Unknown Speaker 0:00 Kurt Nelson, Kurt Nelson 0:07 welcome to Behavioral Grooves, the podcast that explores the psychological principles behind why we do what we do. I'm Kurt Nelson and Tim Houlihan 0:14 I'm Tim Houlihan. On today's episode, we have the privilege of speaking with Raj Choudry, researcher and author of the book, work from anywhere the blueprint for the new world of remote Kurt Nelson 0:25 work. Now, Roger's work has been groundbreaking in showing that remote work isn't just a pandemic response, but potentially a better model for both individuals and organizations. What's fascinating about his research is how he distinguishes between work from home and work from anywhere. Now, work from anywhere gives employees geographical flexibility to choose where they live, whether that's closer to family in a more affordable city or near the beach. Who knows Tim? I kind Tim Houlihan 0:53 of like that. And the benefits aren't just for employees. Companies gain access to global talent, convert real estate costs from fixed to variable, and under the right conditions, can even see increased productivity and reduced attrition. Raj Kurt Nelson 1:09 also addresses the critical challenges that organizations need to solve when implementing work from anywhere, the isolation problem, communication challenges and maintaining corporate culture. Tim Houlihan 1:20 But what I found most interesting was the breakdown of different hybrid models, hybrids, the weekly, monthly and quarterly models that he talks about, and how they can be tailored to different teams and different company needs. Kurt Nelson 1:32 Yeah. Tim, that was really cool. He also shares some cutting edge research on how digital twins are making remote work possible, even in traditionally on site, industries like manufacturing, healthcare and power generation. Yeah. Tim Houlihan 1:45 So whether you're a leader considering how to structure your team's work arrangements, or an individual looking to make the case for more flexibility, this conversation offers practical insights into the future of work. Kurt Nelson 1:58 So sit back and relax, perhaps in your home office or favorite coffee shop or on the beach somewhere with your dog nearby, as our guest would understand, you'll Tim Houlihan 2:10 find out about that, and enjoy our conversation with how work from anywhere is transforming how we think about work. With Raj Choudry, you Raj Choudry, welcome to Behavioral Grooves. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure to have you here, and we're going to start with a speed round. We'd like to know this is a rather abnormal speedrun question, but if you could be granted the ability to speak fluently to either animals or babies, which would you choose dogs? No question. Oh yeah. Kurt Nelson 2:50 I love that. I like how quickly that was. That was you might have thought about that at some point. You have dogs that you're driving Raj Choudhury 2:58 along, and she's my favorite child. So, oh Kurt Nelson 3:00 yeah. So like having the ability to speak and understand would be pretty great, wouldn't it? Yeah, okay, all right. All right. I'm gonna go back to one of our more traditional ones. Are you a coffee drinker or a tea drinker both, both? Oh, is there, is there a process as a coffee in the morning, tea in the afternoon, or does it just mix in any way? Raj Choudhury 3:22 Yes, I don't drink coffee in the afternoon. Tim Houlihan 3:26 Okay, oh, okay, okay, so only tea in the afternoon. Yes, okay, okay, interesting, already. Third speed round question is the future of work entirely remote. Raj Choudhury 3:39 So entirely remote is a misnomer. I'm a huge supporter of work from anywhere, which we'll talk about. But I'm also a huge supporter of well intentioned in person. Tim Houlihan 3:50 Excellent. We will definitely talk about that Absolutely. All Kurt Nelson 3:53 right, Raj, we're on the last of our speed round questions, and this is a question again, probably part taking to probably further conversation that we're going to have is geographical flexibility the key to accessing untapped global talent. Absolutely, Raj Choudhury 4:10 I think that's the business case for work from anywhere in one sentence. Then Tim Houlihan 4:16 let's explore that. Tell us. Tell us about that. Why? What? Are we missing? Or what are executives missing when they're so concerned about bringing people back to the office? Raj Choudhury 4:27 Sure. So the first thing I should say is that work from anywhere is not the same as work from home. Work from anywhere is a work arrangement which allows individuals to choose where to live, which city, which town, which state, sometimes even which country. And so individuals can benefit in lots of ways. They can go and live in a cheaper city. They can live closer to mom and dad and do caring responsibilities. They can live in a in a beach, close to a beach or close to the mountains, based on what you love. But for companies. What work from anywhere does is it allows companies to expand the labor market they can hire from. So instead of being locked in into the New York market or 50 miles around New York, now you can hire from the West Coast. You can hire from the middle of the country. You can hire from Canada. You can hire from other countries around the world. So it's really expanding where you find talent from. And then we can talk later about how that fits into hybrid, and how hybrid is not one single thing. I talk about weekly hybrid and monthly hybrid and quarterly hybrid, which allow for work from anywhere, Kurt Nelson 5:42 yeah, and I think it's really interesting. And thank you for the differentiation between, you know, work from anywhere versus work from home, because I think that's a really key piece of this. And so when a company is thinking about this, and we talked about this in the in the speed round question, right? So it's accessing global talent from where they are. But why? I mean, if I'm in New York, I have, don't I have enough talent there? I mean, what is, what is the compelling reason for a leader? Then to really say, All right, this is there. Because obviously there might be some negative points that we'll talk about. You know that the idea of remote work. So, yep. So I Raj Choudhury 6:23 think the argument is that, you know, talent is everywhere, but company offices are not everywhere. So think about a startup, and the work from anywhere model is really popular with startups. So just to give you a real example, I studied this startup called Zapier. They have about 800 employees now, and these 800 employees come from more than 30 countries. Now, if Zapier was based in Silicon Valley, it would be competing for talent against Google and Facebook instead. Now it can find talent in Costa Rica and Kenya and Thailand and India and other places around the world. The other thing is, you know, it's not only just Global Access, but by going global or going national, you are also getting more diverse talent. So you're getting you're getting more women who prefer work from anywhere. You're getting people on on many other dimensions of diversity. I'll mention one quickly. So neurodiverse people have shown a very strong preference to work remotely because they don't want to live in New York and with the sounds and the noises of New York. So if you are a leader who cares about getting talent, and especially high quality talent, and getting diverse talent. Then work from anywhere has to be part of your equation. Tim Houlihan 7:47 Yeah, a lot of employees, I think, can pretty easily relate to the the benefits. Let's, let's talk a little bit more about the benefits to the organization. I love this, this example that you just gave on the startup, this idea of they could, they don't have to compete with with Google and other major Silicon Valley organizations by being able to hire from anywhere. But what about I mean, let's get let's get to ROI on this, because ultimately, companies need to make decisions that are going to benefit the bottom line. Raj Choudhury 8:16 Sure. So the benefits to companies are threefold. First of all, you are getting better talent access. So if you are trying to hire a machine learning engineer, and you're trying to hire machine learning engineers today or AI engineers in your local city, you might find such people in Silicon Valley. But if you are a company in Kansas, if you are a company in in Ohio, God bless you, right, you will