Episode Transcript

Please note this transcript was generated by AI and contains errors including missing and misspelled words.

Meryl: Hey John, welcome to the podcast.

John: Hey Merrill, thanks for having me.

Meryl: The topic for today is all about remote work and comparing that with hybrid work. So if we have Business Depo on the hybrid side, I know you've got a really strong in-office culture, but you also have flexibility for your team.

So if you represent that side, and I'll talk on the remote work side. Let's start with what do you say is some of the pros of hybrid work, and then we'll jump into some of the cons.

John: Yeah. And I suppose to give a little bit of the context to our hybrid workforce here we have about a hundred people overall within the Business Depot group. So we have some people that work in Sydney. We have. People that work out in Brisbane, we then have some people overseas. We have some people that work remotely within Australia.

And so I suppose one of the pros of a hybrid workforce in my mind is just the flexibility that it offers our team members as their lives change. . So I dunno. When someone has a baby and they wanna work from home, you know, for a period of time or if someone has some other significant event in their life, for example, maybe they need to move cities because of their spouse or something like that.

I love the flexibility that we can go well, That's not a problem. We can deal with that. I do think the hybrid work arrangements can be good for attracting staff as well. But I'd imagine that to be on your pros of the a hundred percent remote side of things as well in that, better work life balance, something we all strive for, not necessarily all good at, but something we all strive for.

And I do think the hybrid work. does increase those opportunities for the face-to-face times. Now I enjoy the face-to-face times. Not everybody needs to have as much of it as I do given my personality type. But I do think by having a hybrid workforce and having some in-office time, you increase the opportunities for that collaboration, the face-to-face collaboration, but you also can increase the opportunities for that deep thinking time as well.

Meryl: Great. I've got questions for you on that, but I'll follow up with some of my thoughts on

John: be disappointed if you didn't have some questions on that me.

Meryl: Yeah, and you were right. So when I'm thinking about remote work, I think some of the advantages are increased flexibility. cutting out things like the commute, so there's more time to spend on things outside of work.

Access to a global talent pool. If you've got the infrastructure for remote work, then it means that you can hire people. Anywhere as long as you're legally compliant. And I think particularly it's great for parents of young children and it means that you can get along to school assemblies or music concerts or things during the day that typically maybe 10, 15 years ago, when I think back to when I was working in an office and accounting firm, it would've been hard to get along to those events.

And yet you are a partner, a very senior inner. So, so next door, let's talk about some of the disadvantages and then I'll dive into my questions for you. So what would you say are some of the disadvantages of the hybrid model?

John: Yeah, look, the hybrid model has just layers of complexity to it in my world. And we have not nailed this in. A shape or form. So, may not even be the best example, but the complexities we see around collaboration and communication. For example, you know, scheduling face-to-face meetings, if that's what we're deciding to do.

I think there's no doubt it would be easier to have a hundred percent in or a hundred percent out as to how you go about the collaboration and the communication piece. Access and costs. I think there is difficulty in ensuring equal access to resources and opportunities. I mean, people that are in office just naturally get some things that are more advantageous for them than the people that are working remote.

 So it might be office space or it might be gotta have two sets of, screens at home end at work sort of thing. And that was one of the big things we did during Covid, just brought everybody two screens to take home as well. And then I do think there's just the technical challenges, ensuring the seamless communication and collaboration for remote workers.

And part of that's probably specific for us cuz we have a. What we describe as human brand or culture. And so to deliver that human experience and human communication becomes difficult. And probably the prime example there is like when we have our team musters, where we get everybody together.

We don't want to discount the experience of the people that are in the office, but we also wanna make sure that the people out of the office have an experience, let alone scheduling them because everyone works so many different sort of times. So I think that's probably more of a technical challenge in how we deliver on the complexity of communication.

Meryl: How do you do that when you're doing a team master where you wanna have that great in office experience, but then you've got people who are dialing in remotely.

