiet quite a bit. and for me it was important to make that public. And I brought it up in one-on-ones and I talked with everybody about it, but like, not everybody is dead open, so, but you can still see that something happened. So finding out what is it that changed in their life. And if it's something that has to do with their external life, which you may be able to support to support them, even if it's just listening to them, or is it something that has actually to do with the company itself?

Valentina - [41:16 - 42:25]

Maybe they're Subaru worried because funding is taking long and a fundraising is taking longer than was said at the beginning. And now they're suddenly like worried that they're going to lose their job because on LinkedIn, everybody's writing about how, like there were layoffs or, or, or maybe they took on this new role. And they're not really clear about what this role actually means within the company. So they're still attached to the old role where they knew everything. And now the new one is too overwhelming. And where can you as a manager, listen to them. If it's work-related help clarifying, like, what are the things that are expected of you this week, this month? And so that it's like they see the path because sometimes we're just stuck in our brain and we don't see the trees, like not, not the forest, not the trees, not nothing. We only see like clouds. It's like, okay, what, what am I supposed to do here? And having somebody at the office, you would probably just talk about this with your like coffee mate or wherever you sit with together. But in a remote, like you, as a leader, you need to find these things out. It's when somebody quits it, not shouldn't ever be in a surprise for you.

Scott - [42:25 - 42:59]

Absolutely. there are two points I really liked and I want to pull out the first is, as you said, when you made that announcement, you continue talking about with people on your team that your father had passed away. And again, I send my condolences, the biggest thing, and I think I wanted this. I want to end the conversation a little bit later with the idea around this of, you know, as leader, especially when you want to kind of create environments, something it's leading from the front, right? If you want to create an environment where people are open and transparent and feel comfortable sharing things with you, you need to lead first, you need to show them.

Scott - [43:00 - 44:21]

And I think that's a fantastic thing that you said, this happened to me. Like, this is how I feel. This is how it feels vulnerable. This is how, and being able to share that and people understand, oh, okay. Like my leader is feeling this way. My leader is vulnerable. My leader is sad. My leader is something and they're sharing it with me. That makes it more comfortable for me. If I have something going on with me that I can kind of then share that back. So I think most critical thing that any leader can do around this whole idea of mental health and it really anything, I think culturally is a leader from the front, right? That's not taking vacation. Right. Do you have unlimited vacation? If you, as a leader, don't take vacation. The people who are going to see that you don't, they're not going to do it either. and whatever that means. So certainly leading from the front. the second point that I wanted to bring out was that idea of noticing kind of the differences. And this was, I had somebody in my team a couple of years ago that used to drop chips or memes and whatever, like the team channel every day, it was always like a great part of the great parts a day, whatever, no new meme or GIF, they're going to put it in there. And then the person started kind of putting it in there like three times a week and then kind of putting in there, like once a week. And like, this was assigned for me, Hey, there was something going on here, right? Because again, every day they had a habit of doing this engaged, cultural, whatever it may be.

Scott - [44:21 - 45:07]

And then they had some kind of change and yes, I think that's a complete, complete red flag. and things that I do now with my, certainly I do now with my teams, like two things that will, we can talk about. Number one, I kind of check in with them in slack every other day. Just, Hey, how's it going? How's your day. What's new. Just again, just to have that conversation, it's not work, not asking them about work. I'm not giving them feedback. Just how's everything going again. It's very quick. It's not anything like that. Just to kind of get feedback the second, what we do. And maybe we'll also kind of dive into, like, the idea of tools is we do a daily, async standardly, stand up through, slack. And one of the questions in there is kind of like, how are you feeling today with a set of emojis? Like happy to happy face to not happy face.

Valentina - [45:07 - 45:11]

Okay. So you basically it's, you're already given like the options.

