In this episode we speak with David McIvor, Founder and CEO of WorkSafety and the Author f the Working from Home Safety Handbook. We chat with David about the changes in the current work environment due to COVID-19, what are the best practices when working from home including how to set up your workspace and how working from home may continue to become the norm in a post-COVID world.

You can find David’s handbook and more information at www.worksafetyathome.com.au

You can learn more about Mate internet and mobile plans at www.LetsBeMates.com.au.

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Transcript

Faz: Welcome Australia. It’s that time again for another podcast from the Mate team where we try and get into your head with stuff that makes us sound smart. Sit back and relax. It’s time for us

to be Mates.

Hi Australia. Welcome to another episode of the, let’s be mates podcast. we’ve got Dom and Bosco here. Boys. How are you doing today? Good. Good, awesome. I think we’ve got a good show lined up today. Something, people wouldn’t find as. exciting as other topics that we’ve done or that we’re doing. But I think it’s something very relevant, to the current situation and dynamic that the world’s in at the moment.

we’ve got David McIvor. David is the CEO of work safety.co. So he spends his life making sure people in the workplace and at home have the right setup. To ensure they don’t have any type of injuries when they’re in the workspace, in the work environment. And I think a lot of the stuff that he’s going to talk about today is going to be very new to a lot of us.

And so, let’s, let’s talk to David. David, welcome to the show. Welcome to the let’s be mates podcast. We’re glad to have. Yes, we are all mates. Thanks for joining us and thanks for giving us your time. I know you’re a very busy person and you do a a very crucial job for us all Aussies. and

David McIvor: Interesting time in which we live

isnt it

 

Faz: absolutely. And I think our business has seen a lot of change with this. I think people are considered, you know, internet services and essential service. And I think what you do in your role is just as essential to, to, to what we do as well. And I guess that leads into it. would love to, our viewers would love to hear about what your role is, the, the business that you work for and what you actually do.

David McIvor: Well, I’m a CEO and founder of a consulting and training company called worksafety.co. I’ve actually been in the health and safety training consulting field for 30 odd years. In, when we first started out, health and safety work, health and safety, and occupational health and safety is really about factories and manufacturing and fixed workplaces and so on.

and the health and safety legislation is based on that kind of a model as well. So over the years, I’ve noticed the transition, not just in the, the nature of work places, but the nature of work itself. and in, in recent few years, obviously there’s been a great increase in the number of, people, particularly in the knowledge and education sectors, doing their work remotely most of the time that, that means from their home.

the studies indicated, and this was up until. The Corona virus thing came along, that, within the next few years, up to 50% of people would be working full or at least part time remotely and again, most of the time from their homes. Now, when I was looking at, health and safety issues and sound, there’s lots around there.

There’s lots of books and so on, around, on, working from home. But there was nothing on working from home safely. So being a safety consultant, I decided I’d write the book. So we, I wrote the, the working from home safety handbook, and we released that last year, just before the end of last year, just before the, COVID-19 issue came along.

So it’s, quite amazing the, the timing, but, Highly relevant, obviously. Yeah,

Faz: absolutely.

Bosco: And David, obviously working from home, as you said, is a growing trend, particularly at the moment. So talk, talk to us a little bit about the right setup for a work from home professional in, based on your opinion in your, field of work.

David McIvor: Yeah, Ross, look, it’s even even more important now. I’m in a lot of the focus on the book pre COVID , was just on that, on, on getting the home works, workplace set up, appropriately and time. And there was sort of a lot of, emphasis on the worker working from home. Talking to their employer in order to, develop appropriate, flexible working arrangements and working from home agreements with the employer, prepared to, help the home-based worker set up their workstation at home appropriately.

And that’s, that includes the chair and the desk and the IT connection. Well, all of these sorts of things that go into having a, an effective workstation now with COVID-19 and social isolation and quarantining and people not coming into work anymore. there’s not really been the opportunity for that consultation to take place between the employer and the employees working from home.

