In a captivating episode, Chris Herd dives deep with expert Denise Brouder, unraveling the intricacies of the remote work era. Picture a bustling office, where spontaneous water cooler chats unveil an employee’s essence. Now imagine its virtual counterpart - quiet, efficient, yet somehow… distant. Denise unveils an enigma: teams are scoring high, yet their sense of engagement wavers. Why? Together, they embark on a journey, exploring:

• The invisible weight of uncertainty every remote worker bears.
• The lost art of informal touchpoints and their unforeseen value. 
• A groundbreaking philosophy where nothing holds solo value, but finds meaning through connections. 
• The empowering “future work mindset”, and the roadmap to harnessing potential. 

A story of empathy, discipline, and finding our place in a digital realm. Listen, as two thought leaders reimagine the workplace’s future. For a deeper dive, the video and transcript are available below.

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Chris Herd: 

Welcome to Against the Herd, the podcast where we dive deep into conversations with contrarian  leaders and visionaries at the cutting edge of the future of work and living. In this episode, I'll be  chatting with Denise Brouder. Denise is the founder and head of data and insights at Sway Workplace, a  learning and development consultancy focused on optimizing performance and hybrid work models  through behavior change. Sway trainers deliver hybrid work mastery at scale. Denise sees the future of  work as an unprecedented opportunity to reimagine work in a way that allows us to live balanced,  purposeful, and meaningful lives, and has a burning desire to develop a future of work mindset in every  person. Please welcome Denise Brouder to the show. 

Denise Brouder: 

Hey Chris, how are you? 

Chris Herd: 

Hey, Denise. Good to have you here. I've been looking forward to this one. 

Denise Brouder: 

Me too. I've been following you for such a long time online and I knew we were going to cross path to  some point, so awesome. 

Chris Herd: 

Well, we called this a professional cage match yesterday, but I think it'll be a lot more friendly than that.  I think maybe using that as the branching off point and perhaps starting in the most obvious place with  you, given your expertise, I think it'd be really enlightening to understand what hybrid work truly means  to you, and how can it be effectively implemented? 

Denise Brouder: 

Professional cage match initiated. I think that's interesting, because I was with a bunch of leaders  yesterday and that was the first question they asked as well is, what does hybrid mean to you? And I  think that's the first flag is that were not really playing from the same songbook in terms of language.  And I think that's one thing that me, you and our peers can continue to massage into the everyday, but  hybrid for me is really, I have a love hate relationship with the word. 

I think I love it because it's a huge conversation starter. It's saying, "We're over here, there's something  we need to pay attention to." When we bring enough people over to the hybrid conversation, we can  begin to really unwind and really insert and co-op the word flexibility. And to me, the definition that we  stand by is a flexible way of working is empowering people to choose when and where they work, but in  a culture of re-imagined trust and hybrid is a work model that enables that. In my mind hybrid is  transitional. We're going to slowly start dissolving it and we're going to move into new ways of working  and then it's going to just be work. 

Chris Herd: 

I love that. And I go back on this with a few people I speak with where nobody says they buy anything on  the internet anymore. Imagine how weird that would be. You're having a conversation with a friend and  they're like, "Oh, where'd you get that thing?" And you're like, "Well, I bought it on the internet." It's like  you just bought it. And I think just now when you have this qualifier for where and how you work, is just really odd. You either do work or you don't work, and where you do it is, or should be a lot less  important. I think given that, why do you think it's so important, particularly from an employee  experience standpoint, and diversity and inclusion as well? 

Denise Brouder: 

DE&I initiatives, and I think my experiences that that endeavor is early in its phase and it sometimes it is  just language and we're talking about how do we bring more people in. But the flexible work and hybrid  work is the ultimate, it's the greatest social solution that we have to actually create diverse and  equitable workplaces. There's people that have never had access to work or worse been in the world of  work but have been underutilized because they had to step back in a lot of ways. The obvious are  working parents, folks that are new or diverse folks that live in remote areas that can't access work. To  us, our huge mission is to use the power in hybrid to level the playing field for once and for all. I'm not  saying we need to give any group an advantage. All I'm saying is let's make it a fair fight. Let's level the  playing field for the power of flexibility and off we go. 