Scott - [45:11 - 46:26]

Correct. So the previous tool we had before allowed custom ones that you can put any emotion in there, which I think was great. Unfortunately they closed and a new tool. I would pushing them to the ed building, but now it's kind of like, I think five type faces, like super happy, happy, middle Sean, so forth. And they really reiterated over the time to the team. It's of being honest. Right? There's never a wrong answer. If you put a sad face, I thank you for that. And no, it's actually a good thing to put upset face in there. Right. Because if you put a sad face in there, it's I look at it as, like you said, I look at those religiously, I see a sad face immediately. I jumped on that person to, Hey, how's everything going? I saw the sad face. You want to talk about it? What's new things like that. Also the same thing, if I see kind of like the neutral face, like three days in a row, like, okay, the same type of thing. That's like a red flag for me. Hey, let me just check in and see why if someone's like neutral. So I think there's even like, can maybe if you want to dive into the idea of tools of those little habitual things, again, of like check-ins or, or what have you, that you can kind of get some just quick feedback, then you can take, you can look at that feedback and get a picture of our K everything's great. Or everything's not great. Or maybe, Hey, do I need to kind of maybe keep an eye on this or do I need to try to do something and take a look now?

Valentina - [46:26 - 47:52]

So, so what we do is we use Geekbot and we actually also, we have a daily check-in, but you ha you, and you have to fill it in once a week. So depending on the type of work you do, it may not make sense to do it every day, but like once a week, at least, and then some people do it more often than others. And there's like, it's the typical standup question? Like, what did you do yesterday? What do you do tomorrow? But in the middle, we have a quiz or like, what's your focus today? But in the middle of the question is share something that you've learned or experienced since you last. and that's really interesting, like we, and we experimented with a lot of questions, because what did you do then? People were like, it's a pandemic. Like, what do you expect me to do? Like the dishwasher. Amazing. Exactly. So like, by focusing on what have you learned or experienced made it a, like a little bit broader, because then you can also talk like about the, the, the book that you read or the recipe you tried or whatever. And it's really interesting because if you use a tool, you usually get the stats, you can actually filter by one person and then you can very easily see, like what has changed over time. And then you can actually look at that and be like, oh, this person used to be very verbose. And now we get an emoji as what have you done? Like something shifted there. And, because then people will comment on threats. So actually the threats under these check-ins have become like our water cooler basically because somebody says, oh, I, I painted this wall in my house and puts a picture.

Valentina - [47:52 - 49:31]

And then somebody is like, oh, I love this color, which is it? Oh, it's, I don't know, peach pink or whatever. And then like, it goes into color theory, et cetera. So it's like very interesting what people then then start talking about. And some of the social channels we have on slack came out of these conversations that then somebody else, and when it's three or four people, it kind of makes sense to just make a public channel out of it. And that's why we have like planned parenting and cats and dogs and whatever, and free climbing and et cetera. And so that kind of, it's far more interesting conversations that were not only work-related out of this daily check-in, which is technically also work-related because like, you talk about what you did before, and after. So that was one of the tool that was really, really helpful for us. What I like about this? How are you in giving some options or rather the thing that actually is complicated? How do you account for cultural differences? Because like, I w I work a lot, like at Germans, we are not super emotional to start with. If, if you have a Brazilian person on the team, it's, it's more likely than not that they have a lot of emotions. If we go with cultural stereotypes, Estonians have even less emotions than Germans, or rather, I mean, they don't have less emotions, but they are very even keeled in terms of how they express these emotions. So how do you make sure that you also get the information that you need from people who will always take the neutral face? Because I mean, life, okay. I'm not sad. I'm not happy. I'm just normal because there, like, sometimes there are, there are some people where it's really difficult to actually get through to them.

Valentina - [49:31 - 49:47]

And I don't know if it's, based on where they grew up and where emotion may not be like that part of, of the general interaction, or if it's aligned with the type of job Def you've chosen. Like they say that engineers are a little bit more stoic, which may or may not be the case, but like, how do you account for that?

Scott - [49:47 - 50:30]

That's, that's a very interesting question. I think something that I, I probably didn't think about, of maybe it's like the combination of, okay, they give a neutral face, but that's like the standard. And then, okay. You have to back that up with those like little conversations, like checking in with them a couple of times a week. And then as you get to know them, if, you know, like, okay, neutral is like, good, I guess for that, For everyone else, neutral Is a smile for them. Then it's like, okay, the fact that we're putting like a neutral face and that's, you know, everything, they're like, everything's in green, so you don't have to worry about it. And so, okay. Not just taking one piece of information alone in itself in a vacuum, but kind of again, doing these little different things to kind of combine those opportunities to really get a more robust picture. I think that's very interesting.

Valentina - [50:30 - 50:32]

never Optimize for only one KPI.

