Nevo Hadas — Entrepreneur, Business Owner, Passionate Digital Transformation Advocate

It is yet another edition of what seems to have you along with us. My special guest today and I'm going to tell you why it's actually quite ironic about what my special guest does and what we're going to be talking about and I'll explain all of that in just a bit though. But first and foremost we have to say welcome to Niva Hadas is a partner at a company called DYDX. So we're going to find out what DYDX is all about and what they do. But first and foremost Niva welcome to the show. Thanks David, thanks for having me. Great, we're going to be talking about digital security today. We're going to basically be talking about remote working and all of these interesting things. So before we get into that though may I call you Niv just so that I don't pleasure and everything later on. Niv, can we start off with a little bit about who are you? Where did you end up at DYDX? Sure, so I guess the most interesting part of my background of how I ended up here is I'm old enough I guess in those days young enough to have been there for the birth of the internet as a commercial entity. So mid-90s ended up having a startup in Silicon Valley from South Africa which we took there kind of you know had the dot-com kind of amazing you know boom times dot-bom kind of scraped through and at the end of exiting and kind of realizing I've always been really fascinated with the nature of work. You know kind of did a corporate stint at Queso Media running their chief digital officer running their kind of digital teams and then ended up coming down to Cape Town to semi-retire and kind of follows stuff I was interested in which was mostly new product development and design and you know in kind of the startup world and that actually evolved into DYDX which is a company focused on product and service design in the digital transformation sphere and what that means is we really do two core things the first is help companies find new ways to make money increase their revenues by providing services and products to to customers which are impacted by the shift in digital transformation and the second one is really helping companies improve how they work internally and that we do through a team called Culture and Future of Work and this evolved quite naturally for us which is kind of how we end up here today it was a because we had chosen to to adopt a different way of working we thought you know if we're trying to build these digital products for companies we're trying to show companies how they can develop new tools and new services we need to be behaving and working like it's the future of ready like the future already so we already need to be thinking about how do we unlock this digital future in how we run our business and so our teams have been working remotely you know across kind of Cape Town, Joburg, kind of London and the Netherlands for the last five years and even though we have an office it's you know you don't go there's nothing that happens at the office it's kind of a meeting space really there's no HR or something that magically occurs only at the office you know the organization is completely virtual and so we've been living through this and utilizing these tools for quite a while and that's kind of how we got to this exciting space of digital transformation and remote working and what does the future hold for people you know as employment models and how how the future of work really unfolds because and that's fascinating because you know it is everybody's sitting here going all right you know and some of the which has now become very tired the the saying's like the new normal I'm very tired of that now and there's just there's just normal it's not new anymore yeah but but how do we how do we do this what do we do you know I've been involved with a couple online well quite a few we do a lot of our stuff online now meetings etc etc and there's been some horrendous things that have happened and the irony as I said earlier on is today we try to connect via Skype and for the first time since I've been using Skype it somehow got locked in a loop and all you kept hearing I believe was did did did did yes you know and and then we well I reset my Skype I assume you did as well yeah and that didn't work and then we went on to Google mute and I was did did did did but now we're back so you know how does this kind of thing impact impact companies because you know there's there's what I find is that people will do one of two things they either COVID that's moved everything forward you know this working from home remote working and then after a period of time and this certainly happened to us in our business we found out we actually ended up working more because we were right here what's your experience of that so so you know we find it quite interesting so because we've been doing it for a long time we like for us it's been really work as usual the one big difference has been that as you said the availability and the fact that people are more locked down in the houses has meant that you're working more hours and people are finding it very hard to differentiate between the two components the work time versus non-work time from a technology point of view though and I think this is the interesting concept right there's a couple of like academically concepts about technical distance and cultural distance when working remotely but and the distance isn't kind of measured anymore in physical distance but rather in experiential difference so you know it's very hard to have a team where some people are very advanced technically and some people are not very advanced technically you know the technical distance in that team is very big and then you find that that you kind of get dragged down to the lowest common denominator and it's very hard for that team to work as effectively as it could in a cultural difference would be different ways that people respond to these kind of events people that are more set in the ways or less flexible might find it very hard to