Rethinking the Purpose of In-Person Meetings: Manuel Pais's Take on Remote Work Trends - ep. 068

In the most recent episode of The Remotely One Podcast, hosts Rick Haney and Kaleem Clarkson invite Manuel Pais, co-author of the book "Team Topologies," for a lively conversation that transcends the technical realm! This delightful discussion spans from Manuel's affection for cheesy 80s music to his intriguing background, originating from Lisbon, Portugal, and presently residing in Madrid, Spain.

With a master's degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon and a noteworthy stint as the former editor for InfoQ, Manuel's extensive career provides the backdrop for an insightful discussion. The exchange leads to a profound reflection on Manuel’s experience, sharing valuable lessons learned as an editor and underscoring the significance of connecting with influential figures in the tech industry.

A pivotal question arises regarding Manuel's transition from his established career to focusing on his co-authored book, "Team Topologies." Manuel's motivation behind the book addresses critical issues related to team dynamics, interactions, and leadership in a technical environment. Our guest emphasizes the importance of recognizing and resolving non-technical problems within teams for enhanced motivation and engagement.

The conversation delves deep into the challenges faced by remote teams, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Manuel discusses how the shift to remote work brought existing issues to the forefront, with teams grappling to collaborate effectively. He underscores the importance of intentionally addressing problems related to team interactions, dependencies, and communication in a remote environment.

The animated trio also touches on the evolving attitudes toward remote work, workplace flexibility, and goal setting. Manuel reflects on the current trend of remote work and suggests rethinking the purpose of in-person meetings, focusing on goal alignment during face-to-face interactions, opening a space to discuss the broader landscape of remote work, touching on transparency, intentional communication, and knowledge sharing among teams.

Venturing into more personal territory, Manuel shares insights into his journey as an author, highlighting the unexpected growth in his communication skills influenced by his work at InfoQ and participation in conference talks. Before concluding, Manuel introduces his latest project, a workbook on remote team interactions based on concepts from "Team Topologies." He elucidates the specific challenges of remote work and provides practical techniques and templates to help teams navigate these challenges.

A comprehensive exploration encompassing Manuel Pais's background, his experiences at InfoQ, insights from "Team Topologies," and perspectives on the challenges and solutions for remote team collaboration. The engaging and informative discussion positions it as a valuable resource for professionals navigating the complexities of the remote work environment. Don’t miss out and get ready to take notes, Manuel is spilling golden nuggets in this installment!

Learn more about Manuel:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/manuelpais/
• TeamTopologies Webpage: https://teamtopologies.com/
• Get the Workbook: https://teamtopologies.com/workbook

Transcript

Manuel: 0:35

I like to listen to 80s music to cheer me up.

Rick: 0:38

What kind of 80s music?

Manuel: 0:39

Uh, cheesy 80s music.

Rick: 0:42

What, like, uh, culture Club or Air Supply?

Manuel: 0:45

uh, like Boy George and, uh,

Kaleem: 0:48

Here we go. Here we go. Okay.

Manuel: 0:51

Yeah,

Rick: 0:52

Come a come a come a come a come a chameleon.

Kaleem: 0:55

Ready man? Well, let's go. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. man. Come on, man. Well, come on me. So, what else? Give me another person that you like.

Manuel: 1:05

what about Lionel Richie? You're

Kaleem: 1:14

I can see it in your

Rick: 1:17

See? We're all cheesy! There's nothing wrong with

Manuel: 1:21

karaoke in this show.

Rick: 1:24

You came to the right show today, my friend.

Manuel: 1:27

I might, regret it in the future, but it will be

Rick: 1:30

there are no regrets. lessons. welcome back everybody to Remotely One. I am your co host, Rick Haney, joined by my well prepared and moisturized colleague, Kaleem Clarkson. Look at He's, Kaka! Kaka!

Kaleem: 1:53

to see you, bro. You're looking good with those glasses, man. You got the hat on.

Rick: 1:57

I feel accomplished. You know, we're going places today.

Kaleem: 2:00

You're the voice of remote work.