John: well, we actually have just invested some real dollars into like a team sort of space. So we've renovated our kitchen to create more of a team forums or town hall sort of space. We've just been using Zoom at the moment. We've got the. The laptop, which I'm talking into and talking to the people.

Then we have another laptop, and then we have the people on the screen behind us. We just can't have enough cameras, enough microphones, and enough TVs. But we're still investing in that. We've still got some different things we're exploring to make it better.

Meryl: Yeah. A and when you mentioned there are sometimes more opportunities for people in the office uh, and you mentioned some of the things like resources. Do you think it would impact things like promotion opportunities and career advancement too? I've heard some people mention that, that if you're in the office and networking sometimes it's easier to fast track your career.

What are your thoughts on that?

John: I don't necessarily think that should be a problem. I dunno whether it is a problem. If you have structured with the remote workers, I find you need to have more structured communication. So maybe it's more formal communication. So we have 90 day check-ins with everybody, whether they work in the office or they work out of the office.

And so therefore, We need to be creating those opportunities for those discussions where someone says, oh, this isn't working for me. Or How about a promotion? That shouldn't be any different, but I can accept that the water cooler conversations are lost. And the water cooler conversations when someone's looking a bit down or not as enjoying themself today, and someone could go, what's up mate?

You know, you do. I think you do miss that when you've got people working a hundred percent.

Meryl: Yeah.

John: but what Do you see as the cons of your a hundred percent remote working?

Meryl: Yeah, so I think it's definitely harder to train and mentor young accountants, and so that's meant that we only generally hire more senior staff that have got five years experience or more. But I don't necessarily think that's great for the industry if everyone's trying to hire senior level staff who's investing in , that training.

So I think that's actually a bit of a risk for the industry if we are not bringing on board graduates and, and doing that kind of, I'd say team culture's harder to build remotely as well. We definitely put effort into doing that at being ninjas and having zoom parties and, and trying to meet up face-to-face when we can.

But as you said, you don't have those just impromptu meetings in the kitchen or walking to the station together. So I think it, it definitely makes it harder. It's doable, but not as, and then I think some, well, I've found that some team members can find it harder to switch off from work. So when, if you're in the office and you leave for the day then you can start thinking about something else.

But I've noticed that some team members will, after dinner, go back and check some more email or log into Slack and, that can lead to burnout if that's not addressed. Or some more boundaries between work and then home life aren't put into.

John: Well, well, not everybody has the perfect setup to work from home either, do they? I mean, and when you. About during the Covid times. Some people were set up on the kitchen table of an apartment in that they shared with somebody else, and it's not healthy to be eating at the same place that you are working

And so you know that's gonna be part of it, isn't it?

Meryl: It is, I think it really helps if you do have a separate room where you can go in and I even put different clothes on, put work clothes on, go into that room, that's work mode, and then switch over to home mode. I actually do work remotely, but not from home, so I've got an office. That's about 15 minutes from home and I really enjoy that actually going to the office, it's work mode, and then get home and,, have that 15 minutes of the drive , to get out of work mode and then trying to get into family mode.

John: I Is that why you have an office to go to it? Just that routine and that segregation for yourself.

Meryl: It was mainly when I had kids, so prior kids I used to just have a home office, but I've got two young kids, a three year old, and a one year old, and they're in daycare only two days a week. Both of them. So it's just too distracting at home. There's noise, there's crying, so it's better. I work quite short hours, so I'm normally home by about 3 34 most days.

 But I just get a lot more done, get out of the house, get the work done , and then get home.

John: And so have you ever had. Your Gold Coast base. Correct me if I'm wrong, have you ever had other workers that are in the Gold Coast as well that you, I don't know, share some co-working space or something?

Meryl: Yeah, so the office that I'm in actually does have a co, so it's actually a converted house. So I'm in my office is a bedroom in a house, but the living space, we turn into co-working by putting benches all the way around the living area. So there's room for about 10 people. Here. And so at different stages, I've had two or three team members working here with me , and I liked that, but I still liked having my office so that if I needed to have a private conversation or I wanted to focus on something, that I could do that without interruption.

