“There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen.”
-Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
I write this from an office frozen in time. It was March 9, 2020 when we closed the office for a dry run at working from home. Three of us arrived that morning to sanitize, put wipes in ziplock bags, and make sure we had cleaning supplies on hand so our team could return safely to the office.
The closure felt temporary and permanent at the same time. While uncertainty permeated the narrative, there were a few things we did know. We knew Covid-19 was in our community. We knew businesses and schools were closing. We knew our team needed to be home to take care of themselves and their families. We knew toilet paper was hard to find.
But we thought we would be back in the office soon.
How naive we were to think at the worst we might be out of the office one month, no way out past July. It’s almost the end of March 2021 and the world’s most expensive PO Box, the space also known as the office, continues to collect mail and packages while our team continues to work from home.
Our work didn’t stop and life didn’t either. We still had clients to serve, projects to complete, software to launch, babies to birth and kids to school. We looked for the opportunity in the challenges and planned virtual happy hours, delivered beer and blankets, and spread cheer in as many ways as we could think of.
At the start of pandemic we coined the phrase “the infinite pivot” only to realize that while a pandemic sharpens the focus on the need to pivot quickly, it’s also exactly what we’ve been doing at SiteCrafting for 23 years. We are built for change. We put the welcome mat out for uncertainty. We embrace the unknown.
The pandemic has sharpened our focus to this end. It’s also reminded us that there is nothing more important than people. From our clients and partners to our teammates, we are all people. People staring down a deadly pandemic, people being parents and ad hoc educators while being full-time employees. People working from home away from the human contact of their office mates. People working to do the right thing always.
We are people who do not know what card the pandemic is going to play next, but we do know that we have each other. We have each other to lean on, to draw strength from and to provide strength for.
I’m proud of our team. We’ve had weeks that felt like decades and yet there are places in our office that feel frozen in time. The last year has brought challenges that we’ve embraced as opportunities. We have once again proven ourselves to be resilient and ready for everything that comes our way.