Rick: 2:02

yes, we know, we got a guest that's gonna put us in our place, and he's gonna inform us of a thing or two, maybe,

Kaleem: 2:08

couple things, I

Manuel: 2:09

Maybe not.

Rick: 2:11

Okay. No, I'm confident. I'm looking forward to this. But before we get to that, listeners, viewers, since you know how to find us, do us a huge favor, go to ratethispodcast. com forward slash remotelyone and just leave us a review. Again, ratethispodcast. com forward slash remotelyone. And if you could do that for us, we would be ever so thankful. Since 2015, Remotely One is one of the largest communities of remote work professionals, with over 3, 000 Slack members and 5, 000 email subscribers. That's pretty big.

Kaleem: 2:45

go. Let's go.

Rick: 2:47

Hey, you know what? It's free to join. So go check it out at remotelyone. com. And with that out of the way, Kaleem, my brother, give us a tease or two about today's guest.

Kaleem: 2:56

Oh, my brother from another mother, baby, there you are, my boy, Ricky, my boy, Ricky Rick. We'll talk about that story a little later, but today, today, sir, our guests, they're originally from Lisbon, Portugal. Okay. Now for some of y'all that don't know, I think running remote is going to be in Lisbon. So, you know, you got to check it out. RIck, our guests today, they currently reside in Madrid, Spain, just just beauty. I feel like this person just loves beauty. Rick.

Rick: 3:29

Yes.

Kaleem: 3:30

it.

Rick: 3:31

that.

Kaleem: 3:32

Yes. Yes. They're over there pimping look at

Rick: 3:34

Yeah. Yeah.

Kaleem: 3:36

Oh, always, sir. Our guests know a few things. They've been taught teachings and they know learnings and they know shits. Yes, they do. Today, I guess they earned their master's degree in computer science from this tiny little school called Carnegie Mellon.

Rick: 3:58

Carnegie Mellon. That's a big ol think tank. Yeah.

Kaleem: 4:03

look it up. If you don't know it, look it up. All right, let's see. Oh, Rick, I think our guest has a lot in common with your cheesy ass. You know what I mean? Our,you heard me? You heard me. Our guests, they love cheesy, eighties music just like you.

Rick: 4:23

Oh, man, I thought you were gonna come at me with something threatening.

Kaleem: 4:25

like you, sir, he has a poster of Boy George and Lionel Richie still in his room.

Rick: 4:33

Do you really want to hurt me? Do you really want to make me

Kaleem: 4:40

me cry? Ooh, ooh, everyone does it, everyone loves it.

Rick: 4:45

You know you do too.

Kaleem: 4:46

I do too, I do too, I can't hate, I can't hate. Um, our guest is the former editor for InfoQ, which is one of the largest technology conferences and websites in the world. And they've had people from every company you can think of, Rick. Netflix, Google, Amazon, everyone has been on that show. So he's a big deal. Rick our guest today. They are the co author I have a book called team topologies.

Rick: 5:18

Ah, it's big time.

Kaleem: 5:19

Yeah. Yeah. Listeners and viewers, please give a warm welcome to Manuel.

Rick: 5:29

woo, woo, woo, woo, woo,

Kaleem: 5:30

Let's go. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. Holy

Manuel: 5:34

Thank you

Kaleem: 5:35

down studio audience. Settle down. They're going crazy.

Rick: 5:39

Is that not the most amazing introduction you have ever had?

Manuel: 5:43

Yes, except the part about the posters in the bedroom. But all the rest is accurate, ok? And it's the most vibrant introduction I've ever had. There will never be another like this.

Rick: 5:56

Never. Never.

Kaleem: 5:58

Never.

Rick: 5:58

ha, ha,

Kaleem: 5:59

Manuel, you telling me you don't have the posters of Boy George and Lionel Richie in your room still?

Manuel: 6:05

That is confidential. That is something I cannot.

Rick: 6:09

We're getting into sharky waters here, Colleen.

Kaleem: 6:12

He was told in confidence, I broke his confidentiality.

Manuel: 6:16

important thing is, you gotta give credit to that, to the 80s music. Took me a while, but I have to give it credit.

Kaleem: 6:24

mean, we all crack jokes.

Rick: 6:26

we ask only the important questions here on Remotely One. Asking the important questions.