But the office is above a brewery, so people always made an effort to come in on Fridays. , we had a Friday afternoon drink finish at two and yeah, really I enjoyed that and I do miss.

John: Will it be wrong if he didn't? Wouldn't.

Meryl: So I, I'd like to dig in a bit more about what hybrid actually means, because it sounds like it's fairly flexible. So I was, maybe expecting that there might be, so I know some firms they have certain days, so hybrid for some people is, well, you can work remotely on some days, but you have to come into the office at least three days a week and there's still set work hours.

So could you describe a bit more what does that look like for say, a new team member joining Business Depot?

John: Merrill, it is all over the shop at the moment for us. Okay. We have some people that work a hundred percent in the office. We have some people who work some days at home and some days in the office, and there is no one day that everybody is in the office. Some people work a hundred percent remote especially the offshore resources overseas.

People still need to apply for flexibility. So we probably have a standard set hours. So if you want flexibility, they just fill out a form. I don't think we've ever said no to anyone to be honest. Merrill don't tell my team, but I don't think we've ever said no, but we pretty much get people to set out why they would like flexibility.

And their manager. They neither approves that or not. We recently trialed , holidays being a working holiday where someone goes overseas for a holiday, but they work set hours while they're over there. We learned some lessons from that,

Meryl: play. Play shit.

John: We learned some lessons from that. I really love the concept of it. But there were some problems with, it was a manager role, and so the time zones of where they were traveling just meant they couldn't, or they found it really difficult to mentor the younger team members that were under their responsibility. We then have onshore bookkeepers, we have offshore bookkeepers.

We have some people who have set. Working from home at different hours just to fit in their lives. So from a hybrid working environment we're probably not that efficient , in pulling it all together because we've just fitted in with everybody else at the moment. And one of the observations I would make though, is like for our bookkeepers, for example, our onshore bookkeepers, they have one day a week that they're all in the.

What I notice around the office is that these people that work remotely when they are in the office, they're all in the office at the same time. Cause they all want to socialize and collaborate and spend some time together. And they're hungry for a bit of interaction, I suppose. And so you, the office goes through these waves.

Extreme chaos to almost like ghost town which I really struggle with the ghost town more than the extreme chaos. But that's probably more of a reflection of my personality in that when it's really quiet around the place and I don't feel the energy, I really struggle with that. So hybrid for us is pretty much a bit of everything.

Meryl: Yeah, that, that sounds very flexible and much more flexible than I remember from years ago. So if someone's in the office , do they have set work hours? So if someone is coming into the office, do they have to be there by 9:00 AM or 10:00 AM and is there an expectation that people hang around till five?

 Let me give you a bit of context. So back in my BDO O days when I was there as a graduate, . I was in audit, so it was busy season and then quiet season. Sometimes you would have zero work. You've done nothing all day. Maybe you've done your CA study, you'd still hang around and you'd still be there till five 30 for the impression or the bad impression it would create if you left before that, even though you had no work to do,

John: needed to be seen to still

be there.

Meryl: That was

15 years ago, but interested to hear your perspective on office.

John: Yeah, well, again, people can apply to work different office hours. We have standard hours. Our standard hours are eight 30 to five, so people wanna work a. um, Set of hours. Then they just apply for that. We have people who start at seven 30 and leave at four. We have people that start later and, maybe either has negotiated a shorter hour day or they'll work a little bit later.

So, yeah, it's we'd never have been a culture where we want people. be seen or to feel like they have to be seen to be at their desk at a certain point in time. And I'd like to say if people just get the job done, everybody's happy. But there are people who take advantage of it and it's, I find it really disappointing that someone negotiates a seven 30 start time, but they get into the office at seven 30, then they walk outside with their mates to go get a.