Chris Herd: 

And it's ironic that that's really been the playing field of conversation for HR over the course of the last  10 years where it's like we want all these things and then the biggest enabler of that in history comes  along. And then it feels like there's also some reluctance to it. And in my mind, and as you know, I may  be a little bit aggressive in how I position my thoughts sometimes, but companies either care about this  or they don't. And if they care about it, I'm not sure how you can say you do without embracing a new  model of work which is more flexible to people's conditions and their living circumstances. 

Denise Brouder: 

The way I think about that is I've yet to meet an individual contributor, a manager, a team lead, a senior  leader that does not have a personal affiliation or desire for or really embracing the value to them that  they get from working flexibly. But where we begin hitting walls is these folks are... The everyday person  is absolutely crushed under the weight of their work and inefficiencies. They can't get up long enough  for air, and if they do, they find themselves in a silo. They're in this spucket with a lot of pressure to  meet their, "What fire are we putting out today?" The ability to step back and look bigger term and look  longer is a bit of a privilege that not everyone has. And then how do we in our peer space open up those  conversations and drop in those tools and solutions to get people moving rather than only talking about  it? 

Chris Herd: 

It's hard. People are used to working how they're used to working and change is painful and I think it's  leading people to water in a way that they can understand, but I think we still have a lot of work to do  there, particularly with leadership to help them understand that. 

Denise Brouder: 

We do, definitely. And I think, you know what's interesting, Chris? Is that I know you've been building  Firstbase for a while. I've been building sway and we have a lot of peers in our space that have been  knee-deep in the future of our world for several years at this point. But it feels to me like the market  that we've been building for is really only materially coming online now. And what I mean by that is we  make a distinction between the hybrid what and the hybrid how. But the hybrid what, is we want to be  hybrid, we want to listen to our people, we want to implement a work from anywhere policy. But people have done that over the last couple of years fairly successfully, and they roll out these plans,  but then they hit a wall and they're stuck and they're wondering what the heck is going on? People  wanted flexibility and we rolled it out. Why is this not working? Because the hybrid how, is a different  arena. How do we bring this to life in a way that allows people to drive their individual and team  performance? That market from my perspective, is only coming online now. It's early. It's still early days. 

Chris Herd: 

A conversation I've had recently around the inflection points that we're going to see across time and the  why is that there are certain reasons that everyone went to remote or distributed or hybrid because of  the pandemic and we had that version of it. And now it's like there's some form of normalization, certain  companies are leaning in harder, we're going to live through this for 10, 15 years as people give up  leases as they realize that they need the most talented people. What do you think are the biggest  roadblocks to that overall? 

Denise Brouder: 

I think the most immediate roadblock is... It's not a desire for flexibility or even a desire to let it be  because I think everyone wholesale agrees if we want talent, attraction, retention, if we want higher  levels of productivity and performance, this is the way to go. But the more obvious ones, I think real  estate's a real issue right now. It is the question, huge question mark around real estate. And that's why  I think the pushback and the RTOs are coming out pretty aggressively because we've lived with a certain  real estate paradigm for a very long time. And there's financial flows in the back of these real estate  initiatives that are very extensive across the economy. It doesn't surprise me that there are powerful  people having powerful conversations and trying to direct people back to this utilization of commercial  space. 

But that's where the friction is, because people are like, "What? I'm not going back there." Interestingly,  I was in a conversation yesterday just about this and the conversation was about 40 or 60% of people's  week they spend commercially at HQ. And I said, "If we're focused only on that 60% of time. We have to  be aware that people need workspace 100% of the work week and how are we looking at that part?"  There's nuances there too and conversation parts that can be bubbled up, but we have to unwind that  grip that the real estate industry has in the conversation right now. 

Chris Herd: 

And it's a little scary actually when you consider that element where it's like, well actually, are  companies making decisions because of their real estate portfolio or are they making decisions because  it's the best thing for their people, the best thing for their strategy and ultimately the best thing for  them to be economically successful as a business? 

Denise Brouder: 

I would like to say it's because we're looking longer term at the health of the employee, but the reality is  we tend to have to put out the fires that are right in front of us. And we tend to focus on what do I have  to do today to get through to tomorrow? And I think that a lot of it is, again, it's the upfront decision  around space and how does that work? Because what came up in a real life conversation yesterday was  we discussed the idea that the folks that we've been working with over the last couple of years really  have a desire for repeatable space. They want to have a place to go to when they go to an HQ and when  they don't, they don't feel like they have an anchor, a home, and it affects their psyche around that  sense of belonging and finding their team. And why am I even here. Now, conversely, yesterday we had real estate folks that were discussing, "Well, I can't assign a desk to  somebody when I don't even know when they're going to be there." The question really becomes how  do we meet that in the middle? Where is the consensus point there that can unwind that friction point  to meet both sides? 