Scott - [50:32 - 51:36]

Exactly. So the lesson I want to bring up one last point, I want to talk about here, because I know our time is kind of running out, the conversation we've had today and many of these conversations around leadership and helping with loneliness and burnout, mental health and things like that. It's you as a leader, how do you help your team? And we covered a lot of great things today, a lot of great ideas, but one of the things that isn't so discussed as much, and I, again, we I tried to do this on my own on the first season is what do you do as a leader for yourself? Right? Because you have things going on, right? You said, again, your grandfather passed away a month, a month ago. So you're trying to help your team with whatever they're dealing with, but you, at the same time, like you're dealing with things that are going on. So I'd love to hear like what you've, what you do, maybe what you picked up over specially maybe during the pandemic of different habits or daily things that you do every day to help with your own mental health and your own loneliness and all the things like that, which then again, I think is as valuable to leaders to again, to give them the tools and resources, because if they can't help themselves, they certainly can't help anybody else.

Valentina - [51:36 - 53:17]

Absolutely. Absolutely. actually that is, I learned a lot when I became a, became a mother because as a mother, you are also supposed to figure it out all yourself. And like the unsolicited advice you get usually is not very, very, very helpful. so, and like for me, like motherhood and leadership have a lot in common. So I was able to like transfer some of the skills from, from one to the other. So one thing that I'm, I'm a, I'm a huge fan of therapy. And, now for example, I'm specifically working with a who specialized in grief counseling. So, because I know this is the big emotion at the moment that I have to go through. If I put it into box, label it and put it on the stairs, it just explode 10 years from now with something completely unrelated. So I'm going to work through this now. And my team knows that I'm working with a grief therapist because on the day that I have to therapy session, if I have meetings afterwards, it might like it might come up in that unexpected. So I want everybody, like, if I start crying in the meeting, it's not because you are making me unhappy. It's because I'm working through things, which I think also comes with the vulnerability side of things. Like it's okay. Like we are, we are all humans here. And then the other thing on a more like when it's work-related et cetera, one of my experiences, the higher you get, the less, less support you get from the people who are, you are reporting to because they usually have like a million other things that at some point you are just reporting to them because the HR tool needed like lions, but actually you are like working on so different things that you can't really help each other and don't have the time or the energy for that.

Valentina - [53:17 - 54:48]

Yeah. So I have two pages in my room, on the wall with names on it, and one is my cheerleader list and it always has five to 10 people that I know if they've called them and, and explain what I'm doing, they're going to tell me that I'm amazing. They will remind me of all the things that I've done in my life. They will remind me that I'm totally capable. And they, they cheer me on, they will not give me a lot of constructive or feedback on how to do differences, but they just know that I'm amazing basically. And so whenever I feel, and that my, with women that might actually be cyclical whenever I feel like unsure, or I I'm like, oh my God, this is ultimate. I will call one of them and get a little bit like my, my, my, my ego brushed up so that I can continue. And then the, and I reviewed this, I have the list on the wall so that I don't forget that I have cheerleaders and advisors. So the advisors, the second list, the people on that list, like some of them are very constant, but sometimes they will shift. Yeah. So I review every six months. I have a reminder in my calendar to actually check, have I talked to all of them and I haven't talked to somebody, is it because I didn't realize, or is it because they have kind of moved into another like friends category let's say and are not an or so, and then I will like change the names and the advisory board. These are people that actually work through or in similar fields as myself. So I can actually rubber duck with them. Like I can talk and they will ask good questions.

Valentina - [54:48 - 56:15]

They will challenge me to think differently around it and to actually dig even deeper. And so they don't like, the people don't know who they are on the list, but for me, it's like a constant reminder that even though I'm alone at home, I am not alone in thinking through these things. Some of my advisors are actually at clouds, but somewhat my advisors they're simply remote work expert or experts in the support industry. And then I can have these conversations that, that it's like, I have this challenge at work. How would you do this? And then getting the, the input from the other person, but also from the other person, Hey, but like half a year ago, didn't you try out this other thing? Why don't you try this again? Because we have had this ongoing conversation. So creating basically your own tribe of people who can cheer you on and people who can actually help you think is really, really valuable, because this is like creating your own leadership circle that you can kind of report to, and even find an accountability partner if you need one. Sure, Sure, Sure. Plus somebody who actually knows what they are doing. So either a coach or a mental health, professional, I can, that it's an investment and like, you don't need to do it every week. Like I go to one once a month, which is, and it goes into my budget because I know this is like eating healthy or like the gym. Like, it's just important for me to continue being a functional human being, not only at work, but also for my children and for my friends, because I'm not alone in this world for as much as I would like to be sometimes.