Because their other mates have arrived at seven 30 already. Now, that tarnishes the benefits of the flexibility, and we're not, we don't want to be no what, no boss wants to be watching the clock. But when you see that same person doing it over and over again frankly it starts to piss you off a fair bit because people are taking advantage.

And if those people get away, Then other people start to take advantage as well. So it is one of the complexities of the flexible arrangement. No one really knows who's doing what hours at any particular point in time.

Meryl: Yeah. Something you mentioned a bit earlier in the conversation was around deep work and solving hard problems and how when people are in the office there's that energy and you can, I think you described it as deep work. So do you think it's better for things like problem solving and innovation to be in that in-office environment?

John: I think it depends on the person. So what is the problem that's being solved and how are you most likely going to be able to solve it? So, you know, one of our, one of our values is collaborate to innovate. Obviously it's all about continuous improvement. Pick the person who's got the expert skills, bring them into the discussion.

And because we are multidisciplinary, we can bring a lawyer into the discussion or a HR person into the discussion. , but some people, depending on their task, for example, let's say there's a complex tax problem Jackie, who heads up our tax division, she might be better having a day at home and just going deep in that tax problem.

Whereas a lot of the problems that I have to solve, which tend to be more strategic, . I'm probably better off doing that in a collaborative environment where I'm getting different people into the one room to talk about it. So I think it depends on the task and it depends on the person as to what suits their way of problem solving as well.

Meryl: That is a great answer. so I agree as well that a lot of things depend on the people and their environment. And so I'm one of these people that prefers to brainstorm individually and then collaborate. So, and I noticed this because my business partner's quite different, so he would like to be for us in a room together, him on the whiteboard, us talking it out.

John: That's me,

Meryl: and he's great. He excels at that. Whereas I would prefer to go maybe a bit like Jackie, go away, think about it, write it out, have some time to go for a walk or think on it overnight, write out my thoughts, do a Loom video, and then have someone reply back to me. And then, then take some time to think about it and think it through and not on the spot have to come up with an answer.

So,

John: and and that's where the personality profiling sort of work that we do just becomes even more important in these flexible arrangements and these hybrid working environments because not everybody's gonna suit sitting at home on their own if they are. A, a high extrovert, probably high f probably doesn't like logical sort of thinking.

They're more big picture thinking. They're probably not gonna thrive permanently in a remote working environment.

Meryl: Yeah, you're right. And so doing things like the personality profiling and being aware of that if you're setting up, and that's something I think about when I'm working with Wayne, but other team members. Well, my style, my work for me, but it's not always gonna work for other people. So how to, to manage that.

And I think related to problem solving is, I think deep work is a component of. But deep work is also just getting in that flow state. for a lot of people being interrupted can then impact that state of flow. So if you're focused, I think the research says it takes something like 15 to 20 minutes to get back into if you, if you're a, try to solve a hard problem or deep work,

John: and I'm likely to be the interrupter. Because of my personality type that I'm looking to get my energy from other people, I'm likely to be interrupting those deep thinkers. And so, you know, even in the office, we have a few quiet rooms where people can go and knock themselves away if they need to do a bit of deep thinking to allow for that.

Meryl: Yeah. , I was gonna ask how you manage that in a, I, I've been to your office before, but it sounds like it's changed a little bit since I was there. Is it mostly open plan with some rooms like that?

John: Nobody has an office with a door on it. So we've got some we call pods, which have no ceiling. They've got. plaster walls around them, but they're not completely closed in. That's the closest thing we have to an office. But we do have our meeting rooms, obviously, which can be booked and used for deep thinking.

And we have what we call a quiet room which is if somebody needs to really lock themselves away and dive into some legislation or whatever it is, that's. That's going on. So directors are in exactly the same position as everybody else. And sometimes you have to tell people to just tone it down a little bit in an open environment.

Cause they can get a little bit excited.