Chris Herd: 

And I think the key point there is always people. When we get into it and we talk about culture,  connection and communication, trust and all that good stuff. If you're forced to go into an office, but  you don't get to spend time with the people that are there, the likelihood that you're ever going to want  to go back diminishes over time. My thesis would be every time someone goes in and they don't get  what they want from that physical experience that then paints in their mind either, "This isn't the  organization I should work for." Or, "Going into the office isn't worth it because I end up sitting in Zoom  calls all day." 

Denise Brouder: 

Well, I think the keyword there is force. I can tell you personality wise, if anyone tries to force me to do  something, I'm going to just naturally do the opposite. It's just the way I approach things. But I think the  other side of that, Chris, too is we can't have an expectation of a perfect in office experience. Work is  not perfect, work is challenging. Working with other people is challenging. Things don't always go right,  but we can meet the conditions of criteria for making it meaningful. We know too much now. We never  really thought about having to get up early to get dressed fully and get on a commute and spend $20 on  a lunch each day. We never even considered we were actually doing it, but now we know. We can't  unknow. 

Now we've got something to measure things against and to give up the ease of working from home at  certain times to commute in, we have to get a little more on board with why are we even doing that?  And let's have clarity around it. But again, everything feels very early like the folks we work with and we  ask them, "Are you collaborating, coordinating with each other on the times you're coming together?"  Oftentimes they're not. And I just say, they're not doing it yet. I think everyone's going to get there, it's  just time. 

Chris Herd: 

Well, I think that's what you spoke too about the hybrid how, and I think one of the big problems I see  here is that people... We got through the pandemic, we had whatever bandaid was on that to make that  work. And some people figured it out, some people had the right processes in place. Other organizations  didn't. And I think in my mind there's actually a risk that because of that you ended up with millions of  people having an experience of a really bad way of hybrid, distributed, remote working, whatever frame  you want to use. The thing that I see persisting, which I suspect you also see a lot of is on the how we're  trying to replicate how people work in office in a different mode. How do you think people get out their  own way on that? 

Denise Brouder: 

You're a 100% correct and the work that we do, we really start by outlining that thing right there. What  you just described is, we've worked in an office first way of working for so long, it's actually embedded  in the neurons in our brains the expectations of how the days should flow. The ask is a lot of unwiring to  rewire to get there. To achieve that, our work actually is 50% mindset and 50% skills and techniques. All  of our trainers at Sway have all corporate backgrounds, but they're all career coaches by training. Because we train through the language of coaching, because we know we could walk into a room and  drop a system for a team to come together and every tool in the world, they could find it fascinating, but  they're going to walk away and likely do nothing with it. 

That's why the first thing that we do is talk mindset and really help them shift their thinking to a more  empowered state and reduce the level of fear and increase the level of optimism so that they're ready  to embrace those tools and role model it to the people around them. And that kind of exponential  change is what we strive for. 

Chris Herd: 

I love that. And I think in my mind, the place that I go after that... You're absolutely right. I speak to a  bunch of companies as well and it's like we need a different software. And it's like, wait a minute, you  can have the best software in the world, but if you don't have the right processes and systems and to  

your point mindset in place, nobody's going to adopt the software. And I think taking even more  fundamental step back before that, I think something you've said before is I don't even think people  understand what productivity is. And I think where you get to there is productivity and remote being  outcome focused, using that as a mindset shift from time and seat to what value have you actually  produced week over week? How do you think about making that transition to, are companies even  measuring it correctly? 

Denise Brouder: 

I love this word productivity. It's like the invisible cloak we're all hiding behind and using it to slay  conversations. What does it even mean? GDP right now is not even the best indicator of productivity  growth for the US because the world has changed, so we need to change the assumptions we're making  and what we're measuring and how we're talking about it. We can talk about productivity all day long,  but it really is, I believe more of a visual assumption. If I see people, I'm comfortable that they're  showing up and doing what I'm asking them to do, and I can tie it to goals and whatnot. But what is  interesting too is when we're working together and we're physically apart, one of the questions we ask  people to begin with is, do you have goal clarity? Meaning, do you have a really clear sense of the goals  you need to achieve? Do you have what you need to get there? And do you know what success looks  like? 