However, as we’re starting to come out of isolation, I think there’s no longer any excuse for that conversation. Not to now be carried out whereby the employer and the employee working from home. I reach agreement on a whole range of things, not just to do with the physical workstation set up and stuff, but, hours of, work, maintaining a sense of work life balance.

and a sense of my time, my space, understanding, priorities. All these kinds of issues are associated with working effectively from home.

Faz: Yeah,

I, you know, on that point, my previous life before my, I worked at Microsoft and during my time there we transitioned to, you know, re, hot seating and working from home.

And it really, really became a sort of a trend and a focus at Microsoft then. And what happened was that we, you know, obviously no one had the same desk they had every day. So when they went into the office, Microsoft controlled the set up in the office. But due to the working from home. Everybody did their own thing and were left to their, their own way of doing it.

And what happened is that Microsoft realized that they needed to also educate at the employees of their setup at home if they allowing them to work from home as well. And. So they really started focusing on ergonomics and, obviously, and doing training courses and making sure people are certified to understand the setup at home.

And have you seen that coming from

businesses as well?

David McIvor: Well, not, not enough, in my opinion. it’s almost been left to, the, employee working from home to sort it out for themselves. So we’re seeing all kinds of strange arrangements like people, she’s gone collapsible chairs at the kitchen table, with awful postures and so on.

So, and, and a lot of time working or using laptops instead of proper desk computers. Yeah. Well, the thing we need to understand about a laptop is that if you get the keyboard at the best height, then the screen, the monitor screen is going to be far too low, which results in craning of the neck and head pointing downwards.

And that’ll lead to neck and shoulder pain. And so whereas if you put the, the monitor at the right height, the keyboard is going to be far too hard. And a lot of the time where you’re seeing people working from home. Using laptops and putting themselves at some significant risk of, what we now call musculoskeletal disorders MSD’S, because they, they’re not taking the time to get the, the ergonomics of the workstation

correct.

Faz: Yeah. You know, my local physio, physio three 60 at Glenwood Hills, give it a bit of a shout out to them. the lady there is, has been telling me for the last probably year that I’ve been seeing her that the cases from people, from the professional office environment and that work from home, it’s just increasing and increasing.

And she said, even though she loves the business. The problem is that obviously she is, to your point, she’s saying that no, no one’s getting educated about how to set themselves up properly at home to make sure that they don’t have any type of injuries or, or anything happening, especially around neck pain.

The neck, the neck pain is the biggest issue that she’s finding at the moment. Coming through her physio

practice.

David McIvor: And if you just think about having a laptop, on your, your desk, and I think a Dominic would probably look at a laptop or something there, and then look at the posture and sounds, heads leading forward.

Therefore, the whole weight of the head has taken on the shoulder muscles and the neck muscles and themselves. And, It’s one of the, the real challenges. Our commitment, right? And we’ve got to say a fair part of this working from home safety handbook is to do with a general ergonomics and so on.

Well, when I was writing the book last year, I took myself to the local library to get out of my office. And, I found a nice, quiet area, which was mainly, didn’t have that by year 12, and the uni students and such, and I was working in my laptop. And I’m thinking to myself, this is crazy because this is exactly the kind of posture I’m advising against.

So I’ve got some thick, reference books from the shelves. Put my laptop on top of the, the books so that the, I was able to look directly at the monitor screen, and then I invested in a Bluetooth keyboard and a Bluetooth mouse so that I could operate the, the keyboard at roughly the right sort of height as along with the mouse and so on.

And I was aware of the sort of, the giggles and the sneakers from some of the other, millennials. In the room looking at this silly old bloke, with these workstation set up. However, within a few days, quite a few of the other kids were, doing the same thing cause they’re all on their laptops.

And they all started to realize that really, using laptops for normal work situations is, is problematic. So. Two screens, and that’s certainly one of the recommendations we have is that most of the time someone worked from home is probably going to be using the laptop, but they ought to invest in a another monitor, good quality monitor, which could be either.

Provided by their employer, or at least some arrangement. Kai come to a, so maybe salary sacrificing or something like that. And that becomes the main monitor, which actually I’m looking at at the moment. My main monitor has the, the camera on top. the laptop was off to the side. It’s operating as a second screen.

