Colin Browne — The Happy Sandpit, Going Digital, Can We Have A Remote Sandpit?

Once again, it is what's involved and another special guest. And this is a guest I've had on the show before, twice, I think, and I thought it's about time I caught up again and found out what he's up to and what his sandpit looks like. Who am I talking about? I'm talking about the founder and CEO of Happy Sandpit. It's Colin Brown. How are you, Colin? - I'm well, David, and how are you? It's nice to be back with you again. - I am fantastic. Thank you. And, you know, just to keep it on, keep it on doing our thing. But now the reason I wanted to catch up with you is because I thought I know Colin, and I know that Colin hasn't been sitting on his laurels for the last while. I also know that COVID impacted everybody, and part of what you do involves teams, et cetera, et cetera. So let's start off at the very beginning. Give me a bit of an idea about who Colin is and what Happy Sandpit does. - So I am, who am I? I'm a lot less interesting than I'm made out to be. I think I'm a writer. I'm a guy who's absolutely obsessed with organizational culture and employee engagement, okay? It was an itch that I acquired about 10 years ago, and I haven't been able to stop scratching since. And really what it boils down to is I think that there is a underlying, ongoing, almost never ending,

a misunderstanding about the role and connection between people and organizations, the organizations they work for. So the organization that I run is called Happy Sandpit. I started that off the back of a book that I wrote nine years ago now. It's long overdue, eight years ago, but good news is there's a new one on the way. And the book was called "How to Build a Happy Sandpit," and that was really just an exploration into how South African businesses, really good South African businesses, and there's lots of those, how they create high levels of employee engagement, how they create teams of people who like what they do and like who they do it for and like who they do it with and like they think is a good trade-off for their time on a daily basis. And just to find out how they put their teams together and how they manage to get the results they got. And that's really what kicked it all off. So Happy Sandpit over the years has evolved through being a traditional consultancy into being a sort of an experiential learning-type organization, into doing some more intricate stuff around values development, executive development, team, high-performing team development, that sort of thing. Long answer, not sure.

- Perfect answer. The last time we chatted though, you just launched a Happy Sandpit board game. So let's take a step back to that. How has that been going? Has that taken off, has it helped people? - Yeah, so interesting story about that. It actually has done quite well, David, and surprisingly, I think for a little South African organization to have the kind of international reach it's had has been utterly surprising, but we've shipped games out to Colombia and the United States and Bulgaria, Romania, Singapore, Australia. We've ended up having, I mean, there's 15 different countries, I think, that we found partners for and customers for. But of course it was a board game, right? And last year made board games highly unpopular and impossible to play. And so one of the impacts of the pandemic is that the game's called Iceberg. And it's designed to help you stress test your core values by making teams interact with the values to solve very complex dilemmas, unsolvable problems related to the Titanic. And the unpopularity or the impossibility of play of board games last year meant that that got redeveloped further. That is now a card deck backed by a whole bunch of downloadable components.

That's also doing quite well. I mean, we're shipping some out just this week to the United States, Canada, Germany, and Bulgaria again. But we've actually, what's quite fun about that is we have a partner in Italy, our first ever licensee, 'cause that is a focus for me now. So the game's available in Italian as well as a start. So that's kind of cool. - Wow, okay. So definitely I was right when I said Colin hasn't been sitting on his laurels. But now we talked about COVID there, Colin. And I know a lot of what you did was interfacing with these teams, et cetera, et cetera. What has happened there for you? - I mean, it gave us a whole new set of problems to try and solve. I mean, I have to tell you initially last year, there was a very great deal of reluctance to even address the problems. I think what happened is a lot of companies simply got operational, right? They focused on making sure people could get their computers at home, making sure they had the right wifi. It became about desks and chairs, largely. And a lot of organizations were content to just continue pushing through with that. And I think what happened initially, David, it was almost like, you know in the aftermath of a hurricane, you see these on the news, they set up tent encampments, right?