transition to this way of working from home which is also very challenging for them and it's also very challenging for teams to work so I think there are those components that come to play that you have to deal with but fundamentally what we have found is it's been quite an adjustment for a lot of our clients as they try to figure out what the right ways of them to work are and for us again because we've been doing it for a while we have fairly good routines and methods we know how to do it and it's quite natural it's almost hard to explain that in many ways the effectiveness of the organization really shifts into being output-based versus time-based and you have to be output-based to give people permission to switch off because otherwise if it's time-based people don't know when to switch off naturally and they just want to carry on working because the emails keep flowing and no one stops the emails or the messages or anything like that so you have to decide for yourself like okay I've done what I needed to get done or I'm a track for this project you know let me let me knock off okay well that's some fairly sound advice but you know part of part of what we do is and we also started this the one aspect of the business is moving towards more online-based stuff my fiance is an instructional designer so she does a lot of online learning stuff and she helps people get there they try everything online so you know that sort of a transition was not a problem but in the real world for example what we also used to do is a lot of face-to-face track

sales skills and what we've noticed is aside from I mean corona really messed up everybody there was there was one of those black swan events nobody sure coming but you know a lot of people can I'm fine you know when we say to some people listen you know we can still painting maybe just not in person we can do it you know via the the internet a lot of people are quite reluctant to do that and and I think people haven't gotten quite gotten the heads around how we're going to go forward with this and work with this because we're not going to go back I don't think it in you know to the way things were I just don't think that's going to happen what are your thoughts so I think to tackle the first part of the question first I think before we go do we go back or not you're right there's a big adjustment in doing things differently and part of that is because we're very used to an office centric way of working and to give a good example of this you know for me it's like amazon in 1996 or 97 when they first launched and were selling books online and everyone looked at this and said this is a terrible bookshop you can't go in you can't browse the books you can't read through them you can't go and speak to the you know the kind of you know spotty kids with acne and asking what the best science fiction books are that he has and get recommendations like the whole experience is just terrible you know people really complained about that whole experience and that's because they were judging amazon from the basis of a traditional bookshop physical bookshop which had some some of those experiences but when you look at all those things that a traditional bookshop was trying to do and you look at how amazon has done them you realize that amazon is a much better bookshop at the end of the day firstly it sells a lot more books than a bookshop does which is which is a plus and the second thing is the reviews you get about thousands of people not just the kind of the geek behind the the counter and and so you get you get a very different experience you have to kind of adjust yourself saying well what am i actually trying to do if a bookshop's job is to sell books right is a physical bookshop or a virtual bookshop a better bookshop you know is amazon or the physical bookshop a better a better bookshop but behind you judge it and you almost have to go back to those first principles when you look at at work and what you're trying to achieve at work right if you're trying to build a sense of you know physical camaraderie and those kind of things then yeah then i guess a physical location office is better but you lose a lot of the benefits that you get if you're trying to build an effective business or trying to create more communities there's a lot of other benefits you get that people just don't see it because they're judging it from the lens of i used to do this as you said like the instructing the training thing i used to do this in person i can't imagine doing it remotely but but i'm sure that once the people have done it a couple of times remotely they go oh wow this remote training actually has a lot of benefits that i didn't need that you know that are better than the in-person benefits that i can now do and that's what we often find is as people now you have to rethink your the way you deliver that work but once you do and you re kind of reconsidered it people often go wow this is actually better in some ways than what i was doing before because it actually teaches me more effectively or i get more time to focus on it i don't get as many distractions as having lots of people in that office or the kind of in that meeting room it's actually just me and the instructor it's more focused so those are the kind of things that we see happening now do we think that do i think that things will go back or or not i think there'll be a smaller version back to more people wanting to go back to the office and and in all the research we've seen all the research kind of we've done it's generally because they're they're kind of lifestyle where they are at their home situation doesn't allow them to work effectively it's not quite space it's it's very disrupted that often drives people back to the office sometimes it's because of managers managers are struggling to lead teams remotely and so they want people back where they can see them because that's how they manage that's their their primary management tool is you came in at 90 left at five and you know whether you browse facebook during that time or not