In fact, I’ve got a third screen. And so I’ve got three screens in an array all at the right sort of height, which allows me to sort of, look at various functions and things going on at the other one top. So if you wanted to talk about ergonomics, because I suggest that the starting point, in fact, is the chair.

the chair, it really becomes the starting point in some of the basic principles of a good chair, that you ought to be able to have your feet flat on the floor. Now you can use a foot rest to change posture and all the rest of it. But I’m talking about I default position here where you have your feet flat on the floor, which means that your lower legs are roughly vertical.

Your upper legs are going to be roughly horizontal. We don’t have to measure 90 degrees or anything like that to something like that. Then your trunk and upper body is roughly right angles to your upper legs. now, if you’re going to be able to have your feet flat on the floor and your upper legs basically horizontal, most of the time, that means a seat has to come down.

alot lower than we fought with most clerical chairs and most kitchen chairs and dining room chairs. And so, so it’s really important, first of all, that probably the home-based worker. invest in getting a good chair. Don’t have to pay thousands of dollars for them. You can get decent, height adjustable chairs from office furniture, suppliers and office works and those sort of places for a couple of hundred dollars.

And that would be well worth the investment. Yeah. If we get the seat right and therefore we’re sitting roughly comfortably and so on, that probably means the work surface. The desk or something needs to come down a bit too. otherwise the person’s going to be reaching up with their forearms.

Faz: on, in the office here, from where we started to where we are now, you know, obviously you have a story where you start as a business and you have a certain setup.

And then as we grow bigger and bigger and get more people in, you know, obviously we’ve, we’ve developed the office and, you know, different fitouts and things like that. And, and one of the biggest expenses on our expense sheet is the. The cost of seats, which no one can believe, but you can see the productivity increase when people have the right setup and they’re feeling good about it.

How they’re working. Right. And I think that’s a, that’s a big point to talk about is that, you know, at MATE, we spend a lot of money on making sure that each, the call center staff, particularly who was sitting in front of a computer and a phone most days, sitting properly. And, and with that comes with all a bunch of other things, you know, increased productivity, always feeling good, and, you know, even down to, stand up desks and things like that, which we’ve, we’ve, we’ve really, definitely, we’ve, invested in with our staff as well.

And so I think all those things play a part, right?

David McIvor: Look, if, if you, if somewhere working from home is going to spend what between five and $10,000, to get properly set up, and then that ought to be the subject of conversation with their employer, I’m talking about spending another five to 10% or within that, that money, five to 10% would be devoted to having a chair and a decent workstation.

That you mentioned standing desk. The basic principle is getting the chair right, is that when you’re sitting at your desk for start, when you look at your computer monitor, your head naturally has a bit of a downwards tilt down, just five degrees or something like that. But when you look up, you should be able to see over the top of the monitor.

To whatever’s in the distance. Hopefully some, something a bit further away so your eyes can refocus for that to work, you need to therefore be able to sit at your desk and have your forarms roughly horizontal onto the desk surface and onto the keyboard and the mouse. So a good rule of thumb is to try to keep your elbows by your side.

And if you can keep her by elbows, by your side, without either moving them out or moving them forward, then we’ve got the basis of a, a reasonably good, economic situation. And, so, so the, the. ideal reference heart, if you like, for all of this is the fixed L by heart, so whatever, when you’re sitting, whatever height your elbow is, when you’re relaxed with your arms by your side, that ought to be the height, roughly the height of the work surface.

Now sitting has been called the new smoking, isn’t it, where people spend far too much time sitting? So yes, sit, stand desks are becoming quite, quite the rage. We’re fortunate enough that I’ve got two of them in our office, so electrically operated all they have to do. It was push a button and it’s preset, so it would go up to the right sort of height, right.

when you’re going to operate. From a standing position, you still need to have your work surface at your fixed elbow height. So basically your whole upper body has the same posture as it would if you were sitting down. But even if, if you’re going to be standing up for part of the time, people have imagine that if I have a standing desk, I have to stay up all night, but nothing could be further from the truth.

