An interview with Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez on the Perspectives of Global Virtual Teams
Transcription of interview with Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez, Global Team Expert from KEDGE Business School, France.
Research and Development Department
Victoria Gálvez, Senior Project Manager,
Flavia Cáceres, Project Coordinator,
Pablo López, Research Coordinator
(February 1st, 2021)
0:02 Flavia Cáceres: I will share my screen.
0:13 Flavia Cáceres: So first, as I already mentioned to you, we're AnnexBox. We are a startup company whose main goal is to provide global virtual teams with support and solutions to enhance synergy and productivity among them. Now, I would like to introduce my co-workers. First, we have Victoria as a project manager.
0:39 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: I think the screen went away. I was able to see your slides, but suddenly I don't see them anymore.
0:47 Flavia Cáceres: Yeah, I would like you to see her [Victoria] on camera.
0:50 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: Okay.
0:51 Victoria Gálvez: That 's me. Hi, I’m Victoria.
0:53 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: Hi.
0:56 Flavia Cáceres: Then Alison. She's a Research and Development Coordinator.
0:59 Alisson Falcón: Hey.
1:00 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: Hello.
1:02 Flavia Cáceres: And last but not least, Pablo. He's also a Research and Development Coordinator.
1:06 Pablo López: Hello. Thank you for being here.
1:18 Flavia Cáceres: Now, we're going to start with the questions. And in an effort to take the fullest out of this thirty-minute interview, we have chosen to devote an average of three to four minutes per question. Is that okay?
1:32 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: Sure, yes. I already took some notes, so I'm going to open them to have them at hand.
1:40 Flavia Cáceres: Yeah.
1:42 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: I mean, it's just some brief sketches of ideas that I got, but of course we can discuss.
1:51 Flavia Cáceres: Oh, yeah. That’s awesome.
1:54 Flavia Cáceres: So Alisson will continue with the questions.
1:59 Alisson Falcon: So let's start with the first question. Okay, I want to tell you that your article about Working Across Boundaries was really cool. I read all of it and it was amazing. It was really interesting, I liked it. So about my first question, you mentioned in your article that media lean communication channels, such as email, online chat, etc, may actually reduce conflict and social fragmentation in an intercultural context. And also you mentioned that online mediated communication can be relatively similar to face-to-face meetings. So in that aspect, do you suggest further research on the effects of the use of these online tools for communication in global virtual teams? What about its downsides?
2:50 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: Sorry, what was the last part?
2:53 Alisson Falcon: Yes. What about its downsides?
2:56 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: Downsides, okay. Well, first of all, just for clarification, I wouldn't say, and I don't remember if I explicitly said as you said, that online communication is exactly as face to face. It can be useful, it can help reduce distance, but I would never say it is exactly like face to face. Of course, the more technology advances, the closer we are to having an almost face to face. But I wouldn't say it can completely replace face to face because in face to face there is always the opportunity to have better contact, better body language, and even to have the opportunity to, after the meeting, go to a private room and have a beer and clarify in an informal context. I wouldn't say that, because technology has improved, then it doesn't matter, it's exactly the same. What we probably meant is that technology is advancing and, therefore, it is getting better and better compared to older technology. Having said that, about future research on this area, I think it’s an endless field for research, especially now with the pandemic and with GVTs [Global Virtual Teams] being virtually everywhere or simply everywhere. And at the same time, technology never ending to improve and new apps appearing all the time. I think I even wrote here a copy-paste of the sentence we said [in the article]. We said that, in research, time zones, cultural differences, and communication channels have been the main areas of research. And the last one about communication channels goes back to the 90s or the year 2000, in which the earlier studies were using Skype. And today we have new tools. And at the time we wrote about Slack, Trejo, Dropbox, Google Docs, etc. That was 2017. By now we even have new ones, we have Zoom, we have Teams, we have so many other new applications. Research on the adaptation to these new tools is certainly always valuable. And something that you mentioned that I also took some notes of, that is very important: It's not only about the advantages, it's not only that the new technologies make it easier and easier, it is also about the potential disadvantages. In terms, for example, of the cost of adjustment. Maybe when I see your team, your company is relatively young in age, at least those of you today with me, I don't know the rest of the company. But imagine companies with people in their 50s or 60s. For them, learning new technology might not be so simple. In the end, companies need to balance, cross the advantages of what can these new technologies bring to us with the cost of change, the switching costs. My people are used to whatever app, whatever platform they were used to. Now, you have to conduct a new training, they need to learn, that takes time, and they will not master it immediately, they might not even master it ever. There will be a period of time in which communication will not be efficient; there might be miscommunication problems or loss of information. When is it convenient to adopt a new technology or when is convenient not to adopt a new technology? That is a very subtle but important decision. The company needs to analyze the pros and cons and the resistance from the workers to get one more training. “Last year we already got a training for the new platform, why again this year we have to take a new platform?”. But if you don't take the new platform, maybe the competitor gets the new platform and they get an edge from competitiveness. So yes, definitely I think it's a never-ending research field, both in academia and for practical research for any specific client. Both in the advantages as technology advances, but also then is the right time to adopt a new technology. That in turn depends on the profile of your workers, the age, the experience with technology, how incentivized they are. Do they see that this is going to make their life easier and their job easier, or do they see it as: “One more training during my free time? This is just extra burden for myself”. I don't know if this more or less replies to your question.