i feel like i've got some control um but but we think the reality is really going to be this kind of hybrid what they call distributed teams where some people will be at the office and some people will be remote and it'll be a lot more flexible so you know people will be working from lots of different locations during the week which is is difficult for companies i think because it is more taxing for managers to have a mixed modality of management between physical and remote and from an infrastructure cost it's more expensive for companies because they have to understand how do their right sides their their kind of property and their it and all the other requirements that they have to meet this mixed mixed use of remote and at the office and so i think yeah so it will be you know we now swung to remote work because of covid as you said it's a black swan we'll probably have a little bit of a kind of pull back towards oh god i can't wait to be back at the office again and you know kind of hang out with people and that might be a short spurt there as well then slowly but surely we'll start people saying well actually can i work at office only three days a week and i want to work from home for two days and that whole mix that fear of if people at home they aren't working will fall away and and suddenly you'll get this mixed modality where people are hybrid where people are in different areas at different times fantastic stuff it is what's involved my special guest is neva hadas um one of the partners in the company called dy dx now when we come back we're going to be telling more about remote working and digital maturity and i also want to find out from nevo what dy dx means so when we come back we'll find out all about that we're back it is what's involved and my special guest uh one of the partners uh in dy dx it's neva hadas neva let's start off because i was intrigued i was trying to think is this a fancy name is this a name that i need to pronounce a certain way do we call it diddix what what would is so where does how did you get dy dx so dy dx actually comes from calculus it is the rate of change so it's the change in y d is the symbol for the change in y or the differential in y over the differential in x which is how you measure the the speed of which things change and because the business is very much focused on helping companies transform and kind of meet changing environments we thought it was a fitting name uh to have that that's that's how the name came about fantastic i love i love on the website it's got uh one of one of the the the the paragraphs here says we are nerds geeks goofs cynics movie critics believers artists and quants left brain right brain entp intj designers persuade us teachers coaches coders writers analysts and my favorite one of all spreadsheet jockeys is is that what because it it you this is coming across as a kind of a young funky kind of you know quite a quite a fresh brand uh and and and you know right from the start you go writing big letters you've got there we work differently is is this something that uh you've wanted to do it and have this it's different i mean this is not like like what corporate south africa is used to in any way shape or form yeah so it is something you want to do so i think i mean the interesting thing is it's not that young the most of the people in the company are probably 30 plus which is interesting it's it's quite an older age profile uh of business um the the resources are very diverse so basically the thinking behind it was because so much of what we do is trying to find new ways of looking at things when people are stacking jobs and the job is about what they need to deliver every day day in day out what we found is that you almost look at the problem you know the whole hammer and nail situation when all they have is a hammer every problem looks like a nail um by not having that structure we are able to to see problems a lot more openly and come come up with solutions very differently um and so yeah so a lot of this was by design uh probably the hardest thing we did by design was to change the concept of employment so and this is actually if you want to know the things that that that corporates often struggle with when they first engage with us it's this concept is that very few of the people actually work for us as in like full-time employees um our vision of this was you know having kind of worked in assaulting businesses and having seen how businesses and kind of the concept of employees interact we looked at a concept of um you know getting rid of that whole structure so basically you know if company's number one fear is always that people are their assets which i don't think has been legal since about late 1700s right and but it's still they're still pervasive right we still say oh these people are my assets and and and companies have strange policies which are all about trying to hold onto these assets um more so than trying to grow the assets or let the assets you know not be assets but maybe people like maybe have families and things like that so i'll take was okay what if people aren't our greatest asset what if it is purely relationships or how we treat them you know what happens to get rid of that employment contract in this kind of make believe world where you know i have security and tenure if i have it you know if i have a contract with you and you know i in theory own you as a resource if i have a contract with you both of which aren't really true um and you get rid of those constructs that what you find is that you end up having to change how your business reacts or kind of revolves around its people which i think also add to them being more creative add to them coming up with better solutions and adds to their focus and effectiveness because on on the on the on the kind of i guess the downside of it there's no promotions right there's nowhere to go because everyone is independent contract that's working together uh we've borrowed a concept called x teams which is very much these externally focused teams which a lot of