We’re probably talking about 10 minutes in an hour. Where people would actually stand up and the rest of the time they’d sit down. So even if you’re going to work from a standing workstation, you still need a good seat cause you’ll spend most of your time sitting there and you don’t have to buy electrically operated programmable height adjustable desk costing a couple of thousand dollars.

Again. Office suppliers have attachments or brackets that can go on the top of normal desks and can be used to raise and lower, to whatever’s

comfortable.

Dom: You’re obviously not a tax professional. There’s a lot of this stuff. Tax deductible from people working at home.

David McIvor: It is absolutely text deductible.

I’ve keep your receipts now. It’s interesting you should raise that because, over the text, the text department actually from the sound of it is, Becoming quite empathetic with people working from home, but the home worker still needs to be able to define their workplace. So a corner of the kitchen table, while the meals are being prepared does not cut it.

either it’s an area of the house, maybe the living room, or preferably a, a room with a door, which can be sharp, which then becomes the designated office, and that therefore becomes a, taxable, deductible taxation issue.

Faz: So David, I guess you can’t say, Oh, I bought an 85 inch TV screen. We have a, to, to, to work on and, and tax deduct.

That is, that has to be very relevant, right?

David McIvor: I think the tax people or around all that sort of stuff

Faz: to the listeners, we want to make it very clear we’re not giving out tax advice. All right? So go and seek independently your own tax advice.

David McIvor: Absolutely. It’s no good imagining that just because you’re working from home on the living room table or the dining room table that you can start that claiming household expenses and energy and life and and all that sort of stuff.

But that’s, that’s not going to work. You need to seek advice from your, your tax professional, and at the same time, could I suggest that if you are working. Being paid to work from home, you just need to check the contents of your home and contents insurance policy to make sure it allows for a paid income derived from working from home because it’s no good after you have a break in and lose your computer or, something happens and you claim house and contents insurance for the insurance company then the, and say, Oh, but you’re working from home.

I’ve covered.

Dom: There’s some very clear guidelines around the set up and ergonomics, but what about those other things that people, a lot of people don’t think about? Like, you know, putting some boundaries around, switching off, getting out here, walking around, drinking enough water, what are your thoughts on that?

David McIvor: Yep. Yeah. I think, it’s really important that the, the home-based worker is able to define their space, their time. And allow for work, life balance and so on. We were hearing reports of managers be a little bit nervous because they can’t see people in the central office head down, tail up, working away.

I get very nervous and suspicious that they’re not actually working as hard as they should be, so they are ringing or emailing at all times of the day and night, and, expecting some sort of response. Now, if you work for Amazon, then, that’s exactly what you have to do. you’re, you’re available to Amazon 24, seven, but in the normal workplace, particularly in Australia, there needs to be some boundaries that are agreed to.

For example, if I look, I have a, a little mnemonic which I’m about to show you on the screen. I can send copies of that to you if, if you wish, called the working from home safely. and, the first, letter there S means simulate, your normal working routine. keep, keep to the same so that if you would normally get up at 7:00 AM, and go through the normal routine about having a shower and get dressed and have breakfast, and then you leave the house, you’d get on the bus or the train or get in the car or something like that, you might leave home at eight, say, with a view to getting into your central office location by nine.

Well, whatever, and you would clock on at 9:00 AM in the morning. Just because you’re getting up at 7:00 AM and you’re going to be working from home doesn’t mean people, now can start contacting you from 7:00 AM I think if your normal hours are nine to five, that pretty much should be what you try to, to stick to in order to claim my time and so on.

Now. That that’s something that the employer and your work colleagues need to be aware of, but also family members just because mum or dad is down the hall in a room that needs to be understood that they are at work and by and large, therefore not, not to be disturbed unless it’s absolutely something pressing.

Now. this week, of course, we’re, we’ve got the gradual, starting up again of schools. That’s as many parents have found this. the stuff about home schooling while you’re working from home just does not work. and that’s been really, really difficult. And I think a lot of parents are gaining a lot more appreciation for teachers now after having tried to teach their own kids.

