Hi, everyone. My name is Katharina Lacy. I'm the co founder and chief product officer at Quincas. And this uh session is about balancing mental health and overcoming work, home, work from home challenges.Um Just to give you a little bit of background about what Quincas is is we are a logistic. Uh We build logistics solutions for logistic service providers. It's pretty much that and we're in, we're in Vietnam, Thailand, uh Singapore, Malaysia, uh China as well as in the United States. And as you know, for many of you guys, it's very difficult, especially when you are managing a business from different places in the world. Already without the COVID situation, it's difficult to manage them um with different work from home conditions because one country, it may be strict, the other country, it may be not so strict. And because of that, we've all been dealing with different ways of handling and balancing mental health.

Already. We all know that before COVID even happened, there was high levels of depression and anxiety which was costing a US one trillion a year globally. And this could be because of lots of all the day to day situations before COVID. So we all know that we had, we all had to deal with things and um that were before living today at home, working from home, we have all had situations now where we have our family who walks in, around the house, maybe even in a boxers or naked. I just had to run out and get my dog because I forgot my dog outside, you know, stuff like this that you would not be dealing with if you had to be in an office or you have your Children and balancing your personal and your professional life together, it becomes complicated.

It becomes a little bit more difficult. And because of that, we see that now 50% of adults have experience and more anxiety and stress because of their job security. So in addition to all the other stuff that we were dealing previously, now we're stressed about, are we gonna be able to keep our job? Are we going to be able? Are they gonna cut my salary? Are they going to uh you know, am I when, when is the, when is the next for us in terms of start up world is like, is there gonna be another funding? You know, these things are very stressful for everybody no matter if you're a founder, an employee or you know, starting off on your own. These are, these are stressful moments and what we realized is that also that because of the stress from being locked down alone, especially, it has started to impact the way we work. So how can it, we ask ourselves the question of how can it not stress us working from home is not something that we're used to? Maybe some of us are those who are freelancers or who are, um, contractors actually do this for a living. That, that's totally ok.

But still you guys have learned to manage and balance out your personal and your private life for many that are not used to it, it has led to stress exhaustion. We've had moments where you don't know, you know, you may be waking up at a different hour than your partner. You may be waking up at 630 for me. In my case, I wake up at 630 in the morning to do meetings. So I have my partner coming in saying to me, ok, can you, can you not make so much noise? It's like I have nowhere else to go. So there have been occasions where I've actually gone into my car to have meetings. Uh There are moments where we lose, we have a loss of appetite. There's loneliness and depression because you do feel alone. You're used to work, you're used to working and meeting with people for lunch or going out for drinks and, and restaurants after eat, after working and there's no longer, there's none of that anymore. So because of also that leads into our lack of information and direction from management and overworking because now you have your computer there every day. You know, that's available to you. There's no more. Of course, none of you have made excuses to not go to work.

We all know that, but there are moments when you, you are tired and it shows now that you're tired because now people have a video policy where you have to show up every day on video. You have, you cannot be late for a meeting, you cannot accidentally cancel a meeting because you, it shows up everywhere. There's now a tracking. Um So because of that, it has created a lot of when do I shut off, when do I stop from myself from burning out, burning out? How do I not overwork? And these are, these are simple things that have, we have all probably here suffered because of working from home, which has led to the biggest thing, which is a sense of isolation and disconnection because at the same time, especially if you're working in different remote countries, different countries have again, like I said, a beginning different work from home policies.

You may have a team that is getting together and then you have somebody else in another area that's completely isolated. These, these moments actually play a part in how you handle your work from home. So let's be honest here, work from home is actually here to stay, at least for a while we all know that we're trying to do everything we can to improve the pandemic to make things a little easier. But it's really up to the businesses that we work for or we're creating to actually make that effort to actually fix it. So how about we turn a negative into a positive? We, we can use the work from home to boost productivity by creating communication and responses by interactions. It just because you're digital now doesn't mean that you can't go and talk to somebody in another department remotely, you know, via, via your communication chat.

You can allow to onboard talent anywhere in the world because now we can do cross border talent. It doesn't mean just because I'm in Singapore, for example, means I need to hire in Singapore. I can hire elsewhere. I can go abroad. I can create true virtual, I can create a true virtual office which I'll dive into a little bit later, which actually has no constraints where I can, I can, I can interact with people from anywhere in my company and we need to make sure that we, we, we empower ourselves to basically work.

Yes. Some of us don't know how to work the 9 to 5. Some of us do very well, but we need to be able to encourage others that they can take breaks that they don't have to work all the time nonstop because I can go from a meeting from 630 in the morning all the way to 2 p.m. But that doesn't mean that you have to as well. So what have we done at Quincas? And we have taken pride in actually creating this digital environment that we have realized that because of the amount of cross border, cross border employees that we have everywhere, it's important that we also make it fun. We create a culture out of it. So one of the places that we've done is women at Quincas. We've created monthly sessions for ladies to open up about their ideas. That's what I meant from work from home. That's my dog. Um Basically where ladies in at Quins could basically get together, they can talk about interactions, they can talk about their husbands and their personal lives, their Children.

But a way for us to vent and as well as empower ourselves, we also have q learning where we do topics every once a week or every once a month where we talk and teach each other the new things. And this doesn't have to be just from leadership. It goes all the way down. An intern can teach us something. We also talk about mental health. This is a very big important topic for us because we want to make sure that people during this period of time actually have a, a place where they feel safe to say to us. OK, I'm not doing so good. Someone in my, I'm not feeling Well, because I've been stuck at home for four days nonstop with all my family. They're allowed to tell us this as well as their fears and anxieties that are coming to them because of being stuck at home. So we have allowed that one on one. We have created and fostered that one on one relationship between employee and manager and some of my favorites is Q games. So we've done hackathons. We've actually gotten people together to really think about how do we improve a, a specific product?

How do we actually make uh we had the quickest Olympics where we actually got everybody together and thought of new ways of improving um how to, how to, how to basically reel in new customers. We brought everyone in as well as you've had to also stay fit because your mental health really also evolves about your physical health. And one thing we've done recently was we did 100 kilometer walk. So that means or run depending on how adventurous you wanted to be. Anybody could walk anywhere. But as long as you did 100 kilometers and we rewarded everybody with doing this as a result, this has led us to build a community and team connection and we've allowed people to, to really kind of express themselves based on what they do in their personal lives and bring it also forward.

I've learned from my team that they are actual shit like a lot of them love to cook. They've actually, they also are adventurous uh sports people and they want to teach us these things. So opening that communication is important as well as recognizing them and appreciating them for it. And having everybody in their team also doing the same thing. And by having these cultural di digital environment activities also helps them recharge their mental batteries. So um I'll open up the floor to see um basically what your stories are and tell me what have you guys dealt with? You can be funny, you can be serious how you are overcoming um the the work from home and yeah, thank you very much.