research has shown are far better coming up with solutions because they're not stuck up in a concept of their internal culture they're far more focused on the culture of the project they're trying to resolve so by utilizing those kind of techniques we increase people's effectiveness but it also means that there's no hierarchy there's nowhere to go because there's literally nowhere to go you know everyone's the same level um and and the titles are all the same uh so that kind of keeps things quite quite kind of stable but in many ways there's none of the gamification of employment where you feel like you're going up the ranks which you know can be emotionally very rewarding um yeah things like that so it's very interesting and again i think this is part of this future work uh trained and part of the digital transformation that you're seeing with companies as they move up the maturity levels because we don't really care how many hours you work that's not relevant the way it would often work with us is you're put on a project with a project team uh the project team often involves the clients quite intimately so we work closely with our clients on that and we're there to solve a problem or to develop a solution or something like that and and that becomes what you're primarily involved with and you might be involved in two or three projects but you only have projects there's no corporate you know meetings and there's no kind of like none of that stuff it's you're there purely around these projects and your focus is to deliver the best products you can and that becomes the culture that you adopt and when you finish that project moved into a new project you get a new set of cultures you get a new set of rules a new set of way of working that helps you solve that problem specifically so so the culture also shifts but with that shifting culture also means that you know it said there's no no fixed employment there's no salary it's purely you know fees based on the project and kind of your your input on that project so it's quite dynamic it's quite a quite a different way of doing things as you were talking about this niva i can i can actually see people on both sides both from the employee employers and the employee side having absolute heart failure as you're talking because we've never done this in in this country number one you don't trust staff enough generally to to let them work from home because you're convinced all they're going to do is sit on the couch and watch netflix and and number two um this is what a lot of us get brought up with and certainly in my age group we got brought up with you know go to go to school after you finish school you go to college you go to university get a degree get a job stay in that job figure out what the career path is there and retire in that same job now you're going well it's not really a job it's it's it's more of a a a contractual basis it's more of a project basis um this would then imply that these kind of people that are doing this work um number one they're not employees so there's no benefits leave people i can hear already are screaming about leave where is my 14 days leave um when we come back can we can we address some of those subjects and can we also then talk a little bit about about who would a prospective client be for you sure thing fantastic my special guest is uh nivo hadas and he is one of the partners at dydx we're talking digital maturity we're talking remote working um and as we progress through this thing called life where does technology take us when we come back we'll be finding out a little bit more from nivo and we're back it is what's involved and my guest is niva hadas one of the partners at dydx so just before the break nivo i was saying that i can just imagine both employees and the employers having fits of apoplexy uh listening to us talking about this um how how i mean you must do you not experience some resistance to change um yes or no so so as i said when often when we work with new clients there is a lot of apprehension there's there's a bit of concern going what do you mean none of these people work for you really and how does this work and there's a fear that you know people are just going to leave mid project and they're going to be flaky and it's all very loose but but the truth is a lot of the people even though they're project based have been working with us you know three plus years four plus years so they have very long engagements and most of the projects they're on lasts about a year or a year and a half you know kind of getting renewed every three or four months or changing and morphing and and the most interesting thing is most of the people that work for us don't want to actually well initially essentially so initially everyone comes in and a lot of people say oh no i want to work a full week i want to have this you know nine to five experience some people then realize well actually there's no point in this nine to five experience because no one's watching my hours no one really cares how long i'm working because i'm not going to an office ever uh or very rarely and so because most of my staff's remote and most of my kind of meetings are online and we're actually very good at having very few meetings and focusing more people's time on actually getting work done because a lot of time works work doesn't get done in meetings often you know maybe in workshops and those kind of things but often you know you just need time to sit with an idea and think it through and do the detail and do the hard work that makes an idea develop um you know the perspiration versus the inspiration phase um and and so we find that we give people a lot of space to do that and whether they want to go surfing in the morning and then come and do it or do yoga halfway through the day or walk there like we don't care no one cares um and so very quickly we go away from this idea we get paid for time to get paid for effectiveness and very quickly people catch on to the idea of well hold on a second i've got a lot more flexibility in my weekend times so