We had been thinking about moving more of our working tools online to allow more flexibility for our employees, and allow them to work remotely.

We were hesitant whether to do it, since we didn’t want to lose the spirit of "team". We are firm believers in face-to-face communication, and always thought that working remotely was going to make us leave behind the interaction, the richness of being together in one big office.

We also thought that meeting with clients was also a great opportunity to discuss, to be able to see their faces and reactions in real time when presenting, and always have an opportunity to shift the course of a presentation depending on the look on their faces.

Although we have had remote offices (as far as 4000 miles away) for more than 2 decades, it has never been easy to work with remote teams. Time zones, weather, holidays, have all added to the already problematic of being in two countries.

And then Covid-19 came, and swept away all my beliefs.

Someone said that this pandemic has made technology evolve in 6 months what should have happened in 6 years. I cannot agree more with those words.

We have been working remotely for the past 6 months, not meeting once (in person), but now meeting daily through Google Meet, Skype and Zoom.

We had to adapt, forced by the situation, to this new online mode.

We now meet everyday, discuss our duties online in a 30 minute meeting, everyone is present, on time, and most of us have breakfast while planning the day together. Once caveat: we do not turn the cameras on until later in the day, when our faces are up to the occasion!

We began to get into each other's personal life, in a way, by listening to what’s going on behind our backs while we meet. We now know when someone's dog is hungry, when children want to play or misbehave or are on vacation, and contractors are remodelling homes, but you know what, we still love it!

During this quarantine some newspapers stopped printing, offices remained empty (and not only our offices, but our clients also), but work has been going on mostly unchanged. We are as productive as we were before all this started, and probably even more.

Maybe we already were ready to be 100% digital, but were afraid to try…