8:01 Alisson Falcon: Yes, I totally agree with you. Even the same case we have here in the AnnexBox team. We all use these types of tools that you mentioned like Slack, Zoom, email account. And we all use that and we try to make our working day as effective as a regular working day like in person, face to face. And also, in the AnnexBox team, we are located in different parts of the world, we have members in Europe, we have members in the US, we have members here in Peru. And no matter the distance, no matter the location, we can all work the working day, we can be effective, we can all work together at the same time, but with different distances, right?
8:48 Alisson Falcon: Flavia, can you change the next slide, please?—
8:52 Pablo López: Thank you.
8:48 Alisson Falcon: Okay, so in that aspect, you in your book mentioned that: “Dispersive project members around the globe allow for a 24-hour relay workflow and this can dramatically speed up a project completion time, which could be a great competitive advantage for the organization”. In that aspect, would you suggest further research on the impact of the 24 workflow in global teams and their factors and characteristics along with a study for global virtual teams that have been relying on this work method?
9:33 Ph.D. Alfredo Jimenez: Definitely the 24-hour flow is something that we mentioned in the article and it is like “the ideal” in a company. Ideally in a company, their work will never end. Whenever they end their working shift in Japan, then the Europeans pick up, and then when they finish then the Americans pick up. So it's like the ideal. But at the same time, there are not that many companies doing it. I mean, yes, there are some. And if, for example, my client is one of those who have subsidiaries everywhere in the world, definitely it would be a line of research for my client to see how can we improve this working flow. Or for academic affairs, I don’t know, if I have access to a company that is willing to let me observe, talk to me or let me interview the managers in all these subsidiaries, that could be a line of research. But at the same time, I think it is a relatively narrow area of research because it applies only to really large corporations. Not only large, but also they must be located in multiple continents. Otherwise, [Inaudible 10:45] it won't be possible. [...] So, it's a nice idea for specific clients or for specific research contexts in which this 24-hour flow is possible. And for them, some research on how to gain more efficiency in the way of working, which activities are okay to do in this seamless flow of working and which other activities might require synchronous communication. Sometimes it’s not just send the project and doodle without proper explanation of what has been done [could be misleading for some] areas that are ambiguous as far as explanation and understanding. So, as I said, just for these clients who can create this 24-hour flow, for them maybe an analysis of which activities can be automatized in this way, and which other activities require that meetings happen and that everybody can be present and make questions. And this, in turn, depends on the sector, on the product, on the complexity of the product, on the tangibility of the assets, on how tacit versus codifiable the knowledge or the advantage of the product is, whether it’s a new product or a known one. How different and how — I mean —[inaudible - 12:52] if the Japanese write a report, will the Europeans understand because the Japanese are very fluent in English and what they write is very clear or not. Yes, we more or less understand what we read, but we still need to ask them quite a few details. And then when we send it back to the Brazilian subsidiary, they, in turn, need to ask us about these details. But for specific clients located in multiple continents who could create this 24-hour [workflow], yes. But it's narrower because there are other things that all companies, no matter where they are, if they are now in the pandemic working from home there are other things that all of them will be affected by, and this one is something that it affects only a few. But it's a very interesting one for those specific cases.
13:52 Pablo López: Yeah, surely.