But the kids of home need to understand the rules of the game too. If they are from home. There are certain times where mom or dad’s at work. but if you’re saving an hour or two in the morning, cause you don’t have to commute and an hour or two in the evening when you don’t have to commute, there’s a couple of extra hours that the home-based person can devote to, interacting with the kids or going for a walk in the park or helping with the schooling or whatever it might be.

But one of the great challenges of working from home is how you get away from work. It’s too easy sometimes to just say, Oh, I just want to, run off an email and duck down the corridor and, log back in at, all times of, the night. And people start to get used to that happening. And it’s very hard to shake that habit.

So, yeah. 5:00 PM or 5:30 PM, whatever time you would normally finish work in your central workplace, you turn your computer off. At home, walk out, close the door, and avoid the temptation to come back a bit later on unless it’s obviously urgent.

Faz: So

very good insight. That’s something that you don’t think about in that context.

And that’s a, it’s very interesting. Yeah.

David McIvor: One of the major sources of stress there, it talks about stress of work, and a lot of people are finding that there are different stressors now associated with working from home. Particularly if you’ve got kids to look after all IB, people with disabilities or aged, parents, even elderly neighbors and so on, have been left out of the loop.

So there’s, factors to consider, with all of that, how you, maintain your physical and mental wellbeing. And people are really starting to , appreciated, nice and sunny today. So we’ll get out and go for a bit of a walk in the park. We’re allowed to walk in the park. We’ve always been allowed to walk in the park, maintaining social distancing and so on, and hopefully that might continue, even if there’s some return to a normality, whatever that might be.

Yeah, and it’s worthwhile thinking through what’s going to happen. When, the, isolation and quarantining requirements finish, discuss the question whether people are going to return to a central workplace in the same way as they did before. All this came along.

Bosco: It actually leads into the next question.

So, so yeah, so just on that, so obviously everyone look, a lot of people are home at the moment still, but, what are some things to think about when or if we do, returns normally, as you said, and return to an office or workspace. you know, what are some, have you had any discussions with businesses based on their employees coming back, yet, or anything you can share based on that?

David McIvor: Yeah. Sure. it’s a good point Ross, cause it’s, it’s something away having now to really start to focus on, as I said earlier, before all this came along and it was estimated the next year or so, next couple of years, up to 50% of people would be working full or part time from home. I think, COVD-19 has bumped that up to probably 95% at the moment.

And my hunch is that, after this is all finished, we’re going to, stay up around about, say, the 70% level and not 50%, because, people working from home once they get over the initial, challenges. I have found that they actually can be quite productive and that there are lots of, advantages they, they have, they are now finding, so they run their own space and their own time and instead of spending hours commuting, they can use that for, for other purposes.

And. People are going to find that they could work just as effectively from home as going into a central workplace, maybe even better, depending on what the personality type of the person is and what the workplace was like. Employers on the same token, finding that. Despite their earlier misgivings, they’re finding that a productivity has been maintained, that there’s lots of things people can be doing from home without having to come into the central workplace.

So they’re probably going to be far more relaxed about people working from home. Yeah.

Faz: On that point.

Oh, sorry. On that point, Dave, sorry to cut you off, is that, you know, one thing we’ve experienced is, is staff happiness, right? That the eliminating the commute to work and getting up that extra bit earlier, potentially an all those, different things have, have gone away.

They spend more time with their families because they have lunch at home, they have breakfast at home. and those things where sometimes a lot of those things I have at work, right. And so I think, even from apart from productivity. From a staff happiness perspective, I think that’s really Sean frou into our, into our business.

And obviously through happiness comes a harder work, right? And productivity and all those different things. And I think that’s something that we’ve experienced as

a business.

David McIvor: Yeah. Look, there’s, there’s, there’s a whole lot of factors tied up in this. I mean, basically human beings where we’re hardwired.

To work at groups since we were living in caves. we’ve always, worked it, had to work in groups and cooperate and communicate in groups. And a lot of the communication we still have as human beings is nonverbal, that we can zoom as much as we like, such as we are at the moment. One of the things that we miss with, these, remote, Meetings and so-on is we miss most of the verbal cues, like at the moment, I, I can’t see whether you’re yawning or you’re frowning or you’re shaking your head or whatever it might be. particularly if you’ve got probably about 40, 40 faces on the screen at the moment. So, we are hard what were analog creatures, and here we are trying to survive in a virtual world.