some people say i don't want to work fridays and they'll coordinate with their project teams to ensure that they have the space to not work on fridays um which is very easy to do and and and so that flexibility becomes a benefit that they have all the time so if somebody wants to go away for three or four weeks they can you know if if they go away and they are in you know one of i remember one of our consultants we did a lot of work in paris uh for allianz which is an insurance company based out of paris looking at cross-border insurance between paris and cote d'evoir and francophone africa and you know we have to fly to paris you know it's been about two weeks in paris every six weeks and after that one of the team leads there would say cool i'm going to go to kenya now for a week and just chilling kenya because he had friends there and everything else and it's not a problem he's still working he's just in kenya you know when everyone's remote that doesn't make a difference where you are you can still do your job and can still kind of deliver deliver the functionality so yeah so in some ways it's terrifying in some ways i get it it terrifies me and we often kind of we debate it and we discuss it often but in many ways when i speak to people that are doing it they've actually made these choices that this is how they want to live their life they've actually chosen to move on to this kind of model because they get to learn more they get more flexibility and they get to pursue other passions as well you know we're not we're not kind of jettishly holding onto every minute of their day and if they want to take another project with another company for a while while they're working with us it's fine it's not an issue you know it's it's it's great the more they learn the better it is for us um you know as long as the work is good and it's a little bit on time and it's the quality that the team expects and we spend a lot of time on that on psychological safety on how we interact with each other how we work together the ways that we work that's really where we put our investment and time in so that the effectiveness is there and that keeps people engaged and i think that really is in many ways the evolution of digital work of the future of work is that as you can as people leave an office environment leave the 95 construct you know the first step is oh they go flexi time because now you know they can they don't have to work 95 they can say i want to work for half day fridays and that becomes an initial negotiation and then once you get into flexi time people start saying well maybe i can part time or maybe i can just contract to you as an employer because actually i'm a specialist in something and that kind of makes sense in how this business works and the business makes sense for them because they don't need this person on staff full time so they get to save some costs the person gets to kind of grow as a specialist because they get you to work on more projects so they're quite excited about that so you find that those kind of behaviors start naturally evolving and then companies need to change for suddenly now you're saying well this person doesn't really work for me how do i now manage them and as a team leader can't say oh if you don't do this you won't get a bonus because maybe that person doesn't get a bonus anymore there isn't a bonuses so now how do i manipulate you into doing what i need you to do well i've got to find a very different ways and maybe it's not manipulation maybe it's you know it's very different management techniques so so i think the technology bit of digital transformation what we're seeing right now but what we'll see over years is the cultural aspects of digital transformation which would be the changing nature of employment and how people react we kind of work with each other in the workplace and i think that's the exciting part of the time that that evolution is really is really the exciting component i would agree with you there because it it is absolutely fascinating and as you were talking now i was trying to picture some of our larger corporates the more staid corporates literally quaking in their boots because you know i mean i've worked with somebody before and that was almost the sole measure of of whether you were working or not was whether your bum was on that chair from nine until five and you know we would we would do whatever the project was we would get that finished quick quick quick and easy and spend the rest of the time messing around watching youtube videos doing this that to the next thing because this person insisted that nine to five that was the measurement not how effective you were not if you could get the job done whereas i would be more likely to go this is what the project is um and again as you said i'm i would then turn around to the team and go i really don't mind you know we need to have it done by this date and this is what it looks like knock yourselves out if you want to work all day saturday and sunday and take monday and tuesday off that's fine but it horrifies many many people um when we come back uh because sure time's flying again uh nevo when we come back can we talk about who your ideal customer would be because i know people now listening would go okay but then how would these guys fit in with us so when we come back let's talk about uh your ideal customer and then where to in the future for you it is what's involved and my special guest is none other than

he says clearing his throat nevo had us one of the partners at dy dx and we'll talk about that website as well because i just love the website all of that and more when we come back

