Office Hours: The New Normal
Local Foreigner founder Alexandra Hanover eats, sleeps, and breathes business. In Office Hours, she sets aside some time to talk about her very favorite one.
As I sit here at my kitchen table, which now doubles as my full-time home office and part-time puzzle assembly space, I look at my Microsoft Teams app and see 12 blinking dots: a traffic-light display of starts and stops. Jordy and AC blink red, their calendars tell me they’re on a call about blog content. Libby is green, which is helpful, considering I have a question about this month’s invoices. Brooke’s yellow. She’s available, but I know she picks up her son from camp every afternoon around this time. I’ll ping her when she’s back. The little dots are one of my favorite things about our new normal. I don’t know how to describe what I like so much about these indicators of availability, but watching them change from red, to yellow, to green, and back again, seems to give some kind of tangible credibility to our work. We’re not together, but we’re still here, still a team, still moving forward.
At the beginning of 2020, The Local Foreigner had a lot of things to look forward to: a 5th birthday in February, a team trip to Italy in April, and a partner retreat in May. After a successful 2019, 2020 looked like it would be a monumental year. Client itineraries spanned the globe, from summer villa rentals in Europe, to river cruises down the Nile, to safaris across South and East Africa. No one could have predicted what happened instead, at least, no one would have wanted to. I wouldn’t be an honest business owner if I said this year has been successful: our industry was dealt a jaw slacking punch from which it will take months to recover. But challenging times call for innovative thinkers, hard workers, and opportunists – I am fortunate to work closely with 12.
Almost immediately, COVID imposed structural changes on our team. Overnight people were cast into different roles as company priorities shifted and new needs emerged. I’ve always known this team was dynamic, but its collective display of diverse talents has never been more apparent. Jordy, our sales consultant, put her creative left-brain to good use to write all of the content for our new blog. Tati, our travel coordinator accustomed to booking hotels and securing dinner reservations, showed off next-level attention to detail by inputting every single team scouting report into our CRM. After working closely with me for months developing the final stages of our new custom itinerary builder, Libby, our office manager extraordinaire, created a virtual compendium of internal trainings for the team to use. And Alex Creange, our Content Manager, used her social savvy to help rebrand our website and design our inaugural newsletter. I’ve watched Brooke host live forums, Barkley conduct virtual tours, and Alex Erdman manage our growing team of ICs, who continually prove to be invaluable assets of our team. I keep hearing people refer to this COVID period as a down time – and it is – but we’re not spiraling to the ground here, we’re diving headfirst into change.
When we began working from home in March, none of us thought we’d still be clocking in from our bedrooms in July. Our team hasn’t been all together for more than four months, but we have an unwavering sense of team spirit that bridges the gap of physical distance. Our workday has always started at 9:30 AM, but now, instead of coming into the office and heading off to our individual desks, we start each morning with a team video call. We have a thematic agenda of office related discussion topics from the sales pipeline to social media, but we also talk about what we’re binging on Netflix and ordering for takeout. Often, I look at my screen and see 12 little squares erupting in fits of laughter. Twelve green dots, signed-in, sound on.