not find on those locations. So you have to embrace work from anywhere. The second is, if you embrace work from anywhere, you can do in person more intelligently. What do I mean by that you can convert your real estate costs to a variable cost and not a fixed cost. Why do you want to invest in a 20 year, 30 year office lease if your employees are meeting once a month or once a quarter? So you're converting a very important line item in the P and L real estate costs into a variable costs. You use the real estate only when you need the real estate, and the third is under some conditions, my research shows work from anywhere can make people more productive. So that's what I found in the US Patent Office. The productivity went up 4% and why does it go up? Because when people are more relaxed in their surroundings and they have more money in their pockets, they can be more productive. So I'll give you a real example. One of the women in the patent office I had interviewed, she moved to a cheaper location. She moved out of the DC area because the patent office said you can go and work anywhere in the US. So she moved to a smaller town in. Got a larger house, and she was first, for the first time, able to afford childcare because of the lower housing costs. Now you can imagine how that makes a person more productive. So a potential of higher productivity, converting real estate costs into variable costs, and then hiring across nationally or globally, those are the three reasons, Kurt Nelson 10:22 Raj, is your research or anybody else's research that you know point to anything about retention and loyalty for those people who are there? Is there an increase in that as well? Raj Choudhury 10:33 Absolutely so in the patent office study, we found attrition went down, and especially for women. And the other thing I should mention here is that geography has been a huge constrain for both men and women, but especially women and women in dual career situations, because if you are living in New York and your company now wants to give you a promotion, but the promotion means you have to move to San Francisco. For women, it's been more difficult to make that move, because the spouse may not move, the kids may not move. And so there's at least, you know, three, four decades of research now showing that in dual career situations, women have lost because of geography. But if the company offers you work from anywhere and says you can work in in this new role, but you don't have to move, then the woman can take the promotion. Tim Houlihan 11:25 Raj, you talked about the productivity issues, the sort of the functional metric, kind of things that we look at, that a company would look at, what about the psychological benefits to to employees? Raj Choudhury 11:37 Absolutely, I think it is a huge part of the equation here, because if you are living in a place that makes you happier because you have friends and family around, you don't feel guilty about not doing your caring responsibilities, you're enjoying the weekend sports that you enjoy, you enjoy the climate or the food that you Enjoy, then it's going to make you a happier person, and happier employees are more productive employees. You know, I think that's that's pretty intuitive, Kurt Nelson 12:08 yeah. So one of the things I loved about the book was the how you talked about work from anywhere can unlock a lot of benefits, like we're just talking about now, but only if implemented. Right? You really stressed that part, and in particular, you talked about three problems that needed to be solved. You talked about the communication problem, the knowledge sharing problem and the isolation problem. So first off, can you, for our listeners, can you kind of give a little bit of an overview of what those three problems are, and then let's talk a little bit about what, how to make sure that we that if a leader was interested in this, what do they need to do in order to implement that? Raj Choudhury 12:44 Right? Sure. So I think the first problem that kicks in if you're working from anywhere is you do not have a shoulder to tap and ask questions. That's what I call the isolation problem. The second problem relates to communication, because if the team is spread all over the country, or if you have a colleague now living in London, then you have time zones. And then you have to think about time zones when you schedule calls. And the final piece, which I think is the most critical piece, is, now, how do we socialize? How do we onboard people? How do we mentor people. How do new employees and young employees get to know the senior people they need to know and develop the social ties? How do we develop a corporate culture if we all living in across the world? So I my research shows that these are all real problems. But the good news is, you know, my research also shows that there are best practices to get around each one of these problems. Tim Houlihan 13:47 Let's talk about those. What, how would, how would, how do we best attack each of these three major issues? So Raj Choudhury 13:54 the isolation problem and the fact that you cannot tap a shoulder to ask a question is best solved by creating a culture where you are documenting every part of the work. So if there is a project update, or you have a new sales call, document that, and then you don't have to tap the shoulder to ask, Hey, what's happening on the project, or what happened yesterday, or how do I file an expense report here? How do people get promoted here? What are the KPIs for promotion? So all these questions can be documented. And you know, the when I was studying this, there were companies doing documentation very successfully, such as GitLab, but documentation was painful because you know people. You know all of us, we like to work, but we don't like to document. But the good news is that now with generative AI, documentation has become painless, so just this call can be transcribed by a Gen AI. Tool and then summarized in seconds so any new customer call, any new sales call, any new team meeting, can be painlessly transcribed and summarized, so that you're not being dumped with hours and hours of call transcripts. And so I think documentation is key, and documentation is now very, very feasible with Gen AI. So that's the solution to the isolation problem. Okay. Tim Houlihan 15:27 And then, so what about, say, the cultural issue? How do we, how do we form a culture if, if you we've got 600 employees working in 30 different countries, Raj Choudhury 15:38 yeah. So there are two solutions to that problem. So the first solution is, like I said, I'm a huge believer in work from anywhere now, given all the benefits, but I'm also a huge believer in intentional in person. So the way I've thought about the socialization problem is we need in person that is well done. And the thing to think about there, and this is probably one of the deepest insights of the book, in my opinion, is that we don't need in person for every team every week. So when you think about in person, there are two variables to think about. One is the frequency of in person, and the other is the venue of in person. And what most teams and most companies have got stuck with is what they're calling hybrid, which I call weekly hybrid, which is you meet in an office every week. And there are terrible problems with that model, because, you know, in many cases, people are going to the office. They're putting headphones and getting on zoom right, Monday, Tuesday. Part of the team is going Thursday, Friday, so they don't have the whole team together ever. But if you think about the frequency doesn't have to be weekly all the time. For some teams, the frequency is probably okay to be once a month. So you all live around New York. So some people live in Philly, some people live in Connecticut. And then you come to New York once a month for three days or four days, and then do quality in person, time with the whole team is there. So that's my version of monthly hybrid. And then for some teams and for some companies, it makes sense to get together once a quarter, and they they do these quarterly retreats, change the location from coast to coast, so that everyone can travel and and essentially, that's a model where you can completely variable eyes your real estate, because you don't need to have any company offices anymore. You can organize these retreats in locations that can host people once