Meryl: And what do you do if you had a sensitive conversation? So say there was an HR issue or someone wasn't performing. How do you, where do you go to do that? Or how do you handle that?

John: We either go out onto the deck for a casual conversation or we go into one of the meeting rooms to do it. .

Meryl: Yeah, that makes sense.

John: It was one of the things with the open plan design of the office is that you just need more meeting spaces. You need more meeting room spaces. And then we needed the bigger town hall style space which is why we recently spent a few bucks on renovating the kitchen to get that as

Meryl: Yeah. And so if we jump into team culture and relationships, have you noticed any difference in the relationships that form between those staff that are in the office and those that are mostly remote and related question, where would you say the relationships are being built?

John: I'll probably answer this in two parts. Historically we probably relied on those water cooler conversations. And events. We always did a lot of events in the early days in the Brisbane Office of Business Depot. And we used those events not only as an opportunity for marketing to our clients, but it was also an opportunity for our team to connect with our clients and with each other.

So that, and the water cooler conversations was probably critical to how relationships were originally. . We now still, as I said before, do we call 'em our team Musters, where we get everybody together. We try to get everybody together depending on who's in the office and who's out of the office. And hence the challenges we have with aligning the remote workers with the in-office workers.

We still rely on those, I suppose, to communicate key strategic initiatives and those types. , but remote workers undoubtedly connect differently in my mind. And I would say their communication or their connection is more formal in nature. And I quizzed Brittany, our internal HR resource.

What does she notice about this? And she said, what happens with the remote workers is they tend to build a great relationship within their team, but then the struggle becomes getting them to connect outside of their team. And the challenge for us is given we're a multidisciplinary offering, we want people to be connecting across divisions.

It's one of the unique things that we have about our environment. It's one of the things that. Gives employees, I suppose, some deeper opportunity for insights. And so that is a lot harder for the remote workers who are getting to know their team really well. So we have to create opportunities for them, connect across divisions as well outside of just the work that flows.

Like cuz people will connect over work, but it needs to be more than that for them to identify the opportunities within the work as well.

Meryl: Yeah , we've found that too. So our teams are structured mostly on geographic lines, so where are the clients that they're working on? They form close-knit teams, even though many of them haven't met in person. Based on who they're interacting with all at the time. And then they're having other chats, so they're talking about their kids, what they did on the weekend, but they're not necessarily doing that in, we use Slack for Team Chat.

They're not necessarily doing that across the whole company-wide Slack channels. It's more within their smaller teams. We do a few. where we try and get that collaboration between the countries because sometimes clients will have it, a lot of our clients will be selling into to the UK and then the US so we need a bit of collaboration as well.

But we found that a bit of a challenge.

John: Do you ever get them all together?

Meryl: We tried to, so, prior to Covid, we were doing a whole team retreat in the Philippines for everybody. And that had to get canceled and we have another one scheduled this, we have done smaller retreats, but it wasn't for the entire team, it was for the leadership team.

So we've done multiple meetups over the years, but this November it will be our first entire team meetup in the Philippines, which is pretty exciting.

John: Yeah, that, that would be. I mean, we struggle with that as well. And now that with our Sydney office as well, recently we did our leaders retreat, which was basically managers up. So we had about 34 people there, basically. But the whole objective was connection and collaboration. One of the things I enjoyed about that was calling it for what it was and just sort of saying, this is what we're gonna get out of our time together. Connection and collaboration. It's not necessarily diving into accounting processes. Actually please don't . But it was, I find those events really important for us to lay a foundation of connection.

Cuz one of the things, I suppose a question for you Merrill, is, . How do you get them to know each other to build upon the relationship? Because we find it easy with people that are working in the office with a team and then they go remote, but starting remote, we probably struggle with.

Meryl: Yeah, so originally we used to do whole team activities, so it would be a zoom party and it's karaoke or something like that. But that doesn't really help someone that's new if it's a big group particularly if they're a bit shy or if they're more junior team ever. So something that we found helps is, structuring one-on-one coffee meetups and so everyone gets paired with someone I think it's every two weeks, or maybe it's once.