And there are some, unspoken challenges just so that absence of, face to face communication, which is, difficult to achieve virtually, When we are thinking about returning to work as a couple of other elephants in the room, that people really haven’t thought about. One, how do you get it to work now?

Are you going to get in the train or the bus, and cheek to joul with a whole range of other people who may or may not be covert positive? what happens to social isolation when you’re using public transport? Of course, some people are saying, Oh, I don’t use public transport. I’ll drive myself in. Well, if we’re going to have all the extra cars on the freeway, how long is that going to take us?

And where are we going to park our cars when we get to as central a workplace, so how we get there is one issue. the subject of hot desking is becoming rather of interest to employers because they’re starting to decide. Well, if we’re going to have a percentage of their workforce working from home each day, then maybe we don’t have to have 3000 square meters of prime, central business district office, exactly, which were written to get an enormous expense.

Maybe we can reduce that and. We would then say to our employees, you spend a couple of days a week working from home and you come into the central office a couple of weeks, a couple of days a week or something along those sort of lunch. Okay, fine. do we provide desks for people when they come back into the central workplace or are we go to hot desk?

hot desking has, major issues. it’s estimated that, for something like 40%, all illnesses that people get, particularly in winter from coming into the central office, because of, contamination of work surfaces from lift buttons to, telephones to desk surfaces, computer, all this sort of thing.

So we got to have hot desking. Then there’s a whole range of issues as the going to arise about how do we keep that clean? Yeah, particularly if we’re going to be sharing a desk with the other people. We don’t know. We don’t know what their status is or anything like that. So yeah, a hot desk is really problematic at the moment, but one of the things that real estate agents are concerned about it as a potential drop in value of city accommodation city buildings by 15 20% because they’re not going to be working from home more.

Faz: Which

yeah, it’s, you make so many points that probably a lot of people don’t think about. Right. And it just gets me thinking. I know a lot of people that work in businesses that are hot seating, and you know, especially during the COVID time and whoever needs to be in the office, they have the social distancing where, you know, every second desk is getting used.

But no one’s thinking about. You know, the, the status of, of the hot seating, so they’re not, they haven’t changed to, okay, that’s Dom’s desk or that’s Ross’s desk and it stays that way for this whole period. And so I think you make a valid point there. There are a lot of people probably aren’t factoring in, is that hot seating?

Is random people there that they could, they could be doing anything and come from anywhere. And then that’s a challenge too, to control as well. Right? Obviously you use wipes and things like that, but, it’s a, it’s a really valid point, David. And that’s something, something, a lot of businesses need to think about.

David McIvor: Some companies, maybe even companies like mate, provide meals and catering and so on for employers. well, come on. What’s going to happen about providing food into a, a canteen area? maintaining social separation or are we going to put the food into boxes and have people eat it, their workstations and.

Cleaning up after. That’s going to be a,

 

Faz: well, one thing, one thing we do, David, our, so a lot of our background is Italian and Italian. It cooks for us every day in the

office, or she used to before

COVID, and so when we get back to normal, that’s, that’s something that we’ve been talking about. How do we, how do we do that ongoing.

Yeah.

David McIvor: So it looks the, now’s the time to think it through , not when people are coming down with it. What happens with hot basically, or people coming back at the office and I person is diagnosed as COVID positive. therefore, they might. Going off, I certainly got into quarantine for fourteen days. No, but so too, would anybody in that area who may have, come into contact with them.

So before we all started rushing back, and so we really need to think it through. And then you’ve got the, shared, office spaces, particularly for the startups and the, the millennials and so on. They don’t have a central office, but they’ll go and make use of, the, the shared office spaces, which offer different, programs.

dont they? You can, you can actually ha, your own office, you know, a serviced office environment. Or you could, book meeting rooms for, a lot of them had just talked desking pay a couple hundred dollars a month and a hot desk, and it’s not even the one employer. It’s, it’s run by a company that’s providing the, the shared space.