and we're back it is what's involved and my special guest chatting to me nevo had us from dy dx for the back we're talking about the kinds of businesses so so what kind of business nevo would would would you want to work with or would want to work with you in terms of this whole sort of digital maturity thing so we find that there's interest in this business that we work with across the range of business sizes mostly they're larger businesses so around a hundred people minimum just because at smaller size teams often the complexity of working remotely effectively isn't felt as strongly you don't have the layers of management you don't have the the complexity of internal teams um if you look at our clients uh in this area so far it's you know people like vodokom people like smolan uh so so fairly large companies that have worked with us um in in this regard okay fantastic so these are people essentially you know if somebody's listening and it's they're they're a ceo or a cfo or whatever the case may be if they now have this this this challenge people are working remotely um they don't know if they what what what they're kind of doing properly uh they're concerned about it they're concerned about um whether we're going to get back to everybody being in the office or not this is where you would be able to come in and in the system am i correct correct i mean what what we find generally is a number of steps that that they should go through to to try and solve this problem so the first one is really understanding where there are is a business um and what we've developed over the last few months is a digital maturity assessment where where teams evaluate themselves we evaluate other members of the team to try to stand the behaviors that they have and how effective are they working remotely um and this helps us measure engagement it helps us uh measure understanding where they are in their development to become you know kind of it kind of transformed and and able to be disrupted able to get all the benefits of digital transformation and remote working in the organizations we often find companies are lacking in policies so one of the the the key research uh feedbacks is my company doesn't have effective remote working policies um which cover how people should should behave from home or how they should be interacting um with others or what tools to use um you know a range of those those kind of issues come up so we find that it's it's a kind of stage engagement that works really well firstly working with the leadership and executives to understand what should my policy be how should be i be approaching this you know people are working from home should allow them flexible time should i not allow them flexible time how do i change my employment contracts to allow for this and so forth so that's almost the first of the strategic level of where we're going with this how do we adapt the broad guidelines from there what we find is we often do a lot of engagements and workshops with teams specifically the high impact teams so the sales and business development teams because what what occurs is and we saw this a lot over covid suddenly your sales team has to sell virtually they can't go and visit the customer's office anymore they contact the personality lunge and build a rapport that way so how do you make sure that your messaging breaks through and transcends the noise of their daily daily life utilizing virtual means only and how do you close those deals so again that was a very interesting area of of engagements we've had with teams and helping them work through that and what we've also found that's really critically critically important for these teams is the concept of team agreements and working agreements between each other so you know if you look at what has been happening with management science specifically over the last 10 years we've learned a lot of new things one of the key things is about psychological safety in teams and how important psychological safety is for all the members of the team to be able to contribute effectively and this has come out to research like team iq which shows that when teams have high levels of psychological safety they feel they can share their ideas in an environment they collaborate well when they give those teams iq tests the team performs at a much higher level on the iq test than individual members do on their own in other words the teams when collaborating well together can support each other in those in those areas and now as this research is starting to hit more mainstream kind of business thinking you know there was a lot of coverage in this from google we kind of help as part of the remote working structure create working agreements that promotes the psychological safety element which also then drives more collaboration and more effectiveness so there's three levels there's the policy level there is the practical how do i do my job better from a sales level or from an operations level and those kind of things and then there's the team psychological safety level which is how to collaborate more effectively with my teammates even though we're not all at the same office and we are working remotely and separately i think what you guys are doing is is fantastic and i think it's a it's a great service that you're providing i know i do a lot of work with a company called the sales institute also based in kapton and that's one of the big things that we found is sales teams are at a total loss now you know we've been dealing with some of the guys and they're like okay but how we don't know how we're so used to having it done in the old-fashioned way where you go and like you said you have the coffee you sit down you meet face to face you build rapport so i think it's essential that that companies are out there and are improving on those kind of skills because just sitting on a on a on a skype call a zoom call a teams call whatever it is there's a lot of things people don't know because it's such a new way of doing things and you know um and and i think one of the things i don't know if anybody's spoken to to you about this neva but when when we sort of are talking via teams or a skype or whatever the case may be particularly video calling um you kind of what when i do when i sort of want to lean forward to pay attention but then it feels like the people on the other side that are also leaning forward are getting into my space yeah it's a weird weird feeling and there is an etiquette