 But they have an opportunity to meet everyone in the team, one-on-one over a period of time. And the feedback from that's been great because in that one-on-one, they, really get to know someone and their family and their interests, and then they feel comfortable and gradually get to know the full team.

 I've noticed that encourages new team members to participate more when it is that bigger group environ. And some of our team members in the Philippines have just taken it upon themselves to go and meet each other. Some of them happen to live nearby. So they'll go and do that one-on-one and go and have a coffee together or, do something.

John: Yeah. Good.

Meryl: So did you have any learnings coming out? Was that the first offsite you've done with the managers

John: no we've done a few over the years. That was probably the first one where we specifically, because , the last one we did was only six months ago, and that was directors only because it was to set some strategy staff. And the reason it was only six months ago was cuz COVID outbreak stopped us from doing it 12 months ago.

And so we purposely wanted to get the connection so it was the first time we sort of had such a narrow scope, I suppose, for it.

Meryl: Yeah. Something I touched on earlier is one of the challenges with remote work is training , particularly graduates and newer staff. Do you hire graduates at Business Depot

John: Yeah, absolutely.

 They are all in the office. Cuz we find they need to learn within the office. But do you know what? I think they're happy with that. Like usually the grads even learning what it's like to be in a workplace. So throwing them in a remote working environment as a grad, I can imagine there'd be challenges with that.

So we do struggle with the hybrid workplace. With training the grads. So typically if we've got managers who are working from home, if they're working from home and they're in the office a couple of days a week, we find that they can build rapport and then working from home, they're just continuing the conversation through Slack or Zoom or whatever.

As I said before, the Walla Day example, which we will do again, we will allow people to do again, but in that particular instance, we had a manager who was probably in a time zone that didn't. Managing team members as well as they could have. And we'll allow that person to do a wall gate, wall day again, because they've got the right intent, they've got the right idea, but we probably just need to have a few more guard rails around, how we make that work.

Meryl: Yeah. I think the graduate thing's interesting. I know if I was a young accountant, again, I'd wanna be in the office too. I remember learning so much, just observing conversations. The partners having a fee or a scope conversation with a client and you can listen to that. Or , a manager's talking to someone about their billable hours.

And you just learn so much with all of the interactions or someone's explaining something to someone over there. And , if I'm giving advice to young accountants, I'm normally saying optimize for learning in the early years. It's not about optimizing for your salary when you're 22 or for lifestyle, I don't think it's optimizing for your career growth and trying to get around people where you can learn fast.

John: And the observation you made before Merrill is a really good one. What's the impact on the industry if we don't have as many people training grads? Out, Straight out of university. There's already limited supply of, let's call them senior accountants who have had a few years experience and qualified accountants.

What's it gonna be as less and less people go to uni to even study accounting? And then less and less of them are going to have in-office training for us all to then recruit a few years down the track. I think the industry's got some, real challenges in that regard.

Meryl: I think it does too, and I'm, part of c a A and Z council and so I'm starting to see some initiatives through there about trying to get more students in high schools, starting accounting, trying to make it more fashionable. Again, apparently in the high schools it's not as popular anymore.

That. Tech and, finance are more interesting. So try to change that perception and get accountants back out to high schools and, and talking about what we do as our day-to-day.

John: This is a bandwagon topic for me, Merrill, because know, my daughter finished grade 12 last year, and I think she said there was either six or eight kids in her grade 12 class that even chose to do accounting. , one of my boys who's just started grade 10 um, he's chosen to do accounting as well.

I didn't encourage it. He chosen all on his

own. I think he probably chose it cuz he thought he might get a job easily at the end. But he said there's only like six or seven kids in his grade as well that are doing accounting. But do you know what he said to me the other day? We're still doing paper ledgers in the.

dad. And I said, well, it's a good learning, I suppose to understand, but the teachers are saying there's no jobs in accounting cuz the robots are taking them. The teachers don't want to be teaching accounting cuz they're still teaching stuff that we learned 30 years ago. And they haven't moved with the times.