Scott - [56:15 - 56:53]

No, I, I love those ideas. I think they're great. for me, I think what I did mean, especially during the pandemic, was going for a daily walk or run, just getting out out of some and when the pandemic started, it's like, I literally didn't leave the house for like, I don't know, two months, like We were in Spain, there was an option to leave The house. Yeah. So I started going for like the daily walk run just to get out of the house. I think that was really great. I have a group in the morning, a small group here across the street from my house, like where we do kind of morning stretching. We do like gratitude journaling, but kind of pair up and kind of share what we will be having our grad two journals, I think has been, been really great.

Valentina - [56:53 - 56:55]

Oh, this is a great idea.

Scott - [56:55 - 58:22]

Yeah. So we like every, so we meet like six times, five, six times a week and usually like two or three times a week, we'll kind of pair up or like a group of three and just kind of share like what we had on our, our list of, you know, usually it looks like, you know, three areas of gratitude. like how's my, my body thoughts and emotions and what do I want to achieve today? Kind of different things like that and be able to share those as a group like that is just for me, especially being able to just write things down, get getting them out of my brain and getting them out in some capacity has been a huge, huge help for me. I do, I've started getting very much into like just daily, breath work and meditation. So every day I usually have like two, two sessions of like 20 minutes. it's also helped me a lot. And one of the things I did probably about a year, year and a half ago from like having a number of conversations with similar people who happen to be working for startups and it happened to be parents, like everyone was venting like frustration and anxiety and things like that. And it was like just all kind of these little conversations, like with random people. And I said, maybe I should like create a support group. I mean, like that's everything I've always heard of. It's like, it's always good to have people to talk to. So I created this little support group of, I think it was like six people and we met every other week and we had like a little WhatsApp group, but we kind of hadn't the idea was to kind of have like daily things that we take on and we share them and share them the WhatsApp group and like be able to cheer each other on is something that you mentioned.

Scott - [58:22 - 58:41]

But just like the biggest point was, Hey, you're not the only parent who working for a startup with kids that are like unlocked downs or like locked down in quarantines. Like every other week. Like my kids were, I think at one point when my kids were like, literally in and out in and out of quarantine.

Valentina - [58:41 - 58:50]

Yeah. They never get it. Like, can we please all quarantined together? Why do you test positive when the advocate is right out of quarantine? Like how about we think this?

Scott - [58:50 - 59:17]

Absolutely. And I mean that, I mean, that was super helpful for everyone just to have an opportunity for people in the same, same scenario would be able to connect, be able to kind of cheer each other on, be able to have be a shoulder to cry on him, which was, which was great. but I know we kind of pass time and I greatly appreciate the time and the fantastic conversation for people who want to connect more with you, connect a little bit more, learn more about Klaus and what you're doing. What's the best way to get ahold of you find out and get hold of clouds.

Valentina - [59:17 - 01:00:13]

So Klaus, the easiest way is Klaus app.com. and we also have a really, really good blog. So Claus hap.com/blog about all things, customer support, quality, including like templates for how to find a quote, customer support, quality person, et cetera. Like, so there's a lot of very practical advice in there. for me, if you find Valentina Turner with T H O and.dot two dots on the, on the O on LinkedIn, I'm the only Valentina Turner until my, my daughter comes of age and we'll cross that bridge when we get there. so I'm easiest found on LinkedIn and also on my website, Valentina, don't adopt com and yeah. On if, yeah, once a month I do a remote that works Q and a. So if people have specific questions around remote, strategy and leadership, I usually announce it on LinkedIn and also on my website. So people can just sign up and jump in and ask the questions.

Scott - [01:00:13 - 01:00:50]

Fantastic. Yeah. I'll, I'll include all of those links in the show notes and yeah, again, thank you so much for, for taking the time and, and sharing your experience. I think in a, probably the most important topic, around culture and leadership in, on mental health and loneliness and engagement and, and, no burnout in which it has been significant. Probably the biggest issue of the last three years we'll continue to be big issues, especially loneliness. so thank you so much for sharing your thoughts and ideas and things that you've done to obviously improve and fight against those, and to everyone who joined today. Thank you so much for listening and have a wonderful day.