there as well isn't there correct i mean the interesting thing is we actually don't have the right equipment at home to do this effectively to do a lot of the video calling effectively um what what we find is and and you know is in general the the positioning of the camera on the laptop isn't ideal for prolonged video chats um and even the way that zoom sets up or or team sets up their cameras if you look at all those little talking heads is is cognitively very disturbing uh for the human eye which is why you have this concept of zoom fatigue uh you know too long on calls you know you get exhausted the bit rates aren't right uh the brain has to work very very hard from a cognitive load perspective when you bring that into a sales environment what's happening that's that's interesting is that the people that do this really well actually have a separate webcam that is positioned at a slightly kind of like kind of different angle um still allowing eye contact and it's actually at a different height to their laptop and they're utilizing that as their their primary way of of projecting into the into the meeting and that gives them far better control than a laptop type camera and those kind of things are things that you have to learn with time things that that kind of experience more experienced teams have done um and have got in place which simplifies you know if you are going to use video calls and you are going to be be utilizing that technology simplifies how you do that and really improves effectiveness of it even things like teams backgrounds or zoom backgrounds were not done well create more cognitive load than take away cognitive load because they're flashing and there's something weird about those images which is very disconcerting and it attracts a lot of the mind away from the message being conveyed and so those are the things you need to look at uh too okay well that's that's some great advice one of the things that uh you know it's one of those cases of i wish i'd known then what i know now because if i had i would have gone out and bought every last um webcam that i could find because i don't know if if situation has changed yet but um we were looking to buy some additional webcams a little while ago there was not one available anywhere anywhere you couldn't get yeah yeah and also with lights right the right lighting which is the other thing you need with a webcam you know you need the lighting to come from the front not from behind you um all of those kind of things are really really impactful but but i think that's that's the benefit of moving down this this process is that as it matures the equipment will now i think improve dramatically um and and teams will have a better understanding of what it means to to work remotely what they need to do to do this more effectively yeah indeed um we we're about to wrap up now neva just uh quickly before you go um i like to ask uh my guests just to bring a little bit more of the humanity of of the people we interviewed to the floor um so two things i'm going to ask you the first thing is tell me one thing about nevo that people don't know i mean they might know nevo the business person but tell me something about you that that people don't generally know i am a terrible surfer um i love surfing desperately i love it like i absolutely love it i'm terrified of large waves i am a horrible surfer but i you know every weekend if more often i try and i get out there and i do my best well there you go i tell you what you're a step ahead of me there um and then finally nevo um what what's next for dy dx and nevo and the team where do you guys see things going so you know for us our our plan you know we're obviously continuing with the digital transformation uh approach we think there's a long way to go for businesses and there's lots of exciting things that we can do there from the remote working perspective and helping people along that path we've just partnered with red and yellow um and creating a leadership course for them to help uh leaders manage um distributed teams so you know we see the future of people being in the office and people being at home or people you know doing this hybrid of both and how do i as a leader now manage those teams how do i make sure that i've got the engagement and my culture is right and you know i can i can help my teams by building psychological safety so that that's a focus for us to kind of expand in that area and then and then to continue with our consulting and working with with businesses and helping them along this journey we're really inspired by it in some ways the future of work and the changing culture for us is kind of you know something that speaks to all of us um it's something that's benefited all of our lives and and we hope we can share that we can hope we can kind of you know make you know we don't think that work has to be as horrible as it used to be necessarily we think that there's there's a future of work which is you know far more inspiring and far more allowing of people to to have more time to be with their families do their hobbies you know and and bring more creativity and energy when they are working in into the workplace i think that's brilliant and i support that 100 percent either if people want to get a hold of of you or dydx so where do they go um easiest way to go is dydx.digital which is our website there are you can just kind of send through a request form or you can email me really easy nevo@dydx.digital and probably the easiest way to get hold of us okay so it's nevo@dydx.digital if you want to get hold of nev directly alternatively check out the website it's brilliant i thoroughly enjoyed that really cool website nevo thank you so much for taking the time out and having a chat to us and we wish you and the team or the company all the best thanks so much appreciate it there we go that was my special guest once again nevo had us dydx.digital is where you can go if you want to have some more information you want to have a chat to the guys from me to you one last thing thank you for listening.