 So I heard some statistic the other day, I think it was q u t, number of people studying accounting first year is 50% down on pre covid.

Meryl: Yeah. That that does not bode well for hiring senior accountants in five years time.

John: Not at all

Meryl: some of that, that ledger stuff is relevant. I still sometimes draw it out or in Excel. Do the, the t

John: tea accounts every day. No, not every day, but every now and then.

Meryl: Yeah. So it's good theory, but there's definitely more interesting things that could be covered as well.

And learning some of the software, the learning Zero , there's a, a whole lot of things that could be interesting.

John: They still teach Maya, by the way.

Meryl: Oh boy. I guess , a related question to having lots of graduates in the office. . Have you ever had a situation where there's the younger staff who are in the office hungry to learn, but then the managers and the staff who would be typically training them, want that remote work and their at home with their families and maybe not as attentive to the graduates because they're, they're balancing work and life, and if so, how?

How did you.

John: Yeah, and I think anyone who's got team management responsibility for grads or for those people that are in the office, I think they have to have some time in the. Because they do just happen to build a better rapport with the face-to-face and can train them and teach them things like you say by listening into that phone call or being taken into that meeting that they just can't learn remotely.

Meryl: Well, as we wrap up, I thought it would be interesting to pose a final question, , what do you firms who are a hundred percent remote can learn from the hybrid model?

John: Well, I would probably go back to what is at the essence of Business Depot, and that is that culture, collaboration, and connection is still very important. And so, you know, whether that are running their businesses with a hundred percent remote workforce, purposely create those events or create those opportunities to connect in person at some point in time.

Meryl: Great. And, and if I was to flip that around and think about, well, what's something that works well in a remote first environment? I think it's attention. To including everybody, so if it's Zoom first or online meetings first, I, it sounds like you are doing that really well in, in trying to be inclusive when you do the team masters of people that are in the office and those that are dialing in, but I, think that's a challenge and something that's not necessarily done well throughout the industry when it's that hybrid model of it feels like it's office.

First class citizens remote, second class citizens. And so try to make it feel equal for everybody and almost have that remote first lens. So if it's a meeting, well, how are we gonna cater to those that are dialing in remotely?

John: And that is exactly the challenge, isn't it? Because you potentially are devaluing the in-office experience by putting everybody sitting at desks next to each other onto Zoom.

Meryl: I've heard of that as a solution, and then that may not be the best solution either of forcing everybody to take the call remotely. But as you said that, that devalues the in office experience.

John: I'll share with you one little technology thing we're about to try. It's called a meeting al, and it's a device that sits in the middle of the room. It's got multiple cameras on it and microphones on it, and it follows the, so it's like an hour that twists its eyes around to, to see who's talking and shows that person.

So we're gonna try that

next

Meryl: Interesting. So, John, is there anything else , any final comments you have around remote work, hybrid work in office?

John: look, my overarching comment would be we're not nailing it. We've got traction to to get. But we absolutely know we need to have more and more people that are working remotely. There is no doubt in my mind that the percentage will be going towards more remote working rather than in office working.

And there's a whole range of reasons for that. So we have to find a way to make that work and still deliver on the culture and connection and collaboration, which is at the essence of.

Meryl: Amazing. So good to chat with you, John, and if anyone wants to get in touch with you, where's the best place?

John: Oh look my mobile number's on the website, so business depo.com do au. Probably best. Don't leave a message on there or call my PA or shoot us an email, j dot knight business depo.com au on LinkedIn or Twitter JK night. I'd be happy to hear from anybody and happy to share war stories, lessons learned, and all those.

Meryl: Thanks so much.

John: Awesome. Thanks Merril.