a quarter. Yeah, Kurt Nelson 17:49 Raj, I had the pleasure of being able to work with a company that had a lot of people headquartered around Seattle, but they also had multitudes of people across the rest of the US and even globally, and that monthly get together is exactly as what they were doing. They would have a week, and it was, it wasn't mandatory, but it was definitely, you know, it was kind of, we should all get together on the this week, and the leadership team would come together, but then anybody else would also be in in that in the office for that week. It was fantastic in the consulting that I did, because you really had this energy within the within the team. You had a whole different perspective. People were going out for dinners and meeting and talking about things that they wouldn't normally do. I mean, you know, they didn't go out to dinner on a regular basis with everybody else, but because people were coming in, it was kind of an event. And then every, you know, every semester, the leadership team would do an off site where they would go off and spend three or four days in a different area to really do some of that piece. Is that, and I am feeling like that's exactly what you're talking about, is Raj Choudhury 19:02 that is exactly what I'm talking about. And so the companies I've looked at, and there are many companies that are following this model, including publicly traded companies such as Atlassian and Nvidia, which is one of the most highly valued companies in the world, and Airbnb and many others, they follow this monthly with the team and quarterly with the company, kind of frequency. So the team gets together. And I'll give you the other exam. The point about the venue. So in today's world, the office, the downtown office, is just one of the venues where people can meet. So I'm following studying that the sales team in Cisco, and they have been meeting at all kinds of places, but interestingly around sales conferences, because these sales conferences are places where all of the sales people go, so their model has been, Let's all stay back after the sales conference for three or four days. Yeah, and then let's do a fun retreat, and let's get dinner and debrief about what we saw in the sales conference. Get mentorship time, get brainstorming going about how to think about this new opportunity. So I think there's a real way to not not only be creative about frequency and venue, but I keep saying this convert real estate into a variable cost. Tim Houlihan 20:22 Yeah, let's just to follow up on the best practices. What about the communication challenges, especially when it comes to time zones and that sort of thing. How do you approach that? Raj, Raj Choudhury 20:32 so there are two thoughts there. So I think first of all, you have to if your team is organized. So the first choice to make is whether the team should be spread on what I call a north south corridor versus an east west corridor. So if you allow work from anywhere along a north south corridor, then you could have people living in Seattle and San Francisco or Montreal, Seattle and San Francisco, but they're all in the same time zone. So it's like you can have a zoom call for eight hours or nine hours every day, right? But if you're spread across east west corridor, if you have people living in Europe and the West Coast of the US, it's very hard to do synchronous calls. So then you have to embrace asynchronous you have to do some things that are done asynchronously on Slack, on other platforms that now we have and that has been shown to help people in many ways. So I'll give you 2.1 that the synchronous meetings are preferred by the extroverts, but the you think about who speaks at a meeting, it's typically the manager and a few extroverts the back of the room just quietly nodding their heads. Now these people, turns out, love asynchronous they love to contribute ideas in writing, right? And the other thing that is now part of my ongoing research is how, and this is a little futuristic, but it's already happening, how these chat bots, the personalized chat bots, can help us do a synchronous communication. So what I've recently done is there's a new study that we're working on where we created a bot for a real CEO. So his name is Wade Foster. He's the CEO of Zapier, so he let me create a bot that communicates just like Wade. And then we ran an experiment in Wade's company where we asked Wade's employees to guess whether communication answers to some questions were coming from the human weight or the bot weight, and they couldn't tell the difference. Oh Tim Houlihan 22:52 yeah, wow, Did that surprise you? It Raj Choudhury 22:57 did. And so this is what we call passing the Turing test. So today's technology, today's technology, we can create a bot for any three of us, and that bot could be employed, I'm not saying recklessly, but in some parts of our communication mix. So I think the solution is either organize your team north, south, if you want to have a bunch of calls, but if you are going east west, then you have to put slack and these bots into the mix. Kurt Nelson 23:26 I think we could use a bot for Tim. I think that'll probably be better. So there we go. I like that. I like that idea. Hey, this is Kurt, and we want to say thanks for listening to Behavioral Grooves, and we hope that you're enjoying this episode, but it feels a little bit one sided. You're hearing from us, but we're not hearing from you. Tim Houlihan 23:49 This is Tim, and we have two suggestions to remedy that. The first is join our Facebook page and engage with us. We want to talk Kurt Nelson 23:58 with you. We want to hear your perspectives, and hopefully our Facebook page might be the place to have some of that interaction. So please, please come and join us. The other Tim Houlihan 24:07 recommendation we have for you is to leave us a quick rating, you know, the little five star thing at the bottom of your app, or a short review. Just leave us a few words about what you like, about Behavioral Grooves. We very much appreciate it. Kurt Nelson 24:20 Thanks, and we now return you to our regularly scheduled programming. Raj, one of the things, and maybe I'm mistaken on this, but it appears to me, at least from some of the companies that I've been working, working with, but also in the news cycle, that there seems to be more of a push to be back in the office that there is a a kind of pushback from what had happened during the pandemic, and now it's like, no, we need to get back. What are you what are you seeing? Are you seeing that? And why do you think leaders are trying or pushing that? Because it is, at least in my experience, and. Of the people, it's coming from the very top, and they're saying things around culture and some of the issues that you face, but it doesn't necessarily always seem to be based in Rational kind of what is happening on the ground. So yeah, Raj Choudhury 25:15 so I'll tell you the scientific evidence around this. There are three pieces of evidence I want to present. The first is, you know, I think we read about the Amazon and the Dell story a lot, but the reality is that, on aggregate, in the US economy, the percentage of days that workers are remotes has been about 25% for several months and quarters now. And this was 5% before the pandemic. So my interpretation of this is that for every Amazon and Dell, there has been a drop box which has closed down all offices, and those stories probably need to be told more. The second is for the RTO itself. The evidence that I've seen from Mark Ma, who's a researcher at the University of Pittsburgh is that the RTO has has not been followed by any positive stock market performance, so it's not been negative, but it's not been positive. But what is striking in Mark's research is that immediately following the RTO, attrition rates go up through the roof, and especially for women. And he studied this for Amazon. And the third thing, the final thing I'll say on RTOS is, you know, I think the federal cases, just like I think a great example here that the RTOS are often not being done for enhancing productivity. There are other incentives that leaders have, including large scale layoffs, right? Because RTOS, if the evidence that Mark is collecting leads to attrition, then that is you're letting off people without painful benefits. So the RTO is not just a productivity measure. It's often an layoff measure. Yeah, Kurt