Kaleem: 6:32

It's true, it's true.

Rick: 6:34

so getting into it headfirst, Manuel, first of all, thank you for joining us. It's an absolute pleasure to be talking with you yeAh, no problem. You have an incredibly impressive technical background and a very clear passion for leadership. Was there ever a specific moment or incident maybe that inspired you to combine those two elements?

Kaleem: 6:57

Mm.

Manuel: 6:58

Yes. I have, like you said, kind of technical computer science background, and I've done more like technical work for several years, beginning of my career. And then when I got into consulting role. First time you see kind of problems, which are much more about the relationships between people and teams, you kind of think, oh yeah, you know, maybe it's in this organization or something is wrong or not, not going well. But then you start to see the repetition of these patterns. Oh, yeah. People don't talk to each other or people don't know who is, who can help them or yeah, or they have incentives that are leading them to act in ways that are actually not helpful for other teams and for the organization. So he had a lot of those moments back in 2015, 2016, when I was doing a lot of consulting around stuff like DevOps and more technical, but at the end was always coming up was okay. The tooling and kind of technical implementations can help a little bit, but you've got problems here that are much more at a team level. Sometimes, like I said, leadership, issues as well, lack of clarity on what should teams be focusing on and why. And so that's where all the work that finally resulted in the book, Team Topologies, kind of started. It was like a little seed that started growing in my mind. Like, I like the technical part, but when I look at it, there's a lot of problems that are really not technical that have a really huge impact on even how people then, how motivated they feel to go to work, how engaged and how, yeah, that manifests in, the quality of what they do. Right. But especially for the individual that they. You don't get people motivated and engaged if we don't address a lot of these issues around interactions and responsibilities, etc.

Rick: 8:59

Yeah, the things that technology can't always answer for. you gotta address the, the human to human elements.

Manuel: 9:06

humans behind technology, Yeah.

Rick: 9:09

Yeah.

Kaleem: 9:10

too is your background engineering and development. And so many times there's kind of like this stigma that developers are all You know, introverts and don't want to talk to each other. And, you know, you're just sitting in this cave in your underwear, coding away in a dock, you know, it's not true. I mean, like some of it's true, but like, it's not all true. Like we're humans too. I'm a former engineer and it's like a lot of times you can't write your best code if, if you're in conflict with somebody else, you know what I mean? Like you're having this conflict over a solution, right? And you're just, there's no collaboration there. Your code can be impacted by it. So I'm happy that you were able to take that

Manuel: 9:56

I agree. And often,

Kaleem: 9:58

Mm.

Manuel: 9:59

of leads to situations where people are working in a silo in the sense of, well, Because there are developers or engineers that are very technical, let them just do their little thing. But in today's world, especially when things are more and more complex, if you think about the services used, you know, things you use on your day to day basis, Netflix, Spotify. Amazon, this stuff is pretty complex and has a lot of dependencies internally as well as externally. And so we cannot try to put people in just their boxes, which usually are the teams they belong to and say, well, you just do your little part and let us, you know, someone else worry about connecting the dots. That's kind of one of the things that we talk about in team topology is that that doesn't work. Like I was saying, even from a motivational perspective, it's known that people have some sort of intrinsic motivators and it might vary a little bit from person to person. But almost everyone that works in kind of knowledge intensive work wants to have autonomy to make decisions for the work they want to have a purpose, a sense of purpose. Why are we doing this? Why does this kind of bring me or should bring me joy if I have that clarity, and a bit of mastery as well, like that I'm good or I'm getting better at what I do and that all those things bring internal motivation. Right. And the financial part and benefits, it needs to be there. So it's not something that you worry about, but if you think on a day to day basis, maybe, in your engineering experience, calling me probably might remember some situations where you might have really good, you know, benefits or have a good, good job, but then you don't necessarily feel motivated because you cannot make decisions or because you have 10, 20 different people asking you for stuff and you have no way to prioritize and, or you depend on other teams to do stuff for you to be able to move, make progress. And you have no control about when are those things going to be done. So all these, problems actually end up causing people to not feel engaged or not feel motivated to, for day to day work. So we need to address those as well.