A bunch of people have lost their homes. So these tent encampments go up. And the reason for that is 'cause you need to provide shelter and you need to be able to provide food and you need some sort of a organizing principle to enable you to distribute medicine and all of that sort of thing, whatever might be needed. And that's kind of what happened, I think, the initial response to the pandemic was a whole bunch of, fundamentally, tent encampments went up. People set up branch offices at home in their dining rooms and their living rooms, and if they were lucky enough to have a home office and wherever, you know, on depressed days, those home offices were bed, let's face it, people didn't get up. I'm sure that that happened quite a lot, actually. And so the initial response was to try and get some sort of an organizing principle in place on a purely operational level. And I think what happened for a lot of companies, they just pursued that. Others began to think it through and we began to see, as the year evolved, sort of better questions started to be asked about, you know, how do we actually manage this? Because this isn't just a matter of people working from home, everything's different.

It's not just a different geographical location, but it's the same software and the same computer. Like the methodologies behind teamwork and communication and all of these sorts of things began to fail because they were never written for that level of work, that way of working, for that operational model. They were always written for collective people, their groups of people collecting under a single roof every day. And so it gave us a whole bunch of new problems to solve. And it's actually become incredibly interesting to me, actually, to see, you know, just how this is starting to play out. I don't think there's a full answer to it yet. So it's a bit of an ongoing research project for me, even as we speak. - Well, you see, that was the thing, and that's one of the reasons I wanted to chat to you, Colin, was because I thought to myself, yeah, and you're absolutely right. The beginning of last year when the lockdown started, it was very much, let's all get into survival mode, let's make sure we can keep the sort of wheel turning. But, and I was wondering about the sort of knock-on effects, 'cause now we're at currently level one, people are now thinking, okay, maybe restrictions are gonna be eased further.

Some people are talking about a third wave and potentially a fourth wave. But a lot of people are going, but hang on, this working from home thing is it's a lot easier, it's a lot better. Have you guys at Happy Sandbridge started to figure out how to deal with this now, where people are going, now we've been working at home, we're not too keen to go back to the office? - Yeah, it's a double-edged sword, I think, David. I mean, on the one hand, you think about the things we've managed to let go of. Okay, we've managed to let go of rush hour. I mean, that was a crazy invention, and that's kind of largely gone. I see it's coming back again, but it was gone for a while. We managed to let go of a whole range of things, but we built in some others. And that's what I mean when I say that the operational model of applying the work from office mentality to simply working from home failed. I think the one thing that has been an absolute catastrophic downside is that people have ended up putting in significantly longer days. I mean, Zoom has become this amazing enabler, which has been thoroughly misused. I mean, the number of people that I speak to are just sitting on their backsides for 17 hours a day on Zoom meeting after Zoom meeting.

So there's a couple of challenges here, okay, besides the fact that that's not particularly pleasant. I think one of the things, I mean, I'll unpack three or four things here. The first one was, because we're no longer driving to work, we are no longer missing that hour of our day at the beginning and at the end. And you might think that that's a bit of a bonus and that it would be used constructively and that people would go for a run or go for a gym or have a lie in or have a long bubble bath. I don't care what you do with that hour, it's yours now. But in fact, what they've been doing is starting work. And in fact, they haven't been starting at work at seven o'clock in the morning when they might leave the house. They've been starting work at half past six when they get up because they're not having to get ready for work either. And then at the end of the day, when you might naturally finish work at around half past four or five o'clock, they hadn't been doing that because there isn't the clear demarcation of when the off switch gets pressed. And so I've been listening to company after company talking about how last year was their best year ever. And they'll say things like, you know, are people really knocked it out of the park?