Nelson 27:04 do you think there's some inherent biases by leaders, though, too, of the way that they were brought up? I mean, and we see this, and so how can they operate on in this work from anywhere environment? We have to be together in order to get all of the benefits, because that's how I was raised. Is any of that coming out in this as well? Raj Choudhury 27:28 I think as a researcher, I should be careful. That's a very fair hypothesis, and there's correlational evidence that the University of Pittsburgh study collects, which is that RTOS being done predominantly by older, white male CEOs. Kurt Nelson 27:45 But, you know, I see that surprising, but yes, yes, they're good, yeah, but you Raj Choudhury 27:50 know whether, and my sense is, for every JP Morgan, there is a Citibank and Jane Fraser, the CEO, has been very, very consistent that she has embraced hybrid for good. And I think the point I like to make is that, you know, it doesn't matter what leaders think in a moment the labor market will force them to correct because you cannot, in today's environment, have a policy where talent is going to bleed and you will not be able to compete for talent, and then the labor market will force you, in sometime in the future to change that policy and go back to flexibility. Our Tim Houlihan 28:32 listeners might be thinking a lot of this discussion is about knowledge workers, but in the book, you actually present data that says it doesn't just have to be for knowledge workers. This could be in a variety of different worker environments, manufacturing, healthcare, airports, agriculture, you talk about the digital twin. So first, make a case for how could someone who is not a knowledge worker work remotely or work from anywhere? Yeah. So Raj Choudhury 29:01 this is probably one of the most exciting things that I'm following. So a digital twin is a combination of sensors AI and automation, where you can create a virtual replica of any physical operation. So any factory, any warehouse, any farm, a hospital ward, airport with all its conveyor belts and all the busses and everything. So what do you do is you put sensors all along the operation. So you put sensors in the wind turbine, you put sensors in the field, you put sensors on the patients or the patient beds, and then you collect data in real time on the cloud, and then you have algorithms predicting how to run that operation. So based on the weather today, based on the quality of the input, how much gas should be used today, which patient needs attention right now, based on the sensor data that we are collecting. Acting based on the arrival and departure of aircraft, which conveyor belts needs to be run right now. And so once you have that real time copy of the physical operation, then you don't need all the engineers and technical workers and the blue collar workers to be standing around the operation. And so in the book, what I document is two examples from my research, one with a Unilever factory manufacturing detergents in Brazil, and then the other being a Turkish power generation company which has created a digital twin headquarters in Istanbul from one single building, in fact, one floor of a building. Now they are running more than 15 power plants all over the country. Wow. And the engineers, the reason they did it, the Turkish example, was actually none of the engineers and their families wanted to live in these far flung places in Turkey, because, you know, you set up a power plant where there's a river or the mountain has a gorge, but no engineer wants to go live there with their kids, so they built this digital twin headquarter in Istanbul, and the only people left back now at these locations are the maintenance Unknown Speaker 31:21 people, and Tim Houlihan 31:22 it's a smaller staff then as well. Is that correct? Raj Choudhury 31:26 So it is a slightly smaller staff. But also, the other important thing here is that there's been tremendous re skilling that's been needed to do this, because now you are a turbine engineer who's sitting on a computer, looking at AI algorithms and either overriding what the AI algorithm is saying or going along with it. So you need to learn a little bit of Python. You need to know how machine learning works. So it's what I call the Indigo colored workers. So they are a mix of blue and white. Kurt Nelson 32:00 That's That's fascinating. And I like, I like the Indigo component of that, there is an another interesting piece that this brings up right in in how we work and various different things. And Tim has talked about this idea for, for a lot of of you know, pre industrial revolution, we, we almost all worked from anywhere, right? We worked where we lived, in various different pieces. And there's a commute aspect that that is going on, that we know, if we don't have a commute, we save that that time. Is there anything that your research has shown, or that you know of around the psychological benefits of not having a commute, of being able to, if I so desire, to be out on my farm and working in a job, you know, two hours away. And I know it's kind of going back to what we talked about at the beginning, but I thought, I thought that was an interesting piece. Raj Choudhury 32:54 Yeah, I don't see commuting going away. I think I see commuting getting transformed. So instead of commuting in the car every day twice to a downtown office, like we said, now I'm commuting once a month to meet my team, and I'm actually looking forward to that commute, because I know we're going to have fun dinners, we're going to play some games, I'm going to be with my colleagues for three days in a fun location, even in the downtown office, and we're going to have a really good time. So commuting is no longer a chore. So I think it's just reimagining commute. It's reimagining in person, so that in person and commuting is actually helpful to the person in the team. Tim Houlihan 33:38 Raj, what do you say to the leader who is kind of on the fence like, Well, I see all the data, but I'm not sure if it's really right for my company culture, because I'm a old guy who has grown up in this environment of everybody comes to the office, what do you say to them to persuade them to give it more consideration? So Raj Choudhury 33:59 what I do in the book is, I say you don't have to jump into the deep end all at once. So this can be a journey. So if you are a leader who is right now comfortable with a weekly hybrid model, then your next step is to try a monthly hybrid. And you don't have to try it for the entire organization. You could pilot it with one or two teams in the organization, maybe the tech team, maybe the sales team, and then let that monthly hybrid pilot run for a few months, collect the data, see how they compare before and after. And then if you confident that this works, then you can roll it out to a few more teams. But critically, what I also do in the book is, I say, based on which hybrid model you're choosing, the weekly version, the monthly version or the quarterly version, you need to buckle up on the management practices you need to support that version. So it's going to be a lot of bottom up experimentation. And why should you do any of this instead of not just being comfortable with the whole company doing this weekly couple of days, because then you might lose the leg up in the talent game going ahead, because your competitors might do this, and they might start poaching some of your best Kurt Nelson 35:17 employees. Yeah. So are there people for which work from anywhere doesn't work? Raj Choudhury 35:26 So I think work from anywhere works in the monthly and the quarterly hybrid forms in the weekly hybrid. If you have to go to a office every week for two or three days, then of course you have to live within commuting distance of that, and that might be okay for some teams, or that might be okay for some durations of the project. So maybe when we are starting the project, if we are building a new product, maybe the first six months, we have to meet every week. But once we have a beta version of the product, maybe then we can switch to a monthly hybrid. So yes, I'm not going to say that the monthly and quarterly hybrid works for every single team, but the thing that I'm trying to, you know, sort of like open minds and hearts to, is that you don't need to do a top down one size fits all mandate for the entire organization. Don't say that for