Kaleem: 12:21

Manuel, can we go back a little bit you know, into your career? And, talk a little bit about you being the lead editor at InfoQ. When I saw that, I was like, holy smokes. You know, it's one of the world's largest technology conferences. I was fortunate to present at one of the info queues, which is really cool. Can you just tell us about a how did you get the job? Like what interested you to join that organization? um Damn it. I'm gonna do a follow up and then can you just tell us what your role was there and what that experience was like?

Manuel: 12:55

Yeah, for sure. So I started InfoQ as a, let's say an editor. I was writing news. I was reviewing articles or getting Asking people to contribute articles, people like you and other people have interesting stuff to say about, let's say technology in general, I was, within the DevOps area, right? Then eventually, I became the lead editor, which just meant... That I would help train new editors that were joining, and sort of have a bit more coordination responsibilities. But it's quite an interesting organization. So InfoQ is the website. And then they organize the QCon conferences across the world. I learned a lot from that experience. And, struck me was, you know, at the time I joined, that was, I had a technical career and that was doing well, but nobody knew who the hell is Manuel Pais or and I would reach out to people who are sort of seen as, you know, and they are super clever people and sort of luminaries in the technology field, you know, if you think about people like for those familiar with Martin Fowler or Dan North or Jazz Humble, people have wrote really influential books as well. They would all be, I mean, maybe there was one exception or something. Otherwise, they would all be welcome and they would be open to share and explain or contribute stuff. So, that was the biggest thing I took from that. And try to then bring that into my current role where obviously I have more Visibility if you like and some people reach out and try to be always open and sort of kind of pay forward like if those people who surely were super busy and had no obligation to reply to this guy who sent them a random email from InfoQ and they took the time like to try to be available also for whoever reaches out to me with questions about the book or even sometimes about How can I become a book author? How can I change my career? And yeah, that was the biggest thing. It was a very, very interesting experience and just, yeah, growing also my network of connections in the industry and getting to know really clever people was. It was. awesome.

Kaleem: 15:23

So, Manuel, this is your chance. Who was the biggest asshole? Put him on blast right now, Manuel. Who responded, who was just such a jerk? Please tell me it was like, you know, I don't know. Somebody huge, you know. Come on, come on. Give me a Zuck or Elon just told you off in the email. Don't do that. I don't want you to really

Manuel: 15:43

nah, I'm not, I'm not going there.

Rick: 15:46

ha!

Manuel: 15:49

Hahaha. But really, that was, that was really, almost, yeah, I can't even, yeah, remember, I think maybe there was, maybe one situation of not replying, it's not even being, like,

Kaleem: 16:01

yeah, not replying is no big, ghosting is

Manuel: 16:03

It's okay. Yeah. People are busy. You know, that was sort of my expectation that a lot of these people would not reply. That was the thing. And then people would be super friendly and reply and try to help. And like, Whoa, that's

Kaleem: 16:16

Yeah. Yeah. Until Zack told you to go F yourself. I totally get it. I remember.

Rick: 16:22

Yeah. Oh my gosh. You just touched on something that really piqued my curiosity and that was about becoming a an author. Talk to me a little bit about That discovery process and what it was like to become, or decide that you wanted to become an author.

