“So what does that mean that your company is virtual? Is your paycheck virtual too?” Those were the first questions my dad asked me when I told him I was applying to work at Cloud For Good. After assuring him the paycheck would be very real, I started to explain to him the wonders of the cloud and the idea that working from home is not some passing trend.
For those who have lived with the routine of early morning alarms, showers, coffee, and the dreaded commute, working from home might be a hard concept to grasp, never mind the idea of an entire company working from various parts of North America. So is it really all just people in their pajamas, working on the couch?
Not exactly. I won’t say I’ve never stayed in my pjs all day and worked from the couch, but it’s not an everyday occurrence. My commute to my office is less than one (1) minute and I always have a supply of fresh coffee that actually tastes good. I have a dedicated office in my house and a really cool standing desk that I built myself (thank you Ikea hacks). I get to start my day making a nice healthy breakfast, which I eat while I scan my email and plot out my course of action for the day.
Monday mornings start off with the East Coast group sipping coffee and posting fun pics of their weekend, which rolls into the Central Time Zone group of people, which then leads into the West Coasters waking up and all of us heading into our daily group meeting. Yup, I said daily group meeting. It’s so nice to see all of your coworkers faces, especially when everyone is always smiling (yes, we are ALWAYS smiling). It’s pretty easy to be happy when you didn’t have to sit in hours of traffic to get to the office. During our Monday morning meeting we talk about our goals for the week, which we come full circle with on Friday’s morning call where we give our professional and personal work highlight of the week. It’s great when you accomplish your set goal and everyone cheers and claps, but if you fell a bit short you have an entire support group to encourage you to get back on track.
There is such a support system at Cloud For Good, that you never feel like you are alone, even if you
>are physically alone most of the day in your house. We use a myriad of apps to keep in touch from group chats to video conferencing, so you’re able to get all your “water cooler” time in and still be productive. There’s funny YouTube videos, baby pics, dog videos and plenty of chat about the latest Netflix binge everyone completed. Oh, and when you need to just be heads down and power through work, you just power it all down and get to it – it’s the virtual shutting of the office door. Talk about the greatest collection of smarty pants? You have access to one of the best Salesforce Hiveminds around! Have a question about a flow, or writing a process, creating a visualforce page or integrating a third party app? There’s always someone, usually more than one person, who can help you out with that. It’s not just helping where they just tell you the steps to complete an action, they teach you. It’s an understatement to express how wonderfully amazing everyone is with sharing their knowledge; we all want each of our team members to succeed, grow and be the best. It really is the Best Team Ever!
One of the greatest feelings is when you hear clients talk about how thrilled they are with their implementation, or how a new feature you created for them is furthering their mission. Watching clients embrace a Salesforce solution that enables them to have a greater reach or better accomplish their mission is the reason we’re all doing this! I love hearing about all our clients success and the solutions my colleagues created to satisfy interesting business requirements. We’re all “do-gooders” that are a little nerdy and love to share and teach others what we know about technology, so we can help make the world a little better.
And I shouldn’t forget to mention all the fun we have when we get together in person! World Tours, User Group Meetings, general travel that just happens to put us within driving distance of a colleague (for dinner or coffee), all of these times result in hugs and loads of laughs, not to mention a few selfies to share with everyone.
Check out some more awesomeness from my team:
