The Pandemic and Me: Producing Remote Collaboration that Produces ...

CURT MORENO: Hello and welcome to How Remote Collaboration Can Help Your Design Firm Achieve Success. I'm Curt Moreno, and I'm super excited to present this session to you because I think it's going to be helpful for a lot of people. So let's just get right on to it.

Now, I'm going to start off by saying that the most interesting thing about me is my two dogs. I love animals. My little pink one here is going to be Trixie. She's my senior. And the big boy in blue, his name is Max Power. He's my pup. And we go everywhere together.

So, unfortunately, you probably want to know a little bit more about me. So I'll go ahead and tell you. I began working with AutoCAD in 1990, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth with digitizer pads. And I've worked in the oil and gas industry as well as the civil industry ever since. So I'm a content creator for multiple firms, such as Autodesk, Leica Geosystems.

And I've also been published just gobs of times, I'm very proud to say. And I'm a former AUGI board member. And, currently, I'm an IT manager with an engineering firm in Texas, managing several offices across the state and in Oklahoma and Louisiana. So I'm very familiar with the concept of remote collaboration.

And, finally, as I said, I am an avid pet lover-- dogs, cats, horses, birds. I would love to meet anybody who has a platypus. I'm sure I would love him. And I'm also an avid gamer. Currently, my obsession is Lawn Mower Simulator.

So that's the kind of fella that you're dealing with, and, thankfully, my wife puts up with all of that. But we're here to get some work done. So let's go ahead and get started because we have a lot to cover.

First of all, I want to touch on why we're here. Let's clarify the point. We're trying to improve productivity through remote collaboration. That might seem like an obvious issue, but the fact is that there are a lot of people working on this problem-- people much more intelligent than myself.

So what I'm here to do is give you my experience of bringing the firm that I work for through the beginning of this process to where we are now and the tools that we're using. And, as I promised, I'm going to name names because there's nothing worse than going to a session and getting good information but not having a specific product that you know will do what you need it to do. So we're going to take care of that too.

Now, collaboration-- it's what companies do. It seems simple, but it's not. I mean, if we're all in a company, we're coming together to work together to achieve a common goal, otherwise known as collaboration. But collaboration has always been a challenge for companies-- large companies, small companies.

Bringing a wide variety of personalities and experiences together-- whether it be conflict, clashes, personality-type mixtures, collaboration has always been an effort that we've had to achieve. So why do we work for that? What are the benefits of collaboration, and why is it important?

Well, we have increased communication. Now, increased communication is the blood flow of a company. Much like your body, without communication, without that blood flow, you're just going to wither and die. And that's what happens to companies that don't achieve some level of effective communication.

It also allows us to have greater flexibility. When we collaborate, not only are we accelerating the work that we're doing, but we're also being exposed to new skillsets and new ideas. That makes us more adaptable and flexible as individuals, which is priceless in terms of effectiveness and employability.

And then, of course, we have an increased potential for learning. Beyond just being exposed to ideas, we find mentors. We find partners. We find people who are willing to share their knowledge with us. And if we were not collaborating with those people, A, we wouldn't be exposed to them, and B, we wouldn't have that benefit.

And then, of course, on the bottom line, this all leads to increased productivity. Productivity is obviously important to the corporation because without productivity, we don't have profitability. And without profitability, we really don't have a company. Companies exist to make money, and, let's face it, that's why we go to work.

But I think that the most important benefit of collaboration is that as a staff, as a whole organism, we become more engaged not only with the projects but with each other. We come to know each other. We come to depend on each other. And that benefits our projects because, again, instead of relying on the resources of one person, we rely on the resources of the entire company. That engagement can only benefit us all.

So let's move along. We're all used to the world as it used to be. We used to all come to the office, and we would all be in the same space-- whether at the same table, down the hall, in a meeting. And we were able to literally look at someone else and exchange an idea or scratch a piece of paper-- a sketch on a piece of paper and slide it over. We were in the same space.

But however you feel about the recent pandemic, there's no way that you can deny the fact that it has changed the world. We went from a space where we were-- from a time when we were always in the same space, when we were working or even with our families, to a time when we're dispersed. We have people working at different locations with different assets and different capabilities. They're at different levels of availability and different levels of comfort.