So, yeah, that’s, there are some challenges which, people need to be thinking about, and that’s what we’re. Well, that’s what we’re talking about now.

Faz: Well, it’s been great, David, and you know, we thank you for all the information you’ve provided. where can we get more information? And you did mention that you have written a handbook, right?

Which I think everybody should get a copy of, especially in the business space. what’s it called, David, and where can we buy it?

David McIvor: I’m going to stand up for a moment. They’ve got the sun streaming in.

It’s called the working from home safety handbook and employee got to working safely from home. That’s not available in the shops. You go to www.worksafetyathome.com or.com.au, so all one word work safety at home. Dot com and you know, see reviews and little videos and, how to purchase that and all that sort of stuff.

Faz: And to our listeners

David McIvor: at the same time, if it was of interest to you guys, happy to send that to you as a PDF.

Faz: That. That’d be, that’d be great David. Cause what we’ll do, we’ll add it to our, our show notes or on our podcast pages on Spotify and iTunes and on our website as well. And what we’ll do, to our, to our listeners, what we’ll do, we’ll put the, the website, www.work safetyathome.com.au where you can get a copy of David’s books as well.

and you can go there and click on our website to get a copy of that. Well, David, I think gets, any last words from you. I think we’ve gone over time, but that’s fine. Which is all good conversation. And I love talking to people that are passionate about their profession, and that’s something that we’re very passionate about at, mate.

We’re passionate about doing what we do and we love speaking to our mates that are passionate about what they do. So, any last words David, from yourself?

David McIvor: you’ve heard the expression before, but what we’re going through at the moment is unprecedented. but whatever, we’re not going back to where we were and, people, really facing challenges to cope with the situations at the moment.

Right? So, what I would, in the terms of that safely thing, the ,A would be to accept. The reality, what’s happening at the moment. There’s nothing any of us could do about it. We’re stuck. So we need to adapt and we need to appreciate, the positives, such as less commuting and more, more family time, et cetera.

But in terms of trying to cope with our current requirements, let’s not be too hard on ourselves. I mean, this really is, challenging, particularly for old, analog human beings. particularly going into zoom meeting after zoom meeting. I mean, there is a, a phenomenon now called a zoom fatigue.

And, I’ve written a blog on that too. But, worst thing you could do two things if you’re going into zoom and one do not have back to back zoom meetings. I have have a break of at least half an hour in between them and two, during a normal zoom meeting, turn your own camera off. Because when we’re in a meeting situation, we can’t look at ourselves.

What we’re doing is looking at other people. What we’re finding with zoom meetings and you’ve got your camera on you. You spent a lot of time looking at yourself. and your, Brain’s just not, not used to that happening. Some people are very pleased with what they see other people. But then you’ll look at your expression, Oh, scratch my nose at the look too good a watch behind me, all that sort of stuff.

And yeah, so turn your own camera off. You can have the audio on, you can hear everything that’s going on. You can see everybody else and it’s just, you can’t see yourself.

Faz: Well, thanks David. Thank you for joining us. We’ve loved having you on . Well, we’d love to have you on in the future for other segments as well.

And we’ll, we’ll, we’ll definitely, I’m sure our viewers or listeners, I should say, I keep saying viewers, but listeners would love to, to have, I’m sure, hear more from you in the future. And so, but thank you very much for joining us. and, we’ll, we’ll definitely speak to you soon.

David McIvor: It’s nice to have mates.

So, be delighted to help out, particularly say in two or three weeks time when a lot of the, isolation requirements have been lifted. And we’re getting back to what might become the new normal. Might be a good time just to touch base with how it’s all going.

Faz: Awesome. Thanks David.

Bosco: Thanks for listening to the let’s be mates podcast by the team at Mate.

Dom: Search for the let’s be mates podcast on iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, and at LetsBeMates.com.au  hit subscribe to get the latest episode each week.

Bosco: For all your telco needs. Choose a provider you can trust like a mate. visit LetsBeMates.com.au, Google ‘mate’ or call us on 13 14 13 to sign up today.

Faz: See you soon mate.