We really pulled out all the stops. And my question again and again is, but do you know the cost of that? Because if you manage to have your best year yet at the hands and brains of people who put in 17 hours a day, I think it's a bit of a Pyrrhic victory. I think that, first of all, I don't think it's sustainable. I don't think you can replicate it this year. I think people are tired. I think there might be a second, if there's not a third wave around COVID, there might be a first wave around burnout and post-traumatic stress disorder. 'Cause I think people are genuinely tired. And I can sense it in the conversations that I have, but when I'm speaking to senior leaders in HR, they're getting that sort of conversation all the time from their workforces. That's the one thing. The other thing is that I think that the relationship

between people and work has been badly impacted. I think one thing that stood up for rather well during all of this is culture, okay? A lot of the talk is about, oh, there's been, culture has fallen apart because people aren't all working together. I think the one thing that we've understood is that where culture is strong, the physical artifacts, the existence of a building and a sort of a common play area and all of that kind of stuff, that's maybe proven to be a little bit less important than we thought it was. I'm not saying it's completely unimportant, but a little bit less important than we thought it was because I think what happened in the absence of that sort of external structure, the go-to positions of the culture began to resonate quite strongly. The way in which we report to each other, the way in which we make decisions, the way in which we pass information upwards, the way in which we pass queries upwards, that kind of stuff began to become reinforced. And again, I think there's some strength in that, but on the downside, part of the reason that began to happen, I think is because of the absence of the hub, the absence of being at a place of work where my leader can see me every day and therefore there's some sort of acknowledgement of my value, my presence here, in and of itself has some sort of value.

All of that's gone away now. And so now what we have is we have sort of an ongoing sense of imposter syndrome. You can't see me, therefore you don't know that I'm working, therefore I better do a little bit extra and I better start getting it absolutely right, just so that I can prove my worth. That's not healthy, David, right? It's very real though. And so I think there've been a range of things around working from home, which have been remote working, but it's mostly working from home. I think there've been a range of things around that that have been bad. Another thing that has been problematic, and when I say bad, these aren't unsolvable problems, right? They're things that just need to be addressed. And I don't think they have been terribly well, but they are definitely solvable problems. I mean, we see solutions to these, some of them relatively, they're relatively easy to enact. They just need to be acknowledged first. - When we come back, we're gonna chat some more. This is what's involved. My special guest is Colin Brown from Happy Sandpit, more from Colin when we come back. And we're back with my special guest, Colin Brown from Happy Sandpit. So Colin, you sort of, you know, if I understand correctly over the last while, particularly the impact of COVID, it has had upsides, but it's also had downsides, which we may not necessarily be aware of as yet.

Now I know that you've worked with a couple of fairly large organizations. How have some of them dealt with it? - Buried ways in some instances, some of them, I think if you were culturally already set up to be a people enabling organization, to be a people empowering organization, if you were already philosophically aligned with the notion that people are good and worthwhile, and you've hired people who are capable and can be trusted to do work, then that sort of organization weathered this rather well. If you were the kind of organization that was very much a command and control organization, they didn't. And the reason for it very simply is the methodology for control was taken away. The fundamental methodology for control is having people sitting in front of you. And that was taken away. And that became a very, very difficult situation. I think for a lot of organizations, it became very difficult for them to be able to manage that. However, I think even ones that understood this before the pandemic and were able therefore to react, excuse me, to react to it rather well, I think even they failed to notice things because the scale at which this all happened was different. And so, one of the things that we've been exploring is the way in which measurement, employee measurement should be changing and the way in which we should be doing that slightly differently.

We've never paid particularly heed prior to this in terms of how we measure and reward people. We never pay particularly heed to the importance of mental health and some of the things that go around that, the importance of physical health and some of the things that go around that. I mean, companies that have industrial capability, they worry about physical health, right? Because we've got to look after people to keep them safe. We don't think about that in offices, but the reality is I think people who have been, have this massive shift and felt dislocated have suffered mentally, have suffered some physical negative impacts.

