Video Transcript

For most of my career I sat around board room tables with all men and I was constantly saying to them, if you just did this it would be better, if you just did this from an hr perspective business it would be better. And so, most of the time you know they didn’t listen so I thought it was time for me to put my money where my mouth was. So, it was time for me to start my own business I thought I’m going to go out and start my own business and I’m going to take my own advice and so one of the things that was really important to me is that we got an office; because I wanted it to be legitimate because for me legitimate businesses had offices and so we rented an office in downtown Vancouver and hired a group of individuals that were philosophically aligned and things were great we were doing our thing and we were making great impacts on business. I took my own advice most of the time, uh and I made a million mistakes along the way and that’s okay. So, about uh I would say 2010 2011 uh we started to have some challenges with our landlord, our building had been bought three times and so we started, I started thinking about our lease was about to expire. I was trying to think about what I wanted to do in the future as far as that goes, should we renew for another five years, what should we do so I engaged the team to see what they were thinking and again the same message was we want more flexibility, we want to work from home, we want to live in different places we, we don’t want to live in the core of Vancouver. So, um there was just this perfect storm of a whole bunch of things that forced me to make a decision, and so we decided to give up our lease. And so, five years ago we took our huge server, put everything on the cloud, got everybody set up at home and we’ve been working flawlessly since 2000. And I guess it was been 2013,14 something like that or oh actually I’m sorry it was 2015. And um yeah, we never looked back. I think about the money that I’ve saved on our monthly rent, the stress that it reduced for me because of all the things that come from running an office. All the logistics that goes with that and frankly the staff were happier, everyone was happier and the goal then was well gosh let’s spend more time with our clients, let’s not spend time in the office. If we’re not at our clients as much as we could be, we’re not doing as good of a job as we could for them and so it just made sense for us. I can’t say that it’s going to make sense for every business, but along the way anyone that was interested I’ve been willing and wanting to talk to them long before COVID about the possibilities of working from home. And what that could look like and just the impact it’s had on the jota team one of our team members lives in Squamish and she used to commute in every single day from Squamish. She doesn’t do that anymore, one of them lives in Langley again would commute in and doesn’t have to do that anymore. The time and stress that has been they’ve regained because of not having to commute has been enormous. And ourability to connect with clients easily, I mean we can be anywhere we need to be it doesn’t matter where our clients are because they’re all over BC. And primarily BC but also some in Alberta and Ontario. We can be anywhere we need to be but on a day to day basis on a regular basis we work from home. The interesting thing though before COVID you would never know we work from home. We were very very careful about all our systems were set up that when you called in you wouldn’t even know that you weren’t calling us in an office. We were always very careful about background noise and there was no pets and no kids and nobody would ever know. And so it’s kind of funny now all of a sudden we’re all going. Oh it’s okay people know that we’re at home because it’s okay. So that’s been a really cool change for us, that people accept it more. Because I remember a few years back I ran into a gentleman who worked for one of the big banks, and he was working at home and he said to me he said Corey what did you do today. You know I was working from home the last couple days, he goes; oh but it’s okay just so you know I actually work well, I work hard when I’m at home and it was an interesting comment because of course that is what people’s version of working from home looks like. It is that maybe if people work from home they weren’t working hard or working as hard as they could. So what I’m encouraged to see today is that more and more people appear to be saying that hmm it’s quite possible that people work the same if not harder at home. It’s not for everybody but you need to find out who it is for and which employees it works best for.