the whole company, it's only this weekly hybrid model that that's correct. That's not correct. There are teams in every organization which could transition easily to a monthly or quarterly hybrid form. I've Kurt Nelson 36:34 worked with other companies too, where for employees, they have a basically a work from anywhere, from most of them open nests, but for managers and above, they don't have you seen any of research that you have about that is that something that you've seen or not seen, and Why? Personally, I think that that is an incorrect kind of assumption, that the managers have to be together, because that's the, again, some of the biases that I think people have. But just thoughts on that, I Raj Choudhury 37:12 think that's, I totally agree with you. It's completely incorrect. And the reason I say that is, you know, my research is drawn from both large companies, but also these all remote startups such as GitLab and Zapier. So in a GitLab which is 3000 people now, or a deal which is a 12,000 strong company now, they don't have any offices, no offices, and they follow the monthly retreats and the quarterly retreat model. And for those companies, the deals, the zapiers, the gitlabs, the the doists, everyone is work working from anywhere. The C suite has worked from anywhere. The senior managers are working from anywhere. Accountant team has worked from anywhere. Sales team has worked from anywhere. Product Development is working. So it works now for a traditional company that's been together for 40 years or 100 years. I'm not saying you can do what they're doing in six months, but you need to start piloting bottom up and finding those opportunities to run those pilots wherever they're appropriate. Yeah, Kurt Nelson 38:17 yeah, Raj, I have to say I was super excited about the book and talking with you, just because my company is work from anywhere company, and I want to just share an experience of one of my employees, who Ben, who Tim knows. So Ben started off working for me from Massachusetts, he said, He then moved to Hawaii for a year. He then moved to Colorado. Then he he and his fiance, girlfriend at the time, who was a visiting nurse, or basically a, you know, they got an RV, they moved to Lake Tahoe, and then they were down in San Diego, Seattle. They for three years. They were going three, four months. Then he came back to Colorado, then he moved up to Alaska for eight months, then he moved down to Belize for three months. And it has been, it has there's never been a time where it has been an issue, right in the way that we work and and for Ben, I think it's one of the reasons that he's still with me, you know, I mean, I he can probably earn a lot more working somewhere else, but he knows that this is, this is the way we work. And I don't think there's a question there, but I think that I just wanted to say I am a firm believer in in the the way that you're talking and I love the idea of being able to share that and hopefully get more organizations saying, Yeah, this is a good model. Raj Choudhury 39:47 Yeah, thanks for sharing that. And I'd just like to add one thought there. So there is this whole phenomena of digital nomadism that's also very related to work from anywhere. And it seems Ben is one of those digital nomads. Right? And there are now 50 countries and counting, including New Zealand last month, that have special visas for digital nomads. So they have invented this visa category only for remote workers. And the reason so many countries want remote workers is these remote workers are not coming for local jobs. They already have a job, right? But they're contributing to the local community through tax and consumption and ideas and connections. But I'll also mention this other thing that work from anywhere. We talked about how it benefits companies and individuals. The other piece is really about how it benefits smaller towns. So I've done years of research now with the city of Tulsa in Oklahoma. So they have a program where they pay remote workers $10,000 if you relocate and start living in Tulsa. And when Tulsa started this program, they said we'll probably get 50 people. They've got about 4000 families so far, wow. And I've done many studies about how this has benefited Tulsa, with tax revenues, with volunteers for local community causes. We have a new study on entrepreneurship, how this is triggering entrepreneurship in the city of Tulsa? And I want to say this, the Tulsa model has now led to about 40 to 45 cities in the heartland of the US trying to do the same, including cities in Ohio and Michigan and Wisconsin and West Virginia. So remote work, and especially work from anywhere, could be great for the Heartland for years and years and years, young people in the heartland just grew up and left for the coasts, and now this is such an opportunity for the Heartland to get some young people and even older people back and this can be a level playing field for the Heartland cities. Tim Houlihan 42:07 We first learned about your work during the pandemic Raj and instantly became fans, by the way, because of what was happening in our world. Has what's changed in your research from 2020 when you first published that that article, I think it was Forbes. Was it or HBr and HBr and and now what's what's different? Raj Choudhury 42:30 So I think two or three things are different. So first of all, we now know a little more about the best practices to to mitigate the isolation, communication and socialization problems. So that's why I thought I'll just write the book and document everything we know at this point in time. The second thing is this phenomena of digital nomad visas and Heartland cities offering incentives has grown. So prior, when I was writing the article in 2020 there were only two countries, Estonia and Barbados, which had visas for remote workers. Now it's 55 or 60 countries, wow. When I was writing the article in 2020 it was only Maine. There was a program in Maine, there was a program in Hawaii, and there was a program in Tulsa to attract remote workers. Now there's a website. You can go, it's called make my move.com and they have incentive programs for remote workers across 50 countries in the heartland. So Heartland mayors and Heartland governors have, it seems, taken a note of this. And the third thing that's, I think, new from 2020 is Gen AI. I think Gen AI is a game changer. It helps us document better. It's it's lead, it's the digital twin revolution. So I think between those three things, the best practices, technology and now the the proliferation of these relocation programs nationally and internationally, that's the big change. Love that, Tim Houlihan 44:03 Raj. This is the part of the discussion where we get to turn 90 degrees and talk about music. We would like to know if you could imagine yourself being stranded on a desert island for a year, and you have a listening device with you, but you only have two musical artist catalogs with you. Which two would you pick? Raj Choudhury 44:25 So I don't know if you know I'm myself, a singer songwriter. I write songs in my language, Bangla, but if I had to pick two albums to take with me the entire Kurt Nelson 44:38 catalog of that entire catalog. It wouldn't Tim Houlihan 44:41 have to be restricted to two records. Yeah, you can Yeah. I Raj Choudhury 44:45 would take the work of Tagore, who's a Bengali poet, and I would just take everything that Tagore has written and composed, and then I would take Leonard Cohen. Leonard Cohen, yeah, I just love Leonard Cohen. So I would take every. You think that Leonard Cohen has Kurt Nelson 45:01 written? Well, it's interesting. You so the first gentleman tango, or was that they said that? Right? Yes, poet, right. And I would say Leonard Cohen as a poet. I mean, when you look at his lyrics, they are very, very poetical. And I know, I mean, I've seen some documentaries about how much energy and focus he put into every single word and how that worked. And it's just, you can see it in in the lyrics that that he has fantastic, yeah, that Tim Houlihan 45:30 is, that's a the strikes me as one of the best responses that we've we've gotten on that question. I love it. Raj Choudry, it is such a pleasure having you on behavior grooves. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks Raj Choudhury 45:43 for having me. Guys really enjoyed it. Kurt Nelson 45:53 Welcome to our grooving session where Tim and I share ideas on what we learned from our discussion with Raj. Have a free flowing conversation and groove on whatever else comes into our beach living brains, because that's where we're going to be working from. We're going to be working from the beach. Tim, is that where you want to be working? No, I'd be in the mountains. I was gonna say that. I wasn't surprised to be, I think I'd be, I'd be by water, though, if I could, I would love to be by a mountain lake Tim Houlihan 46:23 like that would be Flat Rock Lake in Montana, or, Oh, Kurt Nelson 46:27 that, I love Flat Rock Lake Tim Houlihan 46:31 in Teton lake, or Jenny Lake and in the Tetons and Wyoming. Kurt Nelson 46:35 Yeah, you know, there's, there's a whole bunch of them. Even doesn't have to be a big lake. It can be a small lake. Doesn't need to be huge. Hell, even a babbling Creek would be, you know, cool. So Lake Tim Houlihan 46:48 De Smet in saddle string Wyoming. There you go. Okay, okay, I don't, you know, don't know for it's because it's small. It's a small lake. But Unknown Speaker 46:58 how about you? Would you be the beach, Tim Houlihan 47:00 beach, beach. Me, Kurt Nelson 47:01 yeah, figured you'd be the beach. Yeah, yeah. Tim Houlihan 47:04 I like the mountains. Kurt Nelson 47:06 I mean, world, would you be a, would you need to be a warm beach? Or could you be like a main beach or a Canada beach? A cold Tim Houlihan 47:15 beach will not work. Water has to be, no no. It's got to be, it's got to be at least mild, like Acadia and up there in Maine. I mean, those beaches are beautiful, like superior Lake. Superior has gorgeous Kurt Nelson 47:32 beaches. I love those beaches. Tim Houlihan 47:34 But not, I would not want to live there. No, nope. Kurt Nelson 47:38 Too cold. I love, I love that cold water. That's, I mean, that was the up at the cabin this weekend, and the water was really, really cold, yeah, and I was the only one swimming in it. I mean, that was after a sauna, mostly. But it was still, yeah, I was, I was out swimming and staying in. Everybody else might jump in and out. And, yeah, Tim Houlihan 48:00 but you were doing the sauna, legs Kurt Nelson 48:03 floating and freezing my my tushy and my toes off. So I thought it was cool. Okay, weird, like that. All right, what? What did we so first off, I think this hit home for you in this, this conversation with Raj, yeah, because you have, literally, the past few years, not necessarily worked from anywhere, but you have moved around and worked from multiple different locations, in different areas, Tim Houlihan 48:34 five homes in three years. Yeah, yeah, it's and it's been a lot of movement, Kurt Nelson 48:40 yeah. And for me, I have, you know, my my right hand person, Ben, who I just depend on all the time. That's how we've set up our structure. I mean, when, when he first worked for me, he worked, was working from Massachusetts, then he moved out to Hawaii, then he moved back to Massachusetts for a while, then to Colorado. Then he and his girlfriend, now, wife at the, you know, moved to or started doing RVing and like going and living in places for months, right, Tim Houlihan 49:16 right? And that was with her work. Was the traveling nurse thing. And so they have, like, Kurt Nelson 49:21 nurse, and so they could go anywhere. So they started off in Lake Tahoe, or just out there, outside of there, and truck eat. Lake Tahoe would be another place I could live right there, you know, that's a good little crowded, but anyway, but you know, and then going up to, like, around Seattle and down to San Diego and Arizona, and they stay there for three, four months. And he's also spent he did last year or a year before last year, eight months up in Alaska, he's done a couple months down in Belize, yeah, you know. So we've, we've lived this. I mean, this has been a piece so, Tim Houlihan 49:58 and a cool thing about that is. Because Ben has figured out how to really make it work, like how to how to tap into the Wi Fi, for accessibility, for file sharing, for all those kinds of work related things. And he's just continued to to work. I mean, it's never been all. It wasn't like kind of thing, Kurt Nelson 50:16 no, it wasn't no. But he we also had the ability to go at three in the afternoon, you know, if work was done, he could go for, you know, a bike ride in in the mountains. He could go, when he was in San Diego, he would go surfing at the beach. You know, they would take extended weekends up in Alaska and go do some travel that was there. But while he was he was able to work from all of those places, and the technology has gotten such that it's not an issue. It really is a non issue in 99% of the cases, yeah, in Wi Fi and all that, it's more about work routines and and doing different pieces around that so well this, this Tim Houlihan 51:01 reinforces because we're hearing you as the boss, the owner of the consultancy, talk about a guy who has worked for you for many years. Yeah. And so the I think one of the cool insights that comes from our conversation with Raj is that this location independence isn't just about employee happiness, but it actually leads to productivity and opportunity and and good things for the business as, Kurt Nelson 51:27 yes, yes. I mean, you think about, think about the I mean, he is, by far, way more productive than I am, and, and just in a whole number of things, just shines. And he's able to do it. I don't know if working from being remote helps that, but it definitely doesn't hinder it by any means. And there's no it doesn't cost me anything. It doesn't, you know, bring any difference outside of figuring out what time zone he's in. That's it, which is actually interesting sometimes, because sometimes he's out on the East Coast and he's an hour earlier, versus, you know, he's in mountain time most of the time, and that's an hour later, and then sometimes other places. So, but it's, it works. It works really well. So, yeah, Tim Houlihan 52:18 yeah. I think that that's fantastic. It seems to get to, I think the key driver around this, and Raj spoke to this, is autonomy, right? Yeah, it's, it's from DC and Ryan, their work on self determination theory and this whole idea that when we have autonomy, when we feel like we have a sense of agency and can make our own choices that that is an improver. It's a it's a way to contribute positively to our, our general sense of well being. And Ben has absolutely flourished in that, yeah, Kurt Nelson 52:51 and I think other people do as well. It doesn't matter. I mean, if you choose to live near family, if you want to be out in nature, and maybe more adventuresome kind of pieces if you're just going for affordability. Hey, New York is New York City is expensive. San Francisco is expensive. I can go live a few hours away or even further. I can go live in Montana and be as productive, but my cost of living has gone down, and where I live might better suit my personality. So this, this also Tim Houlihan 53:27 connects to environmental psychology. We were talking about Robert Ulrich earlier, and his, his development of the environmental psychology about where we live matters, whether that, that might be proximity, like you said, it could be nature or family, or whatever that proximity thing is, or the little literally, the physical environment of the space that we're in, yeah, all contributes to our well being and and how we have this, how we have this deep connection between our physical environment and our psychological states. Kurt Nelson 53:59 Yeah, there's an interesting aspect of this, and we've talked about this other times, like you've had to move your offices multiple times, and there's pluses and minuses to that. I know I've been we've lived in this house for 26 years, no, not 22 years, right? My office has been in this room for 20 of those, 22 years, right? And you know, my desk configuration, I have to change every once in a while just to get into different viewpoint, because I find that I get lethargic and in a rut in these consistent habits. And I think moving and changing that can be unleash some creative elements. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, you said there's positives and negatives from your constant moving. Yeah, Tim Houlihan 54:55 if we're constantly in flux, I mean, I've lived in five. Different homes in the last three years, and it's, it's that's disruptive, you know? That's, that's too much novelty, Kurt Nelson 55:09 yes. Well, you've had other Airbnb places too, that you've Tim Houlihan 55:13 12 Airbnb Yeah, for four months, yeah. So Kurt Nelson 55:17 when you take all of that into account. There's, there's a lot there, yeah, and, you know, and again, depends on personality. Some people might thrive in that that doesn't feel like you need more stability, you need a little bit more but that, that being said, that there hasn't been benefits of it as well, right? Absolutely, Tim Houlihan 55:37 because we were on a quest to figure out, where do we want to live, and you kind of only know if you if you go, I don't think that you can just ask chat GPT to to answer the question, Where should I live? I don't think that that's a good I don't think it's a good use of no AI. I don't could Kurt Nelson 55:55 get here's my here's my requirements, here's my personality. Find me the perfect location. Tim Houlihan 56:03 Well, so what if, maybe, maybe chat GPT could serve up five locations and say, Here's five for you to consider that that might be interesting. Kurt Nelson 56:13 Oh, go ahead. Well, I Tim Houlihan 56:15 was just, I was just thinking about how, how well Raj addressed, I think the three key concerns, the three problem areas of remote work, I think he did a really nice job of of teasing these out, like, like, isolation, you know, he said, with with the world that we live in, we have an abundance of opportunity to have documentation of What's happening and where things are going. Like every conversation that we have can be transcribed, yeah, and we can keep them as notes and and that helps, helps kind of keep us in touch. And, of course, the idea of of just having video conferencing, those are good reliefs for for isolation, Kurt Nelson 56:59 they are, but as he talks about, they're not necessarily sufficient, right? So we're not, not all of them, right? So there is we need. We need more than just reading the notes from the meeting, having even video chats like this. There is real value in getting together, and we'll talk about that, right? And one of the things I think that you like in some of this ways, but also that communication, right? So isolation is a big issue. So how do you overcome that? How do you get to places where you're not feeling so isolated? And isolation isn't just being here by myself in the office, it is about that human connection and and having that and, and as we've talked about, we we can have connections across the globe with people we've never met. It's just what are the conversations that you're having? How are those interactions happening in various different things? The other piece he talked about was communication, or one of the other pieces communication, right again, as you said, there is this asynchronous workflow sometimes where we can now have all of our meeting notes transcribed. We can have a summary of them created instantaneously. So we're improving our ability, or the ease with the of having communication happen more succinctly and better. Yeah, Tim Houlihan 58:28 it's impressive to see, for instance, what otter can do when, when it's taking notes and an otter comes back with, here's the, you know, identifies, here's the three bullet points that we talked about doing. It's, it's a big time saver to have tools like that available to us. Kurt Nelson 58:45 It is. But there's also this aspect of communication that is like, what we're doing right now is having conversations and sharing that is different than reading, you know, a summary of this conversation. And there's nuances that get picked up on that this is the the other piece of this, which is voice only, written or video or in person, right where we know from communication that much of our communication isn't just from the words that we speak. It's the inflection, it's the way that we pause it is a number of things reading. That's why texts get misunderstood so much, right? Because we don't always have those other points of reference to understand. Is this a joke? Is this being serious? Is this being said ironically? Those are all things we pick up on from other cues. So am I? Do I have a little grin on my face when I call you. You know, the best looking guy that I've ever seen. You know, do I do? Do we laugh at the end of things which the laughs Don't get caught in the transcription? Right? Right? So, right. We. Have a number of things that we need to understand about communication, and it can't be just, oh, I sent you an email and you sent me an email back that that is communicating certain things, but communication, in the broader sense, needs different avenues, needs different modalities to be able to do it effectively, particularly when you're thinking about coworkers, teams, boss to subordinate, sharing organizational information, all sorts of those types of things. Tim Houlihan 1:00:33 That's a great tee up, I think, to get us into the third element, the third problem that goes along with work from anywhere, and that is culture. Like, how do you build culture in a way that is sustainable and meaningful? Because if, if we're going to be in a work group, and they're going to be part of my they're my tribe, I want that tribe to be some, some group of people that I can connect with, right? Yeah. Kurt Nelson 1:00:58 And I think part of the heart, part of this isn't necessary with intact teams who might have been in person for a while, right? It is new teams or onboarding new team members, and that's the part that gets really difficult. And I think there's, there is some truth to like, learning through following somebody around, learning through having kind of just that shadow perspective. I remember when I started off working, I sat in a cube next to Fred bomber, who, you know, who was not in my group, not wouldn't have we wouldn't have interacted, except for the fact that we were spatially next to each other. Yeah, he was in an entirely different group, and he that that connection changed my career trajectory. It is why I'm here today. Is because Fred, you know, we started talking, he somehow liked something I did, took me under his wing, and I went down a whole different trajectory. And that's a cultural piece to a certain degree, because that was a different work group, and he brought me in and shared ideas, and I was able to assimilate that, because he wasn't my boss, but because I was interested in it, he was close, and we were able to make that happen. Well, Tim Houlihan 1:02:32 then shouldn't, shouldn't companies do we have a client that was that mandates two and a half days a week in the office, and they and they and they they check when you badge in, and they check when you badge out, and there's no fudging. Wouldn't, wouldn't that get to that Kurt? Wouldn't that be Kurt Nelson 1:02:46 great? Well, so this is, I think, part of the issue, and this is Raj talks about this, right? Is that a no, it doesn't necessarily solve that. It can be purposeful. And maybe, yes, it does. And if there's a real reason for it, great. And we'll talk about some of the other solutions that he has. But those two and a half days, here's the issue is, I could go in Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday morning. Fred could have come in Wednesday afternoon, Thursday, Friday. We could have never met, or we could have overlapped a little bit in a disjointed way. It wasn't every day, five days a week, and where he was able to learn who I was in a more, you know, focused under in deeper level. And that, I think, is an interesting piece of this. So that gets into some of these solutions, Tim, and I know you really liked some of these different hybrid solutions. Again, not saying that there isn't room for fully remote work, but there's also these hybrid things you want to talk through, some of those that Raj talked about. Thanks Tim Houlihan 1:03:56 for teeing them up, because I really like the idea. Since I am a remote guy, right? I've been remote since 2017 and have worked remotely Well, except for a little bit, a little bit in Charlotte, with, with, with the bank, but, but even that was a hybrid model. And so I think that there are these three models that Raj talked about that are really great. The first one is, is the weekly hybrid this. It's, it's to say, Okay, we want everybody in the office two to three days a week, you know, something like that. And I think that this works really well when you have offices that are easy for people to get to. This