The Coronavirus has brought many, many terrible things which, of course, can never balance the positive. However, we can dust off the adage that "every cloud has a silver lining". This saying applies to all those who wanted to draw a lesson learned from it all.

Undoubtedly, there are many lessons, lots of them! On a personal, social, environmental, economic, humanitarian and professional level. This crisis has taught us a lot about ourselves and how we face problems, challenges and difficulties. As people, as a society and, in terms of our work, as teams.

At Emergya, this has translated into rediscovery. This situation has also touched us on occasions when we have gone through bad times. However, when people have common goals, values and a similar way of seeing things, it is easier to overcome any barriers. In Emergya, we also learned other lessons from this, such as that we are not afraid of change and that responsibility and commitment do not depend on where we are or the timetable we keep, but on our work commitment and that of the people who make up our team.
 
Coronavirus did not catch us in our nappies: remote work was already a standard system in the company.  Generally speaking, we had only tried a pilot, for a few months several years ago, with one day a week (Fridays) of "empty office". However, on that occasion, it did not take off. Although, during all this time, for those who lived in other provinces, and were far from the headquarters in Seville, remote work was the norm, so that they only made occasional visits to the office.

The rest of the team worked in a mixed way. We were coming to the office two or three days a week, staying at home when we needed to due to work-life balance issues, specific needs or just to concentrate better to finish some work.

This stage has shown us that we all can telework simultaneously and that performance does not have to drop following this model. On the contrary, performance, in general, is likely to be better by giving us the freedom to choose our workspace. Now the team is self-managed and has left the common spaces for just that, the common. At Emergya, we have called this Presence of Value. This consists of promoting offices as spaces for coexistence, which represents an added value compared to if we did the same at home. 

And, what are these things? We can think of a few, such as job interviews, welcoming people, mentoring people who are just starting their professional careers, retrospectives and team dynamics, problem management, monitoring and attention to people, etc. In short, everything that gains from the use of the office as a place to live together. In brief, everything that wins if that job is done in person. Those tasks that, by doing them in a face-to-face team, provide something different. We can do everything else in the office if we want or if we feel better, but it will not be necessary.