Manuel: 16:39

It's a good question. I think

Rick: 16:41

Mm

Manuel: 16:42

sometimes people, who want to become a book author and if they ask me for advice, my first question is, why do you want to become a book author? Because there can be many different reasons. And in fact, for me and my co author Matthew Skelton, Or I should speak for myself at least the first reason was let's get what we've seen and what we've discovered in our work into a book because that's a really good means for people to learn about it. And we didn't even have any kind of big expectations on how many copies it would sell or what audience would, it would reach was just like, this is going to be easier if we have a book that we can, give to our customers to kind of explain a bit our thinking, because the things we discussed before, right, technology is not gonna solve a lot of these issues with Interactions and kind of boundaries of responsibility and stuff like that. So having a book is going to be very helpful. Obviously, we wanted it to be successful and it's been way more than we expected. But you know, that can be different reasons to be an author because you want to just condense your knowledge in a way that's easy to communicate. Or it can be that you want to become known and grow your career that way, which is also fine. So for me, it was a bit like that. Obviously, all the work at InfoQ helped shape my writing as well. Obviously, I'm a native English speaker. Not just the, let's say the language itself becoming more proficient, but also thinking about how do you communicate to your audience? Like what is. Understand the audience, understand what is the most important thing for them. How do you get that message across quickly in a way that, that they can digest. And then you expand that into the book, right? In this case. So that was a bit my process. And I know other people have different kind of process for me. It was like a bit of a growth that I had not anticipated, but that was actually what happened with, Writing for InfoQ, and then starting to also do more kind of communication at conference talks and stuff like that. And that helped kind of shape my, let's say, communication skills to be able to write the book. And then we had a lot of help from the publisher as well. It's called IT Revolution. And it's a small publisher, so they really put in a lot of effort for each book. To make sure it's as, as good as possible, and they help us also kind of with the narrative of the book and make sure it was telling a story, right, not just here are all the ideas, but actually, how do you tell them?

Rick: 19:24

Yeah, so, in, in terms of narrative, it seems to me that these days, you know, everyone and his brother involved in this industry has a, has written a book about discovering new ways for their, you Remote teams to more effectively interact, but you kind of took a different approach Yeah, Yeah,

Manuel: 19:44

We wrote the workbook. Yeah,

Rick: 19:47

more specifically though your approach is about Separate teams and getting them to interact so that the you know ripples don't become waves in terms of like You know delayed Delivery on certain things that need to be done on time. You know, increased wait times between teams or whatever. You know, what are the biggest challenges in your research that you found were facing the separate teams who are collaborating remotely?

Manuel: 22:20

that's a good point. And you know, when the COVID happened and everyone was suddenly working remotely, we had published the book team topologies just a few months before. So I started to gain a bit of traction and it started as, okay, what can we do to help around, you know, all this. Companies moving to work remotely, obviously, the initial stage was kind of how do we get people to have access that they only had in the office before kind of the more practical stuff. And then that kind of like the next stage was for. individual teams to learn how to work in this new environment, right? So within a single team, they can decide, well, are we going to be some teams do virtual office where they're, you know, with cameras all day long so they can quickly talk to each other or see each other. Other teams decide to do other ways of working together remotely, right? And because you're in the same team, you figured that out fairly soon. But then what we saw was that. It was becoming more difficult for the work that crosses different teams, right? And if you think about it, actually, in the office work before, you know, when most people were working in the office, it's not that the problems weren't there. It was just kind of the office was in a way hiding problems. In terms of interactions between teams and boundaries, because you had faster access to those people, you had sometimes accidental access to people in other teams when you meet by the water cooler or stuff like that, but fundamentally we were not addressing problems that already existed. Like we were talking earlier, teams don't know who they have to reach out to. They, teams don't know, who is responsible for what and we need to get stuff done and we don't know who to talk to or we know who to talk to, but it's going to take, you know, three times the time we have to get it delivered. All this kind of issues were not new because we went to remote. Often they were slightly, covered by the fact that we're in the same office. So these things sometimes were, would arise kind of, um, accidentally. So now when we're remote, that kind of, was not happening anymore. And so those problems start to intensify. And in my opinion, part of the backlash that has been, I guess in the last months, maybe the last year around remote work, put aside the questions of if it's about the the office, real estate and all that stuff, I think has to do partially with this kind of problematics that trying to work in the same way with the remote aspect is not just about having the proper tools and the virtual chats and all that is about those problems of interactions between different teams became sort of aggravated. Because they're not being dealt with unless you are intentionally dealing with that. And that's why we wrote the workbook on remote team interactions. This one, because we wanted to based on the ideas of the original book, Tip Topologies, what are the specific things that are even more important in a remote environment? And here are some simple techniques and templates that can help you do this stuff. So I'm talking about stuff like, you know, tracking your dependencies to other teams, which dependencies should we address because they are problematic and which ones might be okay. How do you make it clear as a team how others should communicate with you? Where is your kind of information about whatever your KPIs, your metrics, your way of working? Make that visible to others in the organization. Especially in this remote environment and yeah, how to make interactions more purposeful, easier to discover. How do we discover what other teams exist now that we don't even see other people's faces on a regular basis, right? So that was kind of the genesis of the workbook. We started talking about this stuff shortly after the pandemic and then eventually it became this workbook.