doesn't work if you live 50 miles away from the office. This a hybrid model to say you're going to have to come to the office, you know, two or three days a week and commute two hours on each end, does not make sense to me that. So there are exceptions to that. Well, Kurt Nelson 1:04:55 isn't that the issue of the employee? Then? I mean, why did they choose to live two hours? Away or an hour away. Can't they live closer so Tim Houlihan 1:05:04 well, how about, like, affordability, you know, how about, how about maybe family or there's a whole variety of reasons that I might, I'm going to choose to live where I live, Kurt Nelson 1:05:13 and that's what Raj talked about, right? So again, there's, there's an aspect of this, and there's, I again, understand why some managers want this, or leaders want this, but there are other hybrid models. Tim, you wanna talk about those? Yeah, so Tim Houlihan 1:05:32 that's the weekly model, right? But then there's also sort of a monthly model, where you have three to four consecutive work days every month that everybody gets together, and this is when, this is when the commutes are longer, but everybody can reasonably get together in the same place. And then you structure those data. I mean, all of this, all of these, all three of these models, are predicated on thinking about work in a new way, and that's challenging, because we have this status quo bias to just say no, it's butts in chairs, but it's just not anymore. So I think, you know, put on your big girl panties and just, let's keep moving here, because the world is is progressing well. And I had Kurt Nelson 1:06:14 a I worked with a company that basically did a week a month, and so it was a full week in the office, and they had people across the country that they would fly in. So you would fly in for that week. And they often did it where they had the entire company try to come in, not just your team, but the entire company coming. Tim Houlihan 1:06:39 How many people were that? Are we talking about hundreds of, I mean, how many? Not hundreds of? There was Kurt Nelson 1:06:43 1000s of employees, okay, you know, this was a $2 billion company, right? It was not a small, was not a small little, you know, Mom and Pop kind of thing. But that was interesting because it allowed for that cultural piece. It allowed for some of the communication in person. Communication allowed for your team to gather. And often, I mean, there were people that lived in the town and weren't went to the office on a regular basis because they chose to. But there were others who came in, and when they came in, it was kind of a celebration. It was like, oh, let's go out for dinner. Let's go. Let's do some other pieces here, because I'm staying in a hotel, and so that even added to some of the bonding, because you don't necessarily do that with your teammates if you're all in the same town all the time, right, right? Which leads it to the last one, which is the quarterly hybrid that that Raj talks about, which basically it's gathering teams or the company together on a quarterly basis. And this doesn't even have to be at the headquarters. It could be, or you may not even have a headquarters, right? You could just do this as a national meeting. Many of our sales people who are listening, or anybody who's been associated know they have a national sales meeting, often, right? Or even a quarterly, you know, sales gathering. Those are those times where you pull everybody together and have a retreat. Tim Houlihan 1:08:20 How many sales teams have we do we have? We worked with where the sales manager has got people in five different states, and every quarter they get together in a different location to spend a couple of days out of the field to get focused on, what is it that's what's important right now? Set their direction, strategize, share best practices, all those kinds of things in person, which are really, really good things to do, but they just, that's just part of their plan, that's part of their their business Kurt Nelson 1:08:51 well, and here's the key piece of this, because I've seen national sales meetings, I've worked on national sales meetings. It's part of the, you know, some of the work that we do that are horrid, that are presentation after presentation after presentation that are I remember one, actually, this was a Fred bomber story. It was with a large financial services company. They brought everybody down to Phoenix or scottskill, Arizona, right? And basically started meetings at 730 in the morning, ran till like 530 at night, with maybe 15 minute breaks in there and an hour for lunch, 15 minute presentations, back to back to back in a huge ballroom, 800 plus people in this ballroom. Translation, because this was global. So you had back row with, you know, people doing real time translation. And everybody got their 15 minutes from this multi billion dollar global organization. So what did people do with those 15 minutes? They tried to pack everything in into 15 minutes. And so. So you just had a parade of 20 people in a day. Think about the retention of that information. Think about the energy level of people that left that that doesn't work. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about chances to come together. You can share information. That's part of this, you have to share information. What are teams doing? Where are we? Where's the strategy that we're heading for? But you need time to connect, to bond, to build interpersonal relationships, to have some fun, to create that culture that you're talking about and that's structured. You need to put effort and thought into it, and we help companies do that too. So Tim Houlihan 1:10:45 absolutely, I couldn't agree more. Kurt, all Kurt Nelson 1:10:49 right, sorry, my little sales pitch there. All right, ready to wrap up with my little quantification there? Tim Houlihan 1:10:57 I think we got there. Yeah. I think so, yeah. So one thing Kurt Nelson 1:11:00 just on last note is that struck me. And Raj said this, and I'm going to quote him here, said, talent is everywhere, but company offices are not everywhere. And I thought in the global environment that we have today, that was really, really insightful. Tim Houlihan 1:11:23 I couldn't agree more. Absolutely couldn't agree more. It's really a really nugget. Like, if we want to attract and retain the best talent, we've just got to meet them where they are not, not where the building is. Basically just love that. Kurt Nelson 1:11:35 So if you are a leader. So I think we're making a point here we're taking we're putting a flag in the ground. Yes, we are this. Yeah. So if you're a leader still holding on to these old ideas that productivity lives in cubicles, it's time to let go of that. It is time to rethink this. Yeah. Tim Houlihan 1:12:03 Raj reminded us that with the right systems in place, emphasis on the right systems in place, work from anywhere can be more productive, more diverse and more humane like so take the idea join our Behavioral Grooves Facebook community and share your thoughts about working from anywhere and not Kurt Nelson 1:12:21 just humane. It could be more human, right? It could be, yeah, so, but now that you say that, Tim, I'm like, oh, that's an odd connection, like work from anywhere and group community, but you know, I'm stretching, I'm I'm stretching here. You're stretching. You're saying that our groove community is from everywhere. It's like a Tim Houlihan 1:12:46 work from anywhere community. It is. You don't even have to work with the groove community. You just Kurt Nelson 1:12:51 have fun. It's a fun anywhere. Fun from anywhere community. There you go. All right, we would love it. We would really, really love it. If you joined our groove community on Facebook, you can just go out to Facebook search, groove, behavioral, groove, groove community, it'll come up. We have about 140 150 members now, and we're getting Tim Houlihan 1:13:16 150 million. I thought it was 150 million people. Did I get the numbers Kurt Nelson 1:13:21 wrong? You had a couple extra zeros. Mr. Houlihan, all right. Anyway, please join us. We would love to have you. We'd love your voice to join in wherever you are in the world, and because maybe you could pose a fresh question or a fresh idea that you might learn from that group community that might help you this Week as you're going out to find your group you Transcribed by https://otter.ai