We're just sitting now. We're not getting up and wandering around the way we once were. We don't have anywhere to go. For a while during the pandemic, we couldn't get outside. That sort of sense of cabin fever and all of that. I mean, people put on massive amounts of weight, right? During lockdown and that wasn't so much an aspect of work, as an aspect of being stuck in one place. But if we're gonna start looking at remote working as a natural force, as a way in which it's going to be from now on, maybe amongst our KPIs, we need to start adding number of steps per day. I mean, I'm not being facetious about that. I don't know, but I mean, as we're exploring it, there've got to be better things. If we're gonna truly look at employee health, there got to be better ways of measuring things beyond just outputs, right? Beyond just the work that they've created. And so this kind of sense of becoming much more people-centered organizations really starts, that's something we've been talking about for the best part of a decade, but it really takes on a new nuance now. - You see, that was one of the reasons I wanted to have a chat to, because I thought, if anybody would have some sort of a handle on it, you would, because of the way that you do business, the people you interact with.

What is your thought though, Colin, in terms of people going back to it? Because I'm still here daily. Oh, I can't wait for everything to get back to normal. And my feeling on it is, but normal was broken in the first place. Why do we want to go back to that? What is your sort of thoughts there? - Yeah, look, normal sucked, but the thing is, David, it's horses for courses, right? If you are the kind of person at an executive level or a management level, or maybe just somebody who is a high earner, and you've got a home with a nice home office and you're able to get away from the kids and sit down and work in your comfortable chair, I'm quite sure staying away from the office sounds absolutely fantastic. But one of the things that has been, and I hope we've paid attention to this, that has been quite clear during the course of this pandemic is that not everybody lives that way. In the office, we all come in and we're all one way, and we all sit at our desks and we do our work. But when you're a single mom in a one bedroom apartment with two children, I think getting back to the office must sound like Nirvana, right? It must sound absolutely wonderful. It's never been one horse, one course.

It's always been buried. It's always been multifaceted. I just think this has maybe highlighted just how much of that is true. And so I'm sure for a lot of people, getting out of the house and getting back to the office is gonna be absolute bliss. I'm sure for a lot of other people, it sounds like, I'm quite introverted, David, and I work from home anyway. So it doesn't really change things for me, but I'm not sure I'd necessarily enjoy going back to an office every single day. It's not really my cup of tea, but it is for some people. I think a more logical thing to do here though, and I think this is where we'll start to see this land, is we talk about a hybrid model. We now know that it is possible for people to work remotely. We know that it can be effective. People have been talking about wanting to have more flexi time to be able to work remotely and that kind of thing for years, but we've never had such a global, massive, overwhelming demonstration of the viability of that. Now, those organizations that feel that's been really, really effective, fantastic. They'll go ahead to be fully remote. Some organizations have felt that it's just been a failure and they might opt to be fully back at the office.

But I think the overwhelming number of organizations will say there's place for both. Like getting people back together a few days a week so they can be part of the team, part of the tribe, have the conversations, have the interactions, and so that we can have more of a high touch with people as well, there's some sense in that. Allowing people to take a few days out of every single week and work from home so they can just focus and get on with stuff, there's sense in that too. What I think is important though, is that we understand that those two different ways of working require different rules. They require different things. We can't just say, well, tomorrow you're gonna be away at home, but the same schedule of meetings exists. You're just gonna sit at your dining room table and be on Zoom all day from now on. I think we need to understand that there needs to be different ways in which we do these, especially if we're gonna get the most out of them. - Yeah, okay, so I get the hybrid model. I mean, I think I'm pretty similar to you in the sense that I've got my home office, live in a beautiful place, and have absolutely no need or desire to go out anyway. So it doesn't bother me in the slightest.

