Speaker 1: I have someone actually joining us here today, so give me one second.

Speaker 2: Hello? Mark? Can you hear me? Mark? There's tons of static, Mark. Is that you, Mark? Can you change your line? Mark? Mark? Sorry, everyone. So, up until about six months ago, this was my normal morning call. Now, my normal morning is I wake up between 7 to 8.30 in the morning every day, when either my kids jump on my bed, they start screaming, they start hitting each other, they start crying, something always happens, and I get out of bed, I make the most of the morning, I play with them a little bit. I mean, it's an absolute blast. Then, I take a few steps, and in less than five seconds, I'm at work. I get into my study, I open up my computer, and this is what I see. Boom. One, two, three, sometimes up to 20 different people with either their faces or names on screens on my computer. 30 different people from over 10 different nationalities spread all around the world talking nonstop. Five different offices around the world, five different time zones, complete chaos. But it's actually a blast. So, I do this between two to six hours every single day of the week. I currently manage a team of 30 people from 10 very, very, very, very different nationalities. I don't actually know what is tougher, the remote part of having to interact with all of my team just using Skype, video conference, telephone, or email, or the different cultural interpretations to everyday things that happen in the workplace. Luckily, my own personal journey has been a bit of a nomad experience. I was actually born here in Spain, and before I was even a month, I moved to Africa. Then I spent five years in Puerto Rico, then a few more years in Spain, then five years in the Netherlands, then I spent 10 years between LA, San Francisco, and New York. Please don't try to add all of this up. It's a little bit chaotic. Before I moved back to Europe, traveled a little bit around, and finally settling down back in Madrid. I'm no expert in cultures. I haven't studied about cultures, and I haven't read many books about cultures, but I've had hundreds of experiences managing everyday problems that arise from managing a multicultural team remotely. And still, I make many mistakes. So why am I talking about this today? Because this situation that I face every single day will happen to most of you if it already hasn't happened. People want flexibility. People want the choice of where to work, and they want it now. Take a look at this graph here. This is what millennials want from the workplace. They want training. I think we can all agree with that. They want to learn at work, and they want flexible working hours. They want to work remotely. They want to choose when they work. They want to have flexibility during the day. They want this above cash bonuses. They want this above private healthcare. They want this above more vacation. I mean, they want this above maternity, paternity benefits. People want flexibility. I've heard from many people on my team how great it is to work remotely. The reality is that they end up working a lot more hours, actually a ton more hours, very late at night, but they love the flexibility that they have during the middle of the day. Remote working will become even more common because the new generation of managers want it in their workplace. The beauty about remote working is that you're actually adding a huge employee benefit for much less cost, and you're actually creating loyalty for people in the workplace. It's a killer addition for people. But with all this flexibility, it's actually not easy to make it happen. It's actually quite tough. There are tons of problems that arise from everyday situations in the workplace. To illustrate how simple yet complex this problem is, I wanted to share a story that happened to me about two years ago when I first started working remotely with my team in South Africa. I'd been doing this for about five years, and as usual, I was sitting down in front of my computer in Madrid, and I had one of my first conference calls with my team in South Africa. The conference call went great, and at the end of it, one of my team members tells me, I'll call you just now, which I thought, oh, great. I was actually very excited to get into the detail of it. So I ended the call, and I waited in front of my computer, and I waited, and I waited, and I waited, and then after about 15 minutes, I sent a message to my team member in South Africa, and I told them, hey, are we talking just now? To which he responded, yes, yeah, just now. And he pinged me this message. He sent me this image describing how South Africans define time. So just now wasn't, you know, I think what we're all thinking right now, you know, we'll talk in a couple of seconds or a couple of minutes. For South Africans, just now can mean, you know, we'll talk in the future, hopefully today, if not tomorrow, maybe someday in the distant future. You don't really know when you're going to talk. How could something so simple, such as expressions about time, lead to such misunderstanding? This had been an internal meeting, so it wasn't a big problem, but imagine this had been an external meeting with clients. Cultural differences can lead to huge misunderstandings, and the remoteness part of it made it even worse, because I couldn't get out of my desk, go around the hallway, tap the person on the shoulder, and say, hey, are we talking just now? And, of course, this was my first week at work, and I didn't want to sound like an idiot asking these questions. With my own team, remote working situations can be even more confusing. So just this week, we launched a project in India, and it went extremely well, and I wanted to share my enthusiasm with my team, so in one of our weekly calls, I shared with the rest of the team, and I told one of my Indian coworkers, you're killing it out there, and the next day, to my surprise, I get an email very early in the morning from my Indian team member asking me, what did I do wrong? Can you give me advice? Can you tell me how I can improve? And I was taken aback. I was actually trying to express my enthusiasm and the great job that he had done, and he had interpreted something completely different. The exact same sentence in the exact same language being understood in two completely different ways. The lack of context created this misunderstanding. Context is absolutely necessary when working with remote teams. So even with two teams with the same natural language, such as English, there are still problems created due to lack of context. So about a year ago, I was having quite a few communication problems between my U.S. and my London-based teams. We had tons of meetings, probably too many nowadays in most companies, and lots of actions were coming out, lots of activities, we were doing lots of things, but the results were poor, people were not communicating well with each other, and people were getting extremely frustrated. So I needed to do something about this. So I bought 30 copies of a book about how to work with people from different cultures, and I gave my whole team this book here, The Culture Map by Aaron Mayer, and the effect was absolutely amazing. It brought out in the open, in plain sight, how different people are on the team. So I had 30 different people from 10 very different nationalities that were all speaking the exact same language, in this case English, but were all saying things that were completely different, and were acting completely different in the same situations. So, for example, my team in Latin America, they're very hierarchical, so they didn't understand when people were responding in certain ways, or my U.S. and my Dutch teams based in London, they found it completely normal that in the middle of a conference call, you could interrupt the person, and you can say your opinion, and other people were going absolutely nuts with this. This self-awareness and bringing this out in the open was absolutely amazing. It was a key driving force for our success. So I think we all agree that remote working is great, and having this flexibility in the workplace is absolutely amazing, but it can actually also lead to loneliness. In my case, over the last five years, I've actually felt lonely quite a few times sitting in my little study in front of my computer all by myself. And when I've been in the office with other people and actually have to travel, I felt very lonely on the road. I've had to take lots of conference calls in hotel rooms, in trains, in planes, in public bathrooms, even in horrible situations. I've had to take calls in the middle of the morning, very late at night, at 3, 4, 5, 6 o'clock in the morning. I mean, really horrible situations, both physically and mentally challenging situations. So you have to find a way to make yourself be in a comfortable situation. Coworking areas, such as this one here, are great to solve this problem. You can feel that you're part of a company. You can feel that work is being done sitting around with other people. You can network with others. You can get inspired by others. You can inspire others. You can just get out of your chair, grab a coffee, and have a conversation with someone from a completely different company. You just feel that work is being done. So remote working and coworking areas are absolutely great. I think there's no doubt about it. But the reality is that you still need physical presence to create a truly incredible team. You can have amazing relationships just via video conference, via email. You can establish some sort of relationship between your team. But you need the physical presence to create empathy, to really add empathy to your team. So remote working is the future, but you need physical presence at least a couple of times a year to truly create an amazing team. So I want to leave here today with one last thought to share with everyone. I want you to start thinking about what you need to do to be able to wake up in the future, hopefully not a very distant future, and to be able to get up every morning with your loved ones and with your family and be able to take your first call in a place such as this. Sometimes being away from your coworkers isn't such a bad thing. Thank you.