13:53 Alisson Falcon: Yes, I also remember reading that you mentioned advantages and disadvantages of global virtual teams. I remember one advantage was the 24-hour workflow, and also there was a disadvantage kind of similar. For example, imagine we have a team in which there is an American member who sends information to a Japanese member at the end of the day. And what if the Japanese member is out of work and he is sleeping, he has to wait like eight hours to answer the information. So, in that sense, how can a global virtual team develop a balance when using this strategy since it can be like a double-edged sword?
14:45 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: Yes, it's complicated. First, it depends on how many continents are involved. If it's two, it tends to be easier than if it's three because if it is two, it’s more or less possible that it’s the morning for one and the evening for another. But if it’s three, by three I mean Asia, Europe, Africa or America, then it is much harder because somebody is going to be in a very inconvenient time. Then, as I said, it's a matter of analyzing when it’s really needed that all of us are together and try to minimize those cases. But, at the same time, when it's needed, it’s needed [laughing]. If it is really needed, maybe once every . . . then somebody has to do the sacrifice, maybe on a rotating basis perhaps and not overloading. If it is really not needed, don't make someone wake up at 3:00 A.M. if it's something that they can read the next day. Or maybe it's possible that two continents meet and then they record and then the other one watches the next morning. Here, there is never a clear cut rule when it's better that the three continents are at the same time, and when it's okay if two of them are at the same time and the third one then watches online. As I said, it depends on how important that decision is, how much information you need from that subsidiary in the continent that is not going to be present and is going to watch another day. If they are the ones with the critical information or the very key details that we need to know, and if it is something that they are going to be informed and they don't really need to tell us anything particularly important, then maybe we can do it. But yes, definitely the 24-hour [workflow] is also complicated to create. The motivation of workers might be very low if they have to wake up at 3 am every week for boring meetings that they might think, “this could have been an email”.
17:05 Pablo López: Thank you.
17:10 Victoria Gálvez: I have a question, I don't know if I can just jump in. — Yeah— It's just a quick question. So, how relevant do you believe it would be to perhaps classify the types of tasks that are feasible, depending on whether the team works on an asynchronous or synchronous basis?
17:28 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: Quite interesting, I think. Because as I said, when it’s important and when it's not, I think it’s a very important decision with repercussions. Not only in the flow of information and potential success versus failure of the project, but also in the motivation of those involved. I've been in research projects in which— for this article actually, we were two people in Australia, somebody in America and I was in Europe. So whenever we had to discuss it, we suffered. We didn't meet for everything. Many times it was an email, or people discuss and then they inform through a guide about when it is more convenient to do it all at the same time and when it's okay not to, but could be quite interesting and quite useful for a company. And the very, very, very, very bottom line, of course, it's impossible to classify every single activity, and every company needs to personalize the specific situation, product, timing, training. Not like you can create a Bible in which: “This is synchronous, this is not”. But some tips, some guidance, and even better if it's in a consulting way, knowing very well my client, if I can give personalized advice on this. I think it's quite useful.
19:06 Victoria Gálvez: Thank you. 19:08 Pablo López: Great. Thank you.
19:15 Alisson Falcon: Let's go to the third question. I will read like a short part of your article. Firms will likely have to manage heterogeneous GVTs [Global Virtual Teams] including workers with a very different grasp of these new technologies (such as the Millennials or the Generation Z cohorts) but also with quite distinct motivational factors and career orientation than traditional workers. So, do you believe there is a relationship between the generational gap, the willingness towards working on GVTs and the development of cross-cultural competencies?