And I can tell you resoundingly for the hundreds of people we've trained, it's a very high yes. That has  not been diluted by this nature of hybrid, which is a really, really, really good start. But then the point of  leading by outcomes, what we help people understand is I don't think it's enough to say lead by  outcomes. That is too simplistic because that is only output orientated. And then you're making a  quantitative decision, did I miss it? Did I exceed it? Did I hit it? But that's all the way down the pipe. One  thing we help managers and leaders understand is you got to get further up that pipe first. And we have  to know our teams on a social way. Know what are their triggers? What are their stress factors? What  are their ideal focus times? What are their ideal collab times? 

We help people understand we need to see each other differently to keep our finger on the pulse of  how our teams are doing so we can help and intervene and coach and guide so that when we hit those  outcomes, it's not a surprise. Now again, we're using what we have in front of us, where we configuring  it, but that's a huge mindset component right there. That's a mindset shift and simple tools that we can  adopt. It's not only leading by outcomes, it's the support that comes with leading by outcomes that is  also a leadership initiative. 

Chris Herd:

I think maybe take that full circle and end up back where we started. It's trust people, communication  and collaboration. Outcomes might be the thing that underpins that and actually tells us if the  organization and the individuals in it are moving in the right way. But if you're only focused on that, it  sounds like what I hear from you is like, well, we might actually be missing the point somewhere. 

Denise Brouder: 

We cannot. How can we build a sustainable long-term, flexible work future if we don't develop the way  to see each other when we don't physically see each other? And again, to your point there, Chris, there  are, as you know, technology is being built, left, right and center to solve for all of these things, but we  cannot use them successfully and at scale until we first change the way we see it. 

Chris Herd: 

And I think there's a risk on top of that, which is a bunch of the tooling we use now is being designed  explicitly for an office environment. And that can be hard to then do what you're talking about, which is  make the mindset shift, because it's not only do we want to work in the way or our managers want us to  work in the way that we did while in office, we're still using the same tooling. You're expecting us to  change our mindset, but you're putting us within the same framework that we have to operate. And I  think that becomes an intrinsically difficult thing to then transition past. 

Denise Brouder: 

Our default is go to the technology, let's solve this through technology. And the truth is, Chris, that I  think that that approach is putting on a bandaid when we're really looking for the antibiotic. What is the  source? What is our problem? What's driving the friction? And even conversations we were in this week  with senior leadership who were looking for technology solutions for hybrid. By the end of the  conversation, we had them going back to basics, which is even from a leadership point of view, we can't  throw tech, identify the problem first. And the reality is we found that in our work, a lot of folks like the  day-to-day knowledge workers are being given tools, but they're not being given an instruction how to  use it. They're not given a reason to use it. Oh, bless you. And they're wondering, what is this? What do I  do with it? There's context missing from the delivery of tools that is missing the market and adding to  digital debt, and that is a hard thing to carry. 

Chris Herd: 

Well, I think moving past that, because I think there's something even bigger to underpin this. In my  mind, it's the role of data and insights in these new ways of working. We can speak about all these  things all we want, but ultimately, how is data leveraged to create better work environments? And what  can organizations do to better understand that part to tie it to the first piece? 

Denise Brouder: 

We value what we measure, so we should start measuring what we value, number one. And we have  such a reliance on data that we forget to have space and empathy for the stuff that we're not yet  recording that we're not able to look at. Now, a lot of the data being recorded now is very factual. It's  like a badge swipe or it's utilization of tools or it is where people logging in from, all valuable stuff  because it paints a picture. But that's actually not the data that we value and that we record. We ask  people their level of sentiment. And the reason we do that, Chris, is because your desk, our equipment  we're using right now, walls of an office, they are inanimate objects. They do not live or breathe. Only  people do, and only we make decisions about how we show up. Everything else is there to serve us. We measure data about the people, how they are feeling towards  their hybrid work environment. And we dig into that to really develop insights that can be practically  and actionable for a leadership team and adjusting how they've shaped their hybrid work environment  to allow people to live more meaningful purposeful lives. 

Chris Herd: 

What are the cleanest examples you have of that, whether it's a customer story, whether it's a broader  conversation that you've had where that's had a real impact on the way and the experience that  individuals have had at work? 