But your argument about the single mom with the two kids, I can imagine it would be absolute nirvana to drop them off at school or whatever the case may be and go to work and get away from it all. In terms of a company culture though, is this, are the corporates starting to go, okay, but now we need to rethink this? Are you playing a role in that space? And I mean, I think of some of these big corporates, a lot of them that I've heard of are downscaling officers. They can't afford the buildings, et cetera, et cetera, anymore because of COVID. So by necessity, they're having to look at a type of a hybrid model. And as you rightly said, you know, if the boss is not there to see that you're working and to pat you on the shoulder, how do you know that you're doing well? Have you been approached with anything like that? Are you formulating stuff like that? - Yeah, and in fact, more than that, I'm in the process of writing a new book, David, specifically on this. So the book is called, so you opened an office in Yemen, now what? Okay, and Yemen clearly is metaphorical, but what I mean by that is the assumption, and I'll go back to it, the assumption that was made at the beginning of all of this is that working from home is simply a geographical shift, same software, same computer, different chair, nothing changes, and actually everything changed.

And it wasn't, I mean, one of the factors of lockdown was, you know, kids, homeschooling, all of this kind of stuff. There were a number of very significant changes. And I think what we maybe need to accept is that this wasn't something that was a simple shift. We created something we didn't understand. You may as well have opened an office in Yemen and given them the playbook from Johannesburg and said, "Just do that." But things are different there. You know, it's kind of like you've heard of Yemen, right? You can probably point it out on a map. You probably don't know much more about it than that. And I think that's an apt metaphor for how this whole hybrid model, this whole remote working model at this kind of scale actually is. I think we just don't quite get it. But I don't think there's a prescriptive answer for it either. I think there are some good rules or some good ideas. There are some tips. But the approach we've taken very simply is this. Rather than, 'cause look, at the beginning of lockdown, I mean, I had to laugh. Even on CNN, you had that, what's his name, man? The guy with the gruff voice, Richard Quest. He had this, it's probably like Quest on working from home or something.

He's always got Quest on something. But he had these three-minute slots that they used to stick in. And it was like, how to work from home? And it had him in his suit and tie doing push-ups against a desk while a instructor spoke to him over Zoom. And this is how you'll still stay fit and healthy. And I'm just like, I know it's well-intentioned, but it's absolutely bloody useless. Honestly, I mean, I can't imagine anything more inane. And then LinkedIn was flooded. Everybody had an example of the top 10 tips from working from home. Our view has always been this. And it runs through the core of almost everything that I do. I think all organizations are smarter than they know they are. I think the problem with organizations and their often dizzyingly bad decision-making is simply that they don't know what they already know and they haven't developed enough mechanisms to find out. And I think that's always been true. And I think what that means is that on a broad scale, decision-making aside organizations is, it's not always poor, that's bad to say, but it's rarely optimal and it's frequently shocking. And that's always been true, okay? It's always been true that leaders at the top of the organization who have the overwhelming responsibility for decision-making just don't have all the information they need to be able to make smart decisions.

And people who are on the front lines, who are out there right in front of customers every single day, simply aren't consulted. There isn't a mechanism or there isn't a philosophy that says we want to learn. That's always been true. Now, during the course of the last year, there has been a golden opportunity for leaders of organizations to say, you know what, we don't have the answers here. And to do it without any fear of being exposed or anything like that, simply because clearly nobody had the answers, the answers didn't exist. And so the very best place to go to, to learn about how to do this is the people on the front lines. You just kicked 100 people out of the office and told them to go home and work from there. Some of those people have really struggled. Some of those people have knocked it out of the park. Some of those people have done kind of a mixture of each, but they've kind of got a bit better at it. The way in which you decide what your playbook should be for your individual organization, which operates within your culture, is to ask the people who've already figured it out. Don't go and find some fancy way of, you know, some generic way of doing this. You have very specific answers.