19:54 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: Yes, I really think so. And I think there are many articles showing how. Of course, you cannot expect every single individual to behave the same, but there are generational trends, then within those trends, you can [inaudible - 20:10], so each company should analyze its own workers. But in general, age and experience matter a lot about how each generation approaches technology, but something that is interesting is that we are actually finding when we teach younger people and in projects in which we create global virtual teams for educational purposes is that the idea that younger people are necessarily digital natives and masters of technology is not that true either. Yes, they are much more used to using computers, smartphones, and everything. So of course, they are less reluctant to work all the time with technology. But that doesn't mean necessarily that they are good at communicating information through technology. As I said, we teach a lot with younger people and of course, they are all the time using social media, Instagram, and whatever. But that doesn't mean that they can write an email with the proper elements that the rest of their team needs to understand to continue with the project. Or leisure? Yes, of course, they are much ahead of technology than people in their 50s or 60s. But, one thing is using technology for your own leisure and another thing is that you can communicate information properly. So, they are familiar with the channel, but still they need some training in how to transmit the information, even more if they are working in teams where not everybody is young. My brother is a teacher in high school and he tells me some of the expressions that young people use nowadays, and I can't imagine it in five years, working in a global virtual team, they use those expressions to tell anything to the rest of the team, but they will not be understood. And the other way around, if older teammates use expressions, metaphors, if they talk about any famous person of their time who is not famous for a younger person, they are not really speaking the same language. So in the end, a company should verify the people working in a global virtual team are able to understand each other. Otherwise, even though they are speaking English or Spanish, they might not be using the same language. Anyway, but as a matter of age, we are running some projects on creating global virtual teams, both for students at university and in high school and they are all the time using the phone. Yes, but then you see how they write an email. They have to explain to their teammates, some ideas [inaudible - 23:24] you read the email and you virtually don't know anything from what they have done, and of course, the rest of the teammates [inaudible - 23:34] can’t continue the project, as they are not receiving the elements that they need to continue with it. Yes, there are some trends, but the plan is not as simple as younger people are better. They are more willing to work with it, definitely. In general, they embrace technology more, but they also require training, a different kind of training.
24:00 Pablo López: Of course, yeah. That's very interesting. Thank you. Let's move on to the next question, please. Question four. So when we were reading your article, we were also making some connections as of our own experience because we're also a GVT. As a matter of fact, we have never met each other in person, we have always been working using these online tools. And I remember you mentioned that the research and the attention should be focusing on short-term versus long-term global virtual teams. So as of now, due to the pandemic, most teams are in fact a kind of sort of short-term global virtual team, because once everything is normal again they will return to their office. But that also means that these sort of short-term global virtual teams are now facing the challenges that all global virtual teams face. So do you consider that maybe establishing a training program that can be focused on how to succeed as a global team could be a relevant future research option?
25:17 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: You're talking to a person who decided to make a career in University. So, I hope you understand I believe in education; otherwise, I wouldn't be in the right place. Of course, I think education and any kind of training is super important for any type of profile. That, of course, doesn't mean the same kind of training, by different people. Different workers will need different kinds of training. Personally, I have taught regular university students, but also all people, handicapped people, and my experience is that training helps everybody if it's the right training and the person has the right motivation to take the training. That's why, as I said, we have this project called X-Culture. Actually the authors in this article, I know all of them because of the project X-Culture. And we basically go through universities all around the world. We put our students into a large pool, and we create random teams. For example, seven people: one from France, one from Brazil, one from New York, one from Japan. And for a semester, they have worked on a project, like an in-class project, but instead of the team, being the people in your class, you're the only one from the class, then your six teammates come from other universities and they are not with you in the country. We have run this since the year 2010. I participated in the second edition. In the first edition, I think it was six universities. And then it grew and grew and grew and grew, and now it's in more than 100 universities per semester. So now there are even two waves per semester because some universities have different calendars from others. We expanded it to high school, not only university. So definitely, I think training is important, and we try to provide this training in high school and university. If I were running a company nowadays, I would seriously consider training for my workers who are at home working alone and virtually. I could not emphasize how important I think training is if they want to use GVTs. Because it's definitely not something that is immediate. Again, it depends on my workers. [...]
28:06 Pablo López: There goes also the generational gap that you mentioned, like some people, some generations are more willing to accept these types of training. While others will be more, I don't know, will understand everything quicker than others.
28:23 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: Yeah, Yeah. And actually, I think it's very important also to see not only the need to take training but what are the motivations of the workers to take the training. I think companies should present the training not as extra work, not as something that is like an extra burden for them, but something that “look, when you master this, your life will be better, because you will be able to do things”. I mean, they need to present the advantages (if there are advantages because that's the point). If there are no big advantages in this new platform, just because it’s the latest and it’s new and it has a couple of new functionalities, maybe it’s not worth dragging the workers through the training for a very small advantage. But if there is a clear advantage, then the companies need to not only force the training but present the training as something that is going to be a win-win situation.
29:27 Pablo López: As all training should be, right?
29:32 Victoria Gálvez: I have a short comment and I guess a question at the same time. And it is that we do believe that training is fundamental, but it is curious to think about how complex what we want to train our workers in is. And that is because the nature of those are, in a way, related more to soft skills. Things like cross-cultural competencies and self-regulation. So those are things that are not taught that easily. So I just wanted to get your insight on, you know, how to approach best those types of skills that we want to train our workers in.