Kaleem: 26:32

You know, you're, as you're just talking about, Each team being able to know what the other team's working on, to me, it sounds like a lot of the interaction is about transparency and knowledge sharing. Am I hearing that correctly? Like, cause before what you're saying is a lot of times what happens is that. One team will just start hammering away at something in a silo, especially in engineering, right? You have like the front end team over there is just crushing on something. And then the back end team over here is like, Oh wait, that's going to impact something. Where are you seeing The challenges when it comes to this type of transparency, are people buying into this or are you feeling like that's a real big lift for you when you have to, when you're diagnosing a problem, you're like, okay, well this could fix it. Like, what is that looking like when people are reaching out to

Manuel: 27:24

Yeah, it's it takes time. Some teams will be more sort of aware of this kind of problem. Why is this a problem in the first place? Why do we need to be more transparent or more explicit, intentional about how we interact with others and how we make information available to others? In general, what tends to happen? You might have some teams that more in tune to this kind of problems. They'll start doing things a bit differently. And then other teams start to pick up because they start to see, Oh, okay. I can see how this would help us if we adopted a similar approach. Right. But I think you're spot on, right? It's a question of being more transparent, more clear, having more purpose on the way we. We interact with others, especially outside our team. At least in engineering, that has not been a focus in the past. And some teams that are also like, Oh, does this mean that I just, I have to create more documents because I don't want to do that. and so it's, you need to find a balance between you're trying to kind of push people to push in a good way or nudge, I should say, teams to consider that there are these problematics that are causing, you know, impact on other teams but at the same time, also not forcing people to do stuff that they don't understand the value yet. Right. It was kind of

Rick: 28:47

Right.

Manuel: 28:48

nudge and sometimes you wait and allow people to sort of those conclusions by themselves. And so it's, again, it's the work that it's, there's no tool that's going to do it for you, unfortunately.

Rick: 29:03

Yeah.

Manuel: 29:03

And you need sometimes patience.

Rick: 29:05

yeah, absolutely. Kind of digging a little bit deeper into that, as these separated teams start to, their relationships start to evolve, obviously they're setting goals and they're learning new things all the time. How does goal setting and the discovery of new things complement one another in that process?

Manuel: 29:24

So there's an interesting aspect here, and I'm not answering your question directly yet, but thinking about it's related. Okay, I'll get there. But thinking about kind of the where we are now in end of 2023, where a lot of people are working remotely. And but then you also have some backlash of some companies that want to go people to go back to the office. And it's clear. I mean, the data shows that a lot of people, and you've had guests in the podcast like Nick Bloom, or I think we're talking about this as well. Like most people want to have a good balance and they need several days that they want to work remotely. But from the perspective of the organization, right, where you need to have goals and you want, you know, teams and people to be aligned to the goals of organization. I think there's an opportunity to sort of rethink this hybrid work, right? When should we be in the office? What should we try to achieve when we are in the office together? And maybe coming back to the question, that's maybe where it makes sense to people are together to align on their goals and to share, you know what they're doing and how does that align to the goal of the company? Because what I see sometimes we're talking about remote work versus in the office work as if we should always be doing the same type of work. You know what I mean? Like It's just a matter of location and I think that kind of misses the point a bit It's like it's a matter of purpose. Why should we be in the office together? Well, one of the things that would make sense to me is let's be you know So we can be more aligned on the goals and how we're getting to those goals That probably makes sense as you know face to face because you're able to get into deeper discussions perhaps and what makes sense to do remotely or at least offer the choice. Like if you're doing your day to day work in your team, you know, maybe you're building some cool new service or whatever, or you work in finance or whatever on your day to day work, maybe doesn't matter because we have the data that shows actually people can be more productive working remotely because they don't have to commute and they have more flexibility on schedule, et cetera. So I think that's an opportunity to think about what is the purpose and when should we work, when should we be together in the office or in some kind of retreat or something, right? Because the other aspect that is important is for, to build trust between people, especially in the same team. And it's kind of funny to start hearing stories of people who joined the company remotely. They never met anyone face to face from that company and they already left that company. It's kind of crazy, right? Thinking that that can happen.