They exist. You just have to get to them. So a lot of what we've been doing is trying to facilitate companies and actually getting to those answers. And, you know, of course there's some standard responses across organizations, but the reality is with the data that we get back from that type of activity, we are then able to inform leaders of the organization about specific things they need to do, i.e. people won't switch off work early and stay away from their computers over weekends when they're desperately dying of imposter syndrome, unless they are specifically instructed to do so by the CEO. If he says all email servers get switched off on Friday at 6 p.m. and they only get opened again on Monday at 8 a.m., that would be quite a statement. That would be a statement saying it's okay for you to take the weekend off. But I don't think people are necessarily finding those answers all on their own. And so it's really required, I think, in order to understand this, it's required a much more consultative approach, find out from your people what they know and act on that. And so, frankly, should have always have been, but there's never been a better opportunity than this. - I would agree with you there.

I mean, I was chatting to somebody the other day and they said a very similar thing. COVID literally gave us permission to try new things, to fail fast, to fail forward, because if it all did go pear-shaped, then we could go, well, COVID. And it's a valid reason. So I think a lot of people have embraced that. Colin, when we come back to, I wanna talk a bit more about the book because I find that very, very exciting. This is what's involved. My special guest is Colin Brown from Happy Sandpit, back in a bit. And we're back with Colin Brown from Happy Sandpit. So the book title again is? So you opened an office in Yemen, now what? - Which I just love, okay. So how far are you along with the book? Can you give us any clues and hints and stuff that you figured out? - Yeah, sure. I mean, so I'm some of the distance aware. And the way I've been approaching it, David, is to, it's almost being written kind of like a travel guide to a foreign land in a manner of speaking. So it starts out with the tourist guide and that's very much the data-driven side of this, right? That's the stuff that we know, that we figured out for our own research and tying it back and just sense checking it against international research and seeing how those things actually stand up and how they feed off one another.

'Cause I do see this as more of an international book than a purely South African book. I think the experience has been much more global. So that's the first part of that. Then the second part is what the locals won't tell you or only the locals know what you don't see. And that's kind of the,

having got this data together, what have we missed inside our own organizations? What have we glossed over? What have we failed to fully address? And the list of that is incredibly long and incredibly interesting. Because I think a lot of organizations thought that this would be easier than it would be. And so a lot of the normal sort of boxes needed to be ticked, but it turns out there's a whole ton of new boxes. And I referenced KPIs earlier on, measurements. I mean, those are almost certainly gonna have to be very, very different. In a world where people are able to work from home, but they're also available 24/7, we've actually got a, and actually it's a bit of a maelstrom. It's a bit of a difficult situation that. People are gonna get sucked into things that they just can't get out of, work habits and all that kind of stuff without us being able to specifically address that. Then the next part is about moving into Yemen. And now that you've understood all of this kind of stuff, you can actually build an effective office there. So what might that look like? And again, I don't wanna be prescriptive. I said that earlier, but there are some big ideas and I'm not gonna suggest that these are the ideas, but there's some good ones.

Take them, use them, don't use them. A lot of that is still being formulated in terms of what those specific things are. But certainly, they tie in very closely to some of the existing findings from our research around trust and all of that sort of thing.

Around specifically the viability of normal working hours and even the common sense of them anymore. Do they make any sense? Partly those things have been written because we have to lock the office at some point. But if we don't have an office to lock anymore, how can we be much more flexible? How can we be a much more human centered organization? And then we'll look at the various ways in which this is going to impact us in terms of working from home hybrid and working from office. On the basis that you might argue that we need a different set of rules for working from home, but office we've already established. Well, as we've already said, that was already broken, right? So if we're gonna change one thing, we really ought to look at changing the rest. So that's kind of where that's going.