We're not all in the same space, but that doesn't mean that we have to forgo the fact that we can be productive and collaborate together. So let's take a quick look at that timeline. Again, before the pandemic, we were all in the same space, and things were really at about the status quo. We had reached a level of efficiency and productivity that most companies felt was predictable. It was profitable. And they thought, OK, this is the world as we know it.

But then the pandemic came, and, immediately, the streets were empty. People took work home. They took their computers. And they're sitting at home in their pajamas, and now they're working. And we immediately had to turn 90 degrees and discover a new way to be productive. And, surprisingly, what we found was that, in most cases, productivity went up.

It seems almost counterintuitive. But when you think about the fact that you take people out of a environment that has a mostly negative connotation-- because very few people woke up and said, hey, I can't wait to drive 45 minutes to get to my office-- and you put them in a comfortable setting and give them surroundings that are comfortable and natural to them, we found that this is conducive to an increased productivity level-- again, in most cases. Not everybody's the same, but by and large, productivity went up during the pandemic and people working from home.

But now the pandemic has come and passed. And we're in a world where companies are recalling their employees to the office. And what we're finding is that where we expect an increase in productivity to return to at least the norm that we had before, in many cases, we're seeing a decrease in productivity-- partially because some employees are being forced back into the office when they don't want to.

But also because most companies are experiencing a situation where at least some employees are still working from home, whether that be regular, 100%, or they're working in a situation where they come to the office some days. Whether they are being quarantined for rolling viruses that are still infecting the population, most companies are experiencing a situation where they have staff members who have to take some amount of time to work from home. And that's what we're calling the hybrid workplace.

Now, why is it hybrid? Well, obviously because we have people in the office, and we have people at home. Now, I'm not going to lie to you. Solving productivity in the hybrid workplace is an uphill climb. It takes effort, it takes investment, and it takes a little bit of reevaluating what we would consider common sense.

The surprising part of that-- and I hope that you're going to rejoice about this-- is that there's really only three points that you need to work on to improve your productivity in the hybrid workplace. One, we need secure access. We have to have a way to ensure that our staff and our company is safe when communicating remotely. We need to have asset availability. You have to have the tools in order to do the work. And three, we have to have communication.

Now, I'm not going to lie to you. Of these three points, one of them involves technology that you're probably not aware of. One of them involves technology and workflows that become complicated on the surface but once they're in place, are very smooth. And one of them, it requires us to really look in ourselves and make an effort. Of those three, it's the one that we have to look at ourselves and make an effort that's the hardest.

So let's get started, and we're going to start with secure access. Now, we have to keep access secure for obvious reasons. We don't want to open the doors to our companies, whether we're just talking about files, we're talking about money, or really even if we're just talking about the front door. We need things to be secure.

And the reason is that the number of bad actors in the world increases every day. And, more frighteningly, we don't have to just worry about individual bad actors because each bad actor who starts a, let's say, phishing attack on Monday and Tuesday decides that they're going to sniff around the perimeter of your network security still has the phishing attack out there. So a bad actor's career is an exponential rise in the danger of network penetration.

So what does that mean? I'm using some techie words here. But I'm going to boil this down, and I'm going to make this as simple as you can imagine. We have somebody who's working remote, let's say from home, and then we have the office, whether it be a corporate office or a branch office. We need to make a connection from one to the other so that our remote staff can access information and collaborate with people at the office.

So we have our little line here. But the problem is that the world is full of bad actors, whether they be hackers, scammers, phishers. The list goes on and on, and, frankly, they get more ridiculous the more that you verbalize them. And they are more than happy to find your connection and ride it straight into the office.

Now, most of the time that process starts at home and ends at the office because our home connections are retail computers, they're retail, off-the-shelf router hardware that came from, I don't know, Comcast. And they're usually unprotected. It's the weakest point, the lowest fruit. So we have to achieve a point of secure access.

Now, this is an absolute must. We cannot talk about remote productivity and collaboration without secure access because we want to prevent bad actors from accessing our networks, from accessing our personal and corporate information. And then we also want to prevent our remote assets from being compromised. We're not just worried about what's at the office. We're also worried about what's in the field.

So we achieve this by establishing a secure, encrypted connection between those two points. Very often you hear this called a VPN, a virtual private network, but, in reality, what it really just is is almost like a lead pipe. Imagine that you have a telephone line that's very easily bugged. Anybody can clip a couple of little pieces of alligator clip to your wire and listen to your conversation. That's unsecure.

Now, when we take a VPN or a secure encrypted connection, we take that telephone line, and we pass it through a metal pipe. Now the telephone line, which is weak and easily compromised, is protected by an outer shell that's impenetrable without it being noticed. That's how we prevent observers from intercepting and decrypting our traffic-- how we know that the communication from point A to point B is safe.

And it sounds very complicated, but it's easily provided by just two pieces of equipment. We need a secure access point, and we need an office-based firewall. Now, bear in mind, this is already assuming that you've done the bare minimum of security of having either endpoint protection or antivirus on your computers. If you don't have antivirus in your computers, stop what you're doing and install antivirus. That is the absolute first-rung, bare minimum, "bottom of the totem pole" effort that you can make for secure communication.

Now, in terms of recommendations, I told you I was going to name names. And the number one name I'm going to give you for these two devices that you need for secure access is SonicWall. SonicWall is a corporation that offers security products for ranges of companies from very small businesses-- 2, maybe 10 people-- all the way up to mega enterprises. My company that I work for personally, we fall in the SMB market, so we use a mixture of small- and medium-scale devices.

And for our corporate office, we use an NSa 2650 SonicWall device. Now, the 2650 is a mid-range enterprise device because my corporate office is the largest office that we have. It also experiences the most traffic due to the way we do our daily setups and remote access. For our satellite offices, we use TZ600 SonicWall units.

Now the NSa 2650 and the TZ60 are not cheap devices. The setup is going to cost you several thousand dollars-- in the low several thousand dollars. But that includes a subscription that keeps these devices up to speed in all the latest virus signatures. And it helps protect your work environment in a way that you cannot do without if you're going to communicate with the outside world and if you plan to communicate from the outside world to the network in terms of productivity.

The scope of capability of these devices is really impressive. And it's also license-based. So if you decide that there's a feature that you don't need, you don't have to purchase that license, or you can purchase it later. I really cannot recommend the SonicWall firewalls enough.

For our secure access point, we use the Secure Mobile Access product-- in particular, the SMA500 located at our corporate office. Now, even though my firm has 10 locations, we only have one remote access point that's at our corporate office for reasons of security. Once we access our corporate office-- or, I'm sorry, once we access our corporate network from the corporate office, then, because of the firewall setup that we have at all of our offices, we're able to access any of our computers or servers remotely from that point.

Now, all of our devices-- and I really do recommend this even though it raises cost-- all of our devices are configured for high availability. What does that mean? Well, if I have a primary Sonic-- or if I have a primary firewall and a high-availability firewall, in the event that my primary firewall is damaged-- whether it be because of electrical surge, configuration error by one of my technicians-- whatever the reason is, we can failover.

And we can do this remotely as long as we're connected to the internet. We can failover to the high availability, which is just our backup. So that means that even though I rely on one firewall at a time, I have two of them at every location. One is my primary. One is my high availability or backup.

Again, this is an investment, but it's so important because you do not want to be caught without a firewall. Out of 10 locations, if I only had a single firewall at each location, and for some reason one of them went bad, I open my entire network. I might as well not have had any firewalls. So always consider high availability.

So what does it look like once we install the firewall? Well, again, we have our remote access at home, and we have our connection at the office. And we're going to make a connection between the two of them. And, of course, the world is still full of bad actors. But now we have an encrypted path.

Remember that steel pipe that we pass our telephone cable through. Now when bad actors try to get in on our conversation and see what we're doing, they're deflected. They're thwarted because our connection is encrypted from endpoint to endpoint. And all we needed was two devices. Remember SonicWall.

Now let's talk about asset availability. And I'm not going to lie to you. This is the nerdiest, most complex portion of what we're going to put together to make this collaboration pie. I want you to stick with me because one, we're going to try and say it in as plain a way as I can. But two, it's also explained more thoroughly in the handout.

What we want to do first is ask ourselves, why is asset access so important? What is an asset? Well, really, assets are all of our project-related information. They're plans. They're specs. They're proposals. They're whatever it is that we need to be able to have a continuation of business.

They're projects that we used to have. They're projects that we're working on now. And they're projects that we're hoping to get in the future. All of this comes together as corporate assets. And, obviously, if we have people either in the office, at remote offices, or at home, they have to have access to this information to be able to do their jobs.

And let's face it. The fact of the matter is that we have this information spread all over the place. Again, even if you said to your employees, everybody must come back to the office, most companies that have been around a while or achieved some amount of success have more than one location. So we have a situation where even if you're, quote, "in the office," in some aspects, you're still working remotely.

You're working with information that's deposited at one location, and you need to work on it from another location. So, in that sense, what is the difference between working from Houston accessing a file in New York or working from home and accessing a file from the office? The mechanics are the same, and the needs are the same.

So, availability-- let's examine a little bit more. The problem of availability has existed long before remote work. And, like I said, it's existed, but it's been hidden behind the idea that we have multiple offices. So everybody's in the office. This is not remote work. Well, in actuality, it really is. So we've already been hybrid. We just didn't really realize it.

What are the challenges with that? Well, first of all, asset location is siloed in so many cases. The New York team is working on it. The San Francisco team is working on that proposal. Oh, the Houston team is working on the HVAC design.

Because not all locations of a company, all branches, are built equally, we may have some specialties, like MEP, who are in one state and maybe a project manager that's in another state. We can't expect every office anymore to have all of the resources that we need to be able to work on a single project. And that has led to interoffice collaboration.

However, what we found is that in many cases, collaboration has too much overhead and risk. Offices-- and tell me-- I'm sure that somebody out there is going to say, yes, this is my office. Well, we tried working on projects between offices, and what we found was that it just wasn't worth it.

We had duplicate work. We had people arguing. We had schedule problems. It just wasn't worth it. Or, well, we tried it, but the fact is that we just couldn't do it. And we failed at a project and had to do some emergency-- everybody was going to be on hand all weekend to get something done.

It's all come to pass, and we've all experienced it. And the fact is that company and corporate cultures are very slow to change. It's difficult to get past these past failures. It's difficult to change the minds of people who say, well, this is how we've always done it.

So we need to find an answer, and the answer is deceptively simple. Let's just make everything available to everyone. I mean, how much simpler does it get than that? It's really the answer to the problems that we have because the information that's in New York really needs to be available to everybody. The information that's in Houston needs to be available to everybody.

So how do we do that? Well, I've got a series of simplified diagrams, so we're going to run through those. In our old scenario, we had a single office location, and we had the need to access one file from a local server. All of our offices were doing this, wherever they were.

And everybody was pretty happy. Performance locally was fine. I ask for a file, I get a file. I can work on the file. Everything's-- no hang ups. I save the file. I move on.

But then we started having multiple locations. And while local server access was the same, and everybody was pretty happy about it, we really very quickly found that when we went to a remote server, we had problems. And some of those problems masqueraded as hardware problems. We thought we needed bigger, faster machines, stronger hammers, when, in fact, what we needed were smarter nails.

So we stumbled on this quite a bit in my firm and did a lot of research on it. And we finally found a product that is quickly becoming the industry standard for sharing information. And I cannot tell you how well it's worked for us.

And that product is Panzura-- specifically, the Panzura Cloud File System. Panzura is a big company. They offer a lot of products. I recommend that you take a look through their catalog. You'll probably find quite a few things that appeal to you.

But what we did was we said, OK, we're going to make everything available to everyone. We collected all of our project data from 10 individual silos, and we used that data to, A, weed out some things that we didn't need. We found some obvious redundancies.

And then we decided we were going to use Microsoft Azure as our data repository. Now, what does that mean? Basically, we put all of our project data online. That's going to raise some red flags for a lot of people.

Now, first of all-- and this is very important-- you need to make sure that contractually you are able to do this. The nature of some project contracts specifies where data can be stored and whether it can be-- whether it can be stored anywhere, whether it can only be stored in state or even in the borders of a certain country. When you find out what your specification is, be sure that you pick a data repository that satisfies those contractual needs. You do not want to store your information, for instance, in Ireland if you're working for a state department of transportation who specifies you can only store your information within the borders of that state.

Having said that, what we were able to do is create a single point of truth for our data information for all of our staff. There was no more wondering if the cover sheet that was in Houston was the latest cover sheet that Tampa had been working on. We didn't have to worry if the San Francisco marketing team had in fact emailed or copied the latest proposal to our Kansas City office.

We had one source of truth. In my company's case, it was the first time in several decades of our company existing that this had ever happened. Most companies that are 30, 40, even 50 years old have never had a single source of truth for all of their project data.

And the single caveat-- well, I guess there's maybe two caveats to this-- is that even though this is cloud-based, we require, as of now, for our remote workers to still connect to the corporate network via a VPN. Panzura has a product that is about to enter testing that will allow remote workers to access the cloud directly and still enjoy all the benefits that the office workers get from accessing the cloud.

Now, when you are remote, and you connect to the network, it adds a little bit of latency. But it's still workable, and you get the benefits that the office workers get. And we're going to go over that in just a moment.

And one of the most important things to anybody who's looked into anything like this before is that Panzura is able to pass a universal file lock. So when Houston opens a cover sheet to work on it, New York sees that that file is locked. When you have siloed information, if Houston opens a cover sheet that's on their local server and says, well, I'm going to work on it, and then I'm going to copy it to New York so they have the latest version, well, maybe somebody in New York is opening their cover sheet.

And they're working on it because it's the next item on the to-do list. Now we have duplicate work. Worse than that, we have duplicate work, and one of them is going to be lost because somebody is going to overwrite the file that one city worked on while another city was working on their local file. The last person there is the person who wins.

This is a huge, huge killer of productivity and profit. If you took this session, you are probably very familiar with that scenario. And I am sorry that you had to suffer through that.

Now, one of the things that we've had asked before is, why is remote collaboration so slow without Panzura? And this is a technical issue, but I'm going to try and go through it quickly. We obviously have information that travels from one office to another or from one office to our remote staff. Let's say, in this case, we're going from Houston, and we're sending files to New York so that people can work on them.

Well, the files that are worked on in New York have to be saved back to Houston and not just at the end. Programs like AutoCAD, Revit, programs like Photoshop, they all have intermediate communication with the saved source. So even though you haven't hit Save in 10 minutes, that does not at all mean that your computer is not still communicating with the saved location where you got that file.

And here's the ugly, nerdy part. So file operations have to go in order. A file is broken up into packets that are sequential. They have to travel across internet cables that have a physical, an actual physical limit to how fast they can transmit data.

Now, typical transmission times for a connection between offices or really anywhere is about 20 milliseconds. That means that 20/1000 of a second, a packet can go from Houston to New York. And that sure does sound fast. And you know what? My great-grandmother, if she knew what a packet was, would probably be blown away by that efficiency.

But you have to understand that every file has a huge number of operations, not just packets but also communication. So let's say-- and this is not without-- this is not with even the upper limits of range-- there's 15,000 operations to open a file times 20 milliseconds equals 300,000 milliseconds. That's 5 minutes.

If you have a file with 15,000 operations, which might be a large, let's just say, survey layout, going from one office to another at 20 milliseconds, it's not within the-- it's not outside of the range of reason that it could take you up to 5 minutes for that file to finish loading. 5 minutes that you're just sitting there. That is going to cost your company, for an average, entry-level drafter, about $7 just to open the file. Heaven forbid that you open the wrong file.

But what if that file has xrefs? Well, every xref has to be loaded. Every line file that it references has to be loaded. All of these things add up. And what happens is that eventually the latency, which is the delay caused by the physical speed of the connection, builds up.

And you hear, well, I tried to open that file, but my AutoCAD crashed. My computer locked up. But did it really? What we find is that even though your CAD application may be stalled, everything else works fine. The internet browser works fine. Local access to work files works fine.

Everything works fine except for this one application that's opening this one file because the program that is stalled isn't stalled at all. It's starved. It is literally waiting for packets, saying, hurry up. Give me everything you have. I've got to get to work. But the transmission speed can only be so fast over the internet.

So how do we do that? How do we get around this? Well, we need a faster, more advanced way to collaborate, and in order to do that-- in our diagram, you see that we have our Houston office and New York office and then the cloud. We are going to insert devices called filers, and that's what these little yellow blocks are. And what a filer does is it's a physical or virtual device that sits on the server of each office, and it keeps all of the traffic local.

It does this because only changes-- so when we open a cover sheet, and we change the title, instead of saving the cover sheet back to Houston or instead of having to access the cover sheet from Houston, New York opens a version of the cover sheet that's saved on the filer automatically, makes the change for the title, and only the title change goes to the cloud. That metadata is all organized by the Panzura application. Now, that means that our single source of truth is kept up-to-date all the time for everyone.

Now, what if Houston and New York, like I said, are both working on the same project? What is Houston going to do? Does Houston have to go back to the cloud? No. The cloud recognizes that Houston has a copy of the file saved locally. The cloud will update the local file so that when Houston opens the file, again, it's only working locally.

This improves our latency. It improves our accessibility. It improves also our business continuation because security is handled in the cloud and versioning is handled in the cloud, along with redundancy. So we're saving space. We're making things faster. We're only transmitting the information that we need to and not the whole thing.

So we also need to look at the extra bonus. And this is actually not a bonus. It's critical for when you're working with partners. It's the automatic global file locking. So, again, we see our diagram between Houston and New York and the cloud, and Houston has, on its filers, files A, B, and C.

File B is open and being edited in Houston. That information tells the cloud, file B is locked for this project. You cannot work on file B. But New York has a version of file B on its filer because, remember, the filer keeps-- it keeps recent files automatically and keeps them local. The cloud updates New York to say file B is also locked.

Once file B is unlocked in Houston-- i.e., it's closed-- then everything becomes unlocked. This file-locking mechanism is critical to collaboration to prevent duplicate and erased work. I cannot say it enough. It's perfect in the way we implement it through Panzura because it's all automated. I have not had any problems with this in the two years since we deployed.

So not to hammer on this, but let's take another look, another way of looking at the way these files live. Now, right now, I have-- and I've got this cute little dealer right here who represents my servers in three different cities in Texas-- Austin, Lufkin, and Tyler. Now, the Austin dealer is going to play out three files. It has three cards in its deck, A, B, and C. And it's going to deal file B to the project team, which obviously means that it's locked.

But in Lufkin, for the same project, we have C, D, and E. Their project team is opening and working on files C and E. There is no connection between Austin and Lufkin that tells anybody that C is being worked on in Lufkin, and now the version of C in Austin is old. How did C get to Lufkin? Well, it was sent there via a copy.

So now we have multiple versions of the same file. And in Tyler, we have, again, another set of project team members who are working on file H. But how did file H get to Tyler? Well, file H was sent to-- or, I'm sorry, file E needs to be referenced.

So our project team in Tyler calls our project team in Lufkin and says, hey, we need a copy of file E. And it gets sent via email. Now that's not on the server at all. It's on somebody's Outlook and probably saved to their desktop.

So you can see right here that we have multiple teams working from multiple sources with various ways of sharing information. And we have no way of saying that a file is being worked on, please do not work on that. So we run the risk of files being overwritten, and we also obviously run the risk of files being deleted.

So what would it be like to work with Panzura? Well, we've put all of our cloud-- all of our project information into the cloud. So we have one repository for all of our files for this project, A through J. When Austin needs to work on B, Austin accesses B, and B is locked.

Now, Lufkin needs to work on C and E. Hey, that's great. C and E are locked. When Tyler opens H, it's locked, but Tyler needs to reference file E. They get a view-only because when they went to open the file, AutoCAD said, hey, this file is being worked on by somebody else.

Would you like to open a read-only version? Yes I would because I just need to look at the information. If I needed to work on it, then I would either know that I need to contact somebody, or I need to wait. I am not going to accidentally overwrite the efforts of the Lufkin team by the Tyler team.

Now, this right now is a weak point. And referring to the work-from-home product that Panzura is hoping to release soon, our work-from-home team has access to the Panzura cloud. If we do not go through the corporate office the way we are configured to, you're not going to get the universal lock.

If a work-from-home staff accesses the cloud directly, there is no lock. So it's back to, I opened file J, but nobody else knows I have J open. That's why we require our staff to go through that-- through the process of connecting via VPN to our corporate office and then accessing our project file structure.

OK, that was a lot. I know that it was a lot, but the good news is that we're done. We can move on to our final aspect of remote collaboration, and that's going to be communication.

So for communication, we all want to be in the office. And we all want to collaborate, and we all want to talk. And we all want to work together, even if some of us are working from home. Communication is something that we all know about.

The problem is that it's a problem as old as time. People have not communicated well, and we've sought ways to communicate better. So the great thing is that communication is not a terribly difficult technological problem. The problem or the bad part is that the part that's not technological is human nature, which is a little more difficult.

The fluidity of communication depends on your culture of your company. Now, again, companies are-- they turn very slowly. I understand that. But even the Titanic only had a turn radius of half a mile.

And cultures, in terms of communication, aren't homogeneous throughout the corporation. Some groups communicate better than others. So we have to make an effort to communicate, and that effort needs to escalate. We need to really work to bring our remote workers into the fold and make sure they're still communicating.

And we need to realize that not all communication is synchronous. I can't just send you an email and expect you to respond to me like that. I can't just send you a text message and expect that. I don't know what you're doing in your workplace, whether that be at the office or at home. So we need to have a little more understanding and compassion that it might take Cyril a few minutes longer to get back to Steve because of what's going on. As the hybrid workplace settles in, I think that we're going to be able to understand that that's more of a norm.

The good news is that there's numerous-- I mean, the number of communication tools out there is just unbelievable. So the choice is endless, and the price ranges from free to I would never pay that. Recommendations-- on the corporate level, we use Microsoft Teams. And the reason being that Teams commonplace and very understandable for almost all Microsoft Office users.

The mechanics of Teams are very familiar in that it's standard text messaging. It's rich text messaging. We can send a file. We send an image. And it's included as an add-on, or it's included with most Office 365 licenses. So you probably already have it. You just may not be using it. Don't be afraid of it. Get in there. It will become the norm almost immediately.

And the great thing about Teams is that if you don't already have a VoIP, a voice over IP system, there's an optional VoIP license for Teams so that you can make calls directly from Teams to a non-computer user. So you can call somebody who's in the car on a speakerphone. You could call and order lunch. And you can also receive calls, obviously.

On the topic of VoIP, we use 8x8. 8x8 is a voice over IP service that I cannot say enough about. And what I'm going to tell you is exactly what I told my contract manager, who called me just last week. It does what it's supposed to do.

I bought a VoIP system so I can make phone calls. I can make phone calls. And the two and a half years that we've been using 8x8, I've had exactly one outage that lasted for, I think, an hour and a half. It's just a great service. It doesn't need any kind of special service connection. As long as you have an internet connection, you're good to go.

And it's available on just about every platform you can imagine, whether it be traditional desk phones, soft phones, so that you can use a headset and a microphone from your computer, or you can use your Android or iOS application to get phone calls on the move. Voice mail-- very reliable, all of the normal functions, and very reasonably priced. Candidly speaking, I cut my VoIP cost in half by going to 8x8. So that is very highly recommended. Two thumbs up. I think you'll be happy with that.

Now, why is that important? Well, your VoIP is important because most of our staff and our traditional way of doing business is addicted to phone calls. We want to be able to call somebody. We need to be able to ensure that we're available to receive phone calls from our clients.

With a solution that's purely digital, your phone rings on your desk. It rings on your computer, and it rings in your cell phone, no matter where you are. So if you're in the office on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, use your desk phone. If you're at home Thursday, Friday, use your computer phone or your cell phone.

If you're remote 100%, have a desk phone on your desk. All you need to do is plug in it to the internet-- is plug it into the ethernet cable for your internet router. You have a desk phone, a corporate desk phone right there. So availability is very important.

And then last, I want to mention Slack. Now, Slack is very widely used. It's a rich text messaging system. Again, share files, share messages, all that good stuff. You can have multiple organizations with multiple chat rooms, and it has free and paid tiers. Hey, free works great. I don't know why anybody would pay, but some people do.

And it's perfect for out-of-channel communication. What does that mean? It means that stuff that's not really work related. Let's keep work stuff at work, and let's keep stuff where we're joking around, we're blowing off steam, or maybe we're talking about the latest episode of a new Game of Thrones spin-off.

All of that is important. It's absolutely important because all of that is what builds the connections between staff so that we can stay engaged and know each other and like each other and be concerned for one another. But it really doesn't have anything to do with the project. So let's keep project information and friendliness aside.

And here's an important note. Let's say that you say, well, Curt, I work for a very large company, and we're not very communicative. You know what? That's fine. You don't have to paint the pyramid. You don't have to paint your block.

Your work group can start using Slack right now. And as a group of 10 people out of a company of 1,500, your group of 10 people can stay very connected, communicate greatly, be able to ask questions, get information, always be on top of things. And that effort and that bond will help you rise and be more productive in your company.

So we've covered the three points. Let's ask ourselves, where are we now? Well, it's an uphill battle. Increasing productivity has always been difficult. But now that we're in the hybrid workplace, increasing productivity is that much more important. But now I'm hoping that you have a tool set with some solid recommendations, specific products, that you can say, I know this will work because it's worked for Curt.