30:14 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: From the worker perspective or from the company perspective?
30:18 Victoria Gálvez: From the company, like, how would you design a training program?
30:22 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: Design? Well, first I should know about the kind of workers I have. It is not the same if my company's full of millennials, in which the problem is that all the time they write emails but they are not understandable, or if I have a lot of 50-60 years olds in which their communication is very proper but they write an email once every month because they don't want or something like that. So first, the profile of the workers should be analyzed to see the reason why it’s needed and then, of course, it is not the same depending on the product or on the sector. I would take probably the opposite path, I would not think about what training they need. I will try to see what is not working well, or what could work better. if I were— well it's easy to say as a professor who is not really on the day-to-day operations of the company with a million responsibilities to consider, but if I were a consultant spending time in the company to see what to propose—
31:34 Victoria Gálvez: I’m sorry to interrupt. I think the meeting is about to end. I'm sorry. I don't know if you could connect again to the same link, please.
31:41 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: Yes, sure. Yeah.
Audio [Track 2]
0:00 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: But all the attendants were saying, “Yes, it's true. When they send an email, sometimes they sound so rude, so direct like they are ordering”. And then my former student had to explain: “But that's because the translation is not perfect, they translate sometimes mechanically. Maybe in Japanese, this is in this way, but when you translate it directly in Portuguese, it doesn't sound the same. Or here, we tend to be more formal and include more politeness formulas in the emails”. If you ask people to get their opinion, many times you realize things that are not working. And actually, during that talk and by asking this question, they realized that they needed some cross-cultural training to understand Japanese culture because they didn't [understand it]. Many workers were expecting a kind of Brazilian nice way of managing the subsidiary, which obviously is not going to happen because the headquarters are going to— maybe the Japanese headquarters also should get some training on the Brazilian culture, to reduce the gap and establish the bridge. So basically asking them ‘How can we make your work easier?’
1:31 Pablo López: That's very interesting.
1:39 Victoria Gálvez: I think that also happens with this sense of authority and how that behavior related to it is like. In some cases, like, for example, the American workers, I think that they easily show their disagreement to their managers. And it's okay, like, everybody expects that. But maybe Latinos, we really, like, respect that hierarchy. I guess that could cause a cultural shock.
2:08 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: In research, we call it “power distance”. It is one of the classic cultural dimensions. And some cultures are very hierarchically oriented, and others are more “flat” in the sense that there is no better or worse, people are used to what they are used to. Cultural training is always good, and especially in global virtual teams, it’s very much needed.
2:38 Victoria Gálvez: Very interesting. Thank you.
2:40 Pablo López: Thank you, I think I think we have ran out of time, we would like to respect your time. But thank you for your time here, for the information you have given to us, it's very important for us, and it will be used as an important step to develop our company.
3:01 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: Okay. If you want to enter other questions, it's fine. Since I already took some notes. I think there were two more questions. It's okay, we can take care of them.
3:14 Flavia Cáceres: Thank you so much.
3:15 Pablo López: All right. Thank you. So moving on to question five. In number five, we talked about how political and social factors can affect global virtual teams. Since every country, every continent has its own political and social approach. Some of these can affect global virtual teams, as it affects every team, like, every working team, right? So our question is: Would you suggest further research on the factors and distinguish one global virtual team from another and shift it towards unexplored topics? As we mentioned, like short-term global virtual teams and long-term ones, how are they differentiated? Like, if we should go further for a future classification of global virtual teams by name by field? Or what are your thoughts on this topic?
4:19 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: This question was a bit difficult to reply to because making a classification of global virtual teams is not a bad idea per se. And in fact, years ago, doing classifications of different types of [inaudible 4:36] multinational, different types of leadership styles was very trending in research. Since then, I feel like research is less about classifications and more about causality, finding mechanisms to see how something increases or decreases something else or what are the reasons, the mediation, the motivations, why one factor affects another phenomenon in the company or in any other setting. But as you say, some differences such as short versus long term things, in the short term, probably you need much more training in the beginning and in the long term you have already worked, they have experience and they need something different. Yes, it could be interesting. But again, it's for compatibility. I don't know how many companies have so many different types of teams that this would be interesting for them. It could be interesting for my pure knowledge of the domain. But I don't think there are that many companies running so many global virtual teams with so many different characteristics that they might be interested but some specific characteristics such as short term vs long or others could be.