Kaleem: 32:10

Yeah. Yeah. I, I've, never once thought of that. I've never once even thought of that. Like, yeah, you could literally go into a company work for whatever. And then we even have never met any of the humans in person, which is weird. It's a little weird.

Rick: 32:24

It's the future.

Kaleem: 32:25

It is kind of the future. I got a question because like, we are attempting to get more international guests on the show. We have been a little us centric and um, but you know, we got a good amount of international guests. I always love hearing the perspectives of what are the views like outside of the U. S. So as far as workplace flexibility in general, I'm going to ask you a two part question again, dammit. Um, so where are you seeing workplace flexibility? Like what is it looking like in your home country of Portugal and then also where you are now? What is the attitude towards it right now when it comes to workplace flexibility. And then the followup piece to that is where do you think this is all heading?

Manuel: 33:19

Those are good questions. So I think here in Europe where I can, I can give you some and I should say southern Europe cause, I guess in the US you're able to see the trends more country level but maybe people, I don't know. My wife is from the US so I shouldn't I don't want to say anything bad, but maybe sometimes people in the US think of Europe as one thing, Europe, and it's like, uh, if even Portugal and Spain have differences, and so it's very much country based, I would say at the country level, you can kind of see some trends, but basically, I think, my perspective, especially in Portugal and Spain is you have the more established companies, the larger companies that have been around for For a longer time where, many of them are sort of halfway between pre pandemic working from home was sort of a perk. Okay, maybe you can do one day per week or your or less than that. And it's sort of a special benefit. And then you had the pandemic times where. You were, everyone was remote and some bigger companies are trying to push towards kind of pre pandemic, like it's just a perk and we let you, it's kind of like, we give you permission to do stuff to work a bit more from home but then you have all the kind of startup and scale up kind of world, which is quite big, I would say, at least compared to the size of the country in Portugal. So in, in Lisbon and Porto, the main cities, there is a lot of startup scene and scale up as well. And those companies are mostly remotely. So there's all sorts of things. And then you have companies sort of in the middle that also are mostly remotely are mostly remote, kind of mixed, but you do see big companies where they kind of went back to

Kaleem: 35:17

Okay.

Manuel: 35:18

closer to pre pandemic, not exactly the same.

Kaleem: 35:20

You know, it sounds like it's a similar vibe. You know, you have the younger companies. You know, we're going to have Rob Sato on the show from the Flex Index and he was just talking about, you know, the companies that were pre 1990, they have less percentage of flexibility than the companies that were created after 2010. Right. So it seems like that this is a, You know, I try not to use the US as like the model of what's going on globally But the more people we talk I feel like that This is something that the globe is having a common thread. So, thanks

Manuel: 35:58

Probably. Probably. That makes sense, right? Because it's something that I would say is more influenced by the size of the organization and the age, let's say, of the organization, right? When were they established? And it's kind of normal in a way or expectable because there's a lot of ingrained ways of working and thinking about how work is done. That takes time to change, and so now we're in the phase where maybe a lot of people in that situation are looking at the pandemic as like a sort of accident, and they're trying to get closer to how it was before. It's never going to be exactly the same, but, and again, seeing the remote as sort of a perk. And that's where, like I was saying earlier, I think it, when they do, when you do that, you're missing the opportunity of rethinking the purpose of work and the purpose of, it's not just a matter of location. That's important as well, because remote helps with individual, happiness. It helps the climate, which is something we should all be concerned with.

Kaleem: 37:08

We probably should think about the planet.

Manuel: 37:10

something about that, something about climate crisis, you know, making light of a serious issue, but yeah. And so use, you can use both, but be more intentional about why and what do we need to have in place if we're doing it remotely, which is why we wrote the workbook and we also have a video based course about that. That's kind of my main thing is try to raise these questions, like take a deeper thought about the opportunities also of different modes of working, right? It's not just remote is good or not remote is bad. It's a lot more nuanced than that.