Denise Brouder: 

We developed a data tool that we use before we work with anyone wherever we go. We're building it  up over time. We've defined the 10 variables that we believe together correlate to measure the impact  that a hybrid work environment has on allowing that person to do their best work. And in that data set,  the questions that we ask have to do with a level of feeling of trust towards others, transparency and  communications, your remote work environment, sense of optimism. Now, we've been able to use that  data tool to look for signals of distress that may not be obvious to people. In some cases, when we run  that dataset, we're able to go back to a leadership team and say, "You have a problem here. Somebody  is in distress," because that data point within a group is telling us so. And we've had managers and  leaders intervene and be able to help that person adjust what's troubling them so they're no longer a  flight risk. That's what I mean by measuring the sentiment can tell you something different. 

Chris Herd: 

Double clicking on the sentiment, how do you start to think about that from an influencing the decisions  and behaviors of teams to push them towards the right outcomes? Or is it always just a step before that  which is like we're just going to focus on the individual and we're going to take that away? 

Denise Brouder: 

No, we don't ever measure anything by an individual person. We measure it by group. Everything for us  is anonymous because we don't need know anything individually. We look for trends and pulses. I can  give you a great example. We worked with a group of a 100 people just a few weeks ago. We gathered a  lot of data. What was really interesting is the core data that we gathered about that team was very  strong. They were scoring high, which I was like, "That's amazing." But curiously, when we asked them  about their feeling of engagement, it was so tepid and there was nothing about the data points that was  able to explain it. To me, when I step back and I've seen this pattern emerging... Again, we're gathering  this everywhere we go. And Chris, to be honest, I think that there's something, there's a question we,  and I mean you me in our peer space, there's something we're not asking. There's something we're not  measuring for that is fundamentally impacting the way people feel about their work. I don't know what  that is, but it's none of the obvious things. 

Chris Herd: 

What would your hypothesis be? 

Denise Brouder: 

What's that?

Chris Herd: 

What would your hypothesis be on what you think that is? 

Denise Brouder: 

Without being able to say explicitly what I think is causing that is, I think that there is a fundamental  level of uncertainty that the everyday knowledge worker is carrying on their back. Now, it may have to  do with work or may have to do with the world around us, but that uncertainty I feels crippling and is  being amplified because the one thing we've not yet really figured out is the touch point where a  manager meets their individual contributors. To me, that's the flashpoint. That's where we need to focus  a lot of effort. We've not recreated informal feedback loops at that level. Now when you're working  together, you knew a lot more like office gossip, you'd pick up along the hallway. We would talk  informally and get a sense of what's happening. 

I think people are very out of the loop and very disconnected, and I think that they're having a hard time  connecting in to the bigger picture. I think that that's allowing uncertainty to flourish. One of the things  we talked to leadership about is we have to re-institute those informal feedback loops with high level of  frequency and high thought on what are we putting through those feedback loops. I think that's what it  could be, but I'm going to continue digging into it. 

Chris Herd: 

Thinking out loud, my immediate response to this, which is often not the most considered thing, but I  feel like there's something in the comment about... And you never said it, but I'm piecing this together.  There's something in the informality that happens around the water cooler. I push back on the water  cooler thing hard, but as you speak there, what I begin to think and imagine is, I wonder if that  uncertainty is related to people's own understanding of their place in the community. By not having the  context that comes from, I see stuff happening in the office, I understand politics, I know what's  happening with the organization, here's how I play in that. In a world which is less connected, I wonder  if that uncertainty in the individual's mind is like, "I actually don't understand my place." 

Denise Brouder: 

Okay, you want to get deep here? 

Chris Herd: 

Yeah, fire away. 

Denise Brouder: 

Part of our philosophy is that there's nothing in this world that's absolute, like nothing has individual  value. One thing only has value in relation to something else, and that applies to everything. I think the  absence of these touch points, call it a water cooler, call it whatever you want, we have less opportunity  to discover and make definitions throughout our days and define the meaning we have to the work that  we do. They just don't occur as frequently and they not as high quality in a digital environment. I think  that we've been left feeling hollow, quite hollow, and I think that is a pervasive feeling when you've not  yet named it. 

And then I wonder how do we self-correct for that so people can find that degree of fulfillment and  definition in their work. Because the reality is, Chris, people will never let go of flexibility. I don't care.  You can tell them whatever you want. You can threaten whatever you want. They're holding onto this  for dear life, even though they may not be doing it right and well right now they're not letting it go  because it's so important to people. But conversely, you have these knock on effects and that's why we  have to help unwind and solve. 