- This is going to be a fantastic book. So I'm gonna put you on the spot. When do you foresee that it will be available? - Well, that depends on a couple of things. I've approached a couple of publishers with it. So I don't have a full answer about that yet. I do know a few places I can go to with it. And so it's not 100% certain yet, but I would hope to see it later this year, David. - Good, well then, first port of call will naturally be this show because we'd love to talk to you about it. Sorry, before I let you go, Colin, normally at this time during the interview, we ask what your next is, what you're doing. We know about the book now, but have you got any other plans to get things going? Are you branching out into anything else? - Yeah, in a way. I mean, so I've had quite a fun experience, David, with the invention of the game, with the invention of Iceberg that we spoke about earlier. I didn't initially perceive that there would be an international audience for that, but it turns out there was. It turns out that the culture community is something that I find myself very much involved in on a global scale. And I hadn't always been that way, but I very much am now. And so the one thing is I'm very keen on seeing how much I can expand that internationally.

So that's perhaps not terribly interesting to listeners of the show, but that's the one thing. But then I start to think to myself, being in that sort of gaming type space is something very appealing to me. And I think that there is a lot of knowledge in "Happy Sam Pitt". I think there's a lot of understanding about how some quite interesting and complex problems can be solved and how we can gamify that. And so there's a second game on the way. It would have been with us already had last year not been such a distraction. It probably would already be here. It's called "Spaceship 13". It's around decision making. It's analogous to the Apollo 13 project. Testing the consistency of decision making across the organization. So we'll get that thing done, I expect during the course of this year. And that will give us a second quite cool, quite engaging game to play, which will hopefully also solve some very serious problems. And then we start thinking about what the next one will be. 'Cause I think that might be a really good area of growth for us. - Oh, listen, I gotta tell you in terms of, it started off a little bit before COVID and it certainly has come to the fore now, is the concept of making things more human centric, becoming more human.

The concepts of, I've had endless discussions with people about EQ, about becoming human and just how much that can impact on a corporate's bottom line. Colin, before I let you go though, if there's a company that's sitting here and they're listening now and they are a little bit at sea and a little bit lost, are you available to help? - Oh yeah, we'd love to. Always available, especially to help David. That's a big thing for us, right? And I do recognize there's a big need for it at the moment. So yeah, what do you need? Can I give you an email address? - Yeah, what is the single best contact point for Colin and Happy Sandpit? - So if you want to fast track it, I mean, the website is happysandpit.com, not .cosa.com. And that's H-A-P-P-Y-S-A-N-D-P-I-T. If you want to fast track it, you can send an email to colin@happysandpit.com. That'll come straight to me, that's C-O-L-I-M. So, I mean, those are quick and easy ways to get our attention. - All right, fantastic. And I've seen the game. I haven't seen the most recent iteration of it, but I have seen the game. And if you are struggling in any way, shape or form, and you'd like to get some clarity, talk to Colin about the game, 'cause that's gonna be, it is literally excuse the pun and the cliche, but it is game changing.

So you need to do that. Colin, it's been an absolute pleasure chatting to you. One last piece of advice though, before I let you go, for people who are out there, for people who are sitting, whether they be in medium or large corporations that are still wrestling with this work from home thing, what piece of advice would you give them? - Look, I think the one thing to note is that we're all in it together. And so I imagine to an extent, I can speak from personal experience, customer expectations are a little bit different. We need to be a little bit more reasonable with one another at the moment. While we figured this all out, it is a time of change. I would say that you've probably lost some efficiencies along the way. I would say that don't beat your people to death over those. Everybody else has too. And I think that this has been a great opportunity for us to start trying to build better, more human businesses and there couldn't be better work than you can do. - Wonderful stuff. Colin, thank you so much for taking the time out and having a chat to us. I know you are busy and yet you squeeze me in between all of your other Zoom calls, et cetera, et cetera, that you do, but I do appreciate it.

We do wish you all the best. Go well. - It's been fantastic, David. Thank you very much. - There we go. That was my special guest, Colin Brown from Happy Sandpit. So just to remember, Colin@happysandpit, all one-word.com. Give it a shot. Also in the podcast version of this, I'll drop a link to the website there as well. To each and every one of you, take care, Look after yourselves and thank you for listening.