Rick: 37:50

Oh, without question, without question. We are almost out of time, Manuel, but before we get there, I've gotta ask you, if you'd be willing to share a comical or inspiring moment you may have had while working remotely.

Kaleem: 38:03

Oh, here we go.

Manuel: 38:07

I'm thinking of it's sort of a tragic comical. So you tell me afterwards if you think it's more tragic or more comedy. Um, it's a situation I had, uh, I actually have been working remotely well before the pandemic, but actually after, so we published the book and then we started doing training at first it was on site and then obviously quickly everything changed online. And so we still, we get a fair number of people or companies that want training for their employees, right? And what happens, and you can clearly see the difference between sort of a public training where people self enroll and self, self select to, to join versus organizations where sometimes you have people who have been sort of invited between codes, meaning you have to be there for this training. And so what happened specifically was one of the sessions, you know, I'm doing the session. It's actually kind of tiring, right? Because you have to be communicating properly. And then we're using some tools. I don't know if you heard about a tool called Miro. It's basically a, uh, online board to do exercises and we're looking at slides. So actually, from my perspective, as a structure, it's kind of resource consuming and we're using zoom, I think was at the time and we have the chat, right? Which is usually for people talk with the group. And then I started getting individual messages from someone participating and he was just going on about how he didn't want to be there. I don't care about any of this. Shit. Well, he didn't say it like that. This is not meaningful for my work, right? I've just been told that I had to be here. I'm like with all the, at the same time, my brain was like exploding, right? Talking or I'm like coordinating exercise and stuff and trying to reply to this guy. And like, what do I tell him? Like, I'm sorry,

Kaleem: 40:15

I'm

Manuel: 40:15

you know,

Kaleem: 40:18

I'm sorry.

Manuel: 40:20

to attend. Thanks. And I didn't really know what to say, like, at the same time, I felt sorry for the guy because I wouldn't want to be in his position. But at the other time, like, you should feel sorry for me as well if I have to reply. And so, I don't know.

Rick: 40:43

heh.

Manuel: 40:43

Um, I don't know. It was okay for him to kind of vent his frustration. It was just like...

Kaleem: 40:50

wow. Well, did he mean to send it to you though? Like he was literally like

Manuel: 40:56

Oh, yeah. He was sort of polite, he was not like rude or anything. He was just, he was just explaining, I don't care. And I'm like, I care, and now I don't know what. Because usually what, what people will do, if they're forced to attend, and they really don't think it's valuable, You know, some people just be quiet that they might be in the call, but they're doing other work or watching whatever you do or whatever they want to do. And, you know, it's, okay. Cause I think there's some other problem. Why are people not engaged and, or why are you forcing people to do stuff that they don't feel is valuable? But anyway, that specific situation, I was

Kaleem: 41:42

great.

Manuel: 41:42

afterwards, I don't know what to think about this. It only happened once.

Kaleem: 41:48

At least, he wasn't like sending you messages saying, I can't stand your voice. Your voice bothers me. You know, I can't stand you. You're just like, sorry. That's,

Manuel: 41:57

is horrible. Yeah.

Rick: 41:58

crushing your head. Crush, crush, Crush, crush, Manuel, where can our listeners and viewers find you?

Manuel: 42:07

They can find me on LinkedIn. Always happy to answer messages and be touch. And also our main website is team topologies.com and from there you can find all sorts of, you know, free resources. We also have an online academy and if you're interested in the topic of remote team interactions besides the workbook, there's now a video based course. From the company called IT Revolution. They published a course where we work through what is in the book. And we also give examples from our experience with different clients and organizations. So teamtopologies. com is probably

Rick: 42:49

Okay.

Manuel: 42:51

first resource.

Rick: 42:52

Very cool. Manuel Pais, thank you so much for joining us.

Kaleem: 42:56

Thank

Manuel: 42:56

Thank you for having me. It's a lot of fun.

Kaleem: 42:58

on the book. Congratulations on everything. Really appreciate it.

Manuel: 43:02

Thank you and congrats on your podcast. It's great.

Rick: 43:05

Thank you.

Kaleem: 43:05

Thank you very much. Talk to you later, man. Peace.