Chris Herd: 

I want to double click on that a lot, but I actually think it'd be more interesting to do that as a separate  conversation. I'm going to actually shift slightly to two things that we should cover in the last five  minutes or so. Number one is, your frame on the future of work mindset. We'd love to hear what that  actually means to you and how individuals can start to apply that to their own work in living. 

Denise Brouder: 

Ooh, that's great. I actually wrote a blog on this a couple of years ago. If you want to link it to the show,  that'd be great. And this is really initiating factor factor for Sway for me. I started studying futurism and I  started studying systems thinking during the pandemic, and it was such a revelation to me because  futurist thinking and a future mindset, it's all about understanding the world doesn't happen to you. You  happen to the world and the future isn't randomized. We make decisions today to shape the future we  want to live in and work and play in. And systems thinking is a parallel effort. To me it's like, ooh, this  whole world is one big system and then how do I rearrange it to suit the way that I want to live, work,  and play tomorrow? Now, when I understood those two simple principles, I start living by them. 

And then when I started living by them, the intersection of those two, I found potential. I found my own  potential. And I was like, if I can do that, we can all do that. The language of our work and the way that  we work. To me, those are just like being able to write a cheque, like balance a cheque book. Those are  

life skills. Now, AI and data science, those are also becoming life skills. Our portfolio has to change and  increase. But to me, a future work mindset is looking at this chaotic world around us as an opportunity  that you have a place in and feeling empowered to do that and make that decision. 

Chris Herd: 

I love that. What were the things you read that had the most impact? And we'll link to the blog and I'm  sure you list some of it in there, but if there was one thing that you could say, pick this up, this will have  an impact on how you view that and how you work. 

Denise Brouder: 

I can't say I read anything, but I can tell you I started getting myself in rooms I didn't think I belonged in.  And I started learning from people that were doing this well and reading some things that they were  putting out and practicing it and thinking about it. But then mostly honestly applying it to myself. 

Chris Herd: 

I like that. Well, as a final question, so we can't be accused of only talking our own book and saying that  hybrid work and remote work is going to take over the world. I think we've touched on a few times  during this conversation about the community that we're part of, and I think there's a bunch of people  who take it as almost being self-evident that this is going to become the predominant form of work. And  I'm not sure that's true for everyone else. I think they're still making the decision on whether this is how  they want to work or this is the way that work is going to go. Pushing on the other side, if we were to  fast-forward 10, 15 years in the future and hybrid work and distribute work hasn't become the predominant form of work, what do you think are the major reasons that have stood in the way of that  happening? 

Denise Brouder: 

You are a 100% right that this conversation is way earlier than I have to even remind myself about and  come back to basics. To me, it's really, it's a clear path. We will have failed at this in 10, 15 years if we  have not lived by two core principles. One, is the ability to be patient. And the other is the ability to  demonstrate discipline. If we don't have those two, Chris, nothing else is really going to matter. And it  doesn't come natural to us in today's chaotic, digitally infused world, but it is natural to us as humans  and can we bring that part of us out in the way that we work. 

If we can learn to be patient with ourselves and each other, let the models unfold, let the mistakes be  okay, let's learn from them. And if we don't institute our own sense of discipline, how am I showing up?  How am I building consensus? How am I being part of the team? It's not all me. How am I being part of a  team? Because an island of one, we are only part of teams. Now, if those two things are being put those  in the back of our mind and as a lens to see the work that we do, I think we have a chance to get there. 

Chris Herd: 

If we could do only one or two things to adopt that and work forward with those things, what would  they be? 

Denise Brouder: 

It would be develop the skill of empathy. Because to be empathetic, you have to not make assumptions.  You have to trade that off. And if we are not making assumptions about other people when we're  working together and physically apart and we choose instead to be empathetic towards others and  ourselves, then we create space for learning and growth that's in a healthy environment. And then we  can adapt role model, and exponentially grow the impact of flexible work. 

Chris Herd: 

I can't top that, so I think that would be the best place for us to draw the line. I've really enjoyed this,  Denise. Appreciate you joining us. 

Denise Brouder: 

We'll do it again sometime. 

Chris Herd: 

Let's do it again. 

Denise Brouder: 

Thanks, Chris.

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