6:08 Pablo López: Because we were thinking more on this future classification as these virtual teams are now the trend, everyone is a virtual team right now. So we were thinking in these classifications, for a long term research for maybe one day come up with this kind of list of global virtual teams.
6:32 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: Nowadays, I would say that, for example, if you want to publish an article in a journal, they will be more interested in explaining how the duration of the global virtual team affects its performance, for example than in the classification per se. It looks similar, but the focus is slightly different. They will be more interested in knowing why the short term works differently than long term, and how much different, like showing how the relationship between how long the people have been working together and how affected the team is, compared to just presenting the classification of there are teams like these, there are teams like that, because one explains more the causes and the consequences focusing more on duration affecting performance, rather than, “Look, there is this classification. You have these, you have that”, but there is no link for the consequence. I don't know if I'm explaining well, the difference in focus, one is the classification per se, the other one is what triggers something that is of interest to the company, such as performance or motivation of the workers.
7:59 Victoria Gálvez: I think because the first one kind of like, it only talks about the nomenclature, like what name would you give them? Yeah, but the other one is more practical. What do you do with the types of?
8:11 Pablo López: Yeah, that's interesting. Let's go for the last question. Another part that was very interesting was the dimensions that you proposed, which were three, we were really interested in that. It is a topic that, in our opinion, should be researched more. So, our question is, now that global virtual teams are more trending and there are more global virtual teams after you wrote your article, is there a new and more complex dimension apart from the ones that you proposed in the article?
9:02 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: I would perhaps suggest, and we actually have a paper on this, the composition or the diversity of profiles, some backgrounds, in many senses, in the experience in the training received, the personality, how open-minded, how much cross-cultural intelligence in the knowledge of technology, in the motivation, in their leadership styles or in their empathy or in the many psycho metrical dimensions, how is the composition or the diversity of the people making the team. Actually, if you are interested, in the same journal as the paper you read, we have another one in 2019, I think. Actually my co-author Vasyl Taras was the co-author in the paper [the article in discussion]. He's the leader of that one. If you search in the same journal, Article 2019 with Vasyl Taras as the first author ‒we are seven, I also appear there‒ it is precisely about that. We measure how the diversity in the team are sometimes good consequences and sometimes bad consequences depending on what kind of diversity and for what kind of consequence, because it's not the same for the performance of the team, by performance we mean if the team does well the job it has to do, or if it's for the motivation of the people in the team. Sometimes diversity is good for the performance of the team, but sometimes it’s, at the same time, bad for the motivation. Or the other way around, it is very good for motivation and it’s very encouraging to work in the team, but then the problems of the differences in the members can create problems for the final outcome that that income will provide. Anyway, in that article, we discuss how different parts of diversity affect different types of outcomes from the global virtual teams. And nowadays, perhaps something that is a bit external to the global virtual team per se, but affected everybody, perhaps specific, what we would say time-variant situations, things that are because of now. For example, how much people were affected by the pandemic, by the lockdown, their levels of stress, the restrictions. Different countries have different restrictions for people; family issues, maybe the person is not sick or sick, or maybe someone can work very well because he's single or in a couple, and somebody else has little kids who have to go to school or are suffering from sickness. Maybe working from home is very complicated because of these family restrictions. Maybe these two areas could be of interest, I would say.
12:08 Pablo López: Great. That's great. We will read now the article that you mentioned, we will study it more later. It seems to be a really good article. So thank you. Thank you for that. We didn't notice that part. And with that, we can wrap up our meeting.
12:28 Pablo López: Again, thank you for your time. Thank you for your time to be here.
12:35 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: Okay. You're very welcome. Let me know how this goes in the future.
12:43 Flavia Cáceres: Yeah, of course.
12:45 Pablo López: If you need anything from a global virtual team, we're here because we're also one of them. So if you need, I don’t know, maybe a study, maybe an interview, just reach us.
12:58 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: Thank you. I'll take that into consideration. I will keep it in mind.
13:04 Pablo López: Okay, thank you very much again for your time.
13:07 Ph.D. Alfredo Jiménez: Okay. Okay. Thank you.
13:10 Victoria Gálvez: Thank you. Have a great day. Talk to you soon.
—End of Interview—
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