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Business trip: Tel Aviv-Barcelona
Dates: March 8-13, 2021
Dates: March 8-13, 2021
What was the main reason you wanted to travel for business after you got the vaccine?
What was seeing and meeting your teammates like? What did you miss about these interactions?
What I hadn’t realized in all these months of lockdown was just how depressing I found this whole thing. Day in and day out, coming into the same room, and powering up my computer just to talk to digital people took its toll. I woke up in my hotel so excited and motivated to go into the office. I loved seeing people I talk to everyday on Zoom, in person. It was funny to me how surprised everyone was by my height. As a tall person, I’m quite used to having a big physical presence in the room, it was very much part of my identity. I wasn’t aware how much that was not coming across on Zoom. Everyone was so surprised when I walked in! I wonder how many people have felt the same thing…
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I was hungry for human interaction. I’m a people person, and it just wasn’t enough for me to talk to people through a screen, closed in my home office day after day. I think that when you engage with people in person, you kind of become a “better you”. And of course you see the “better them”. You can’t really appreciate people’s full charisma and presence on digital communication tools.I don’t get the dose of interaction I need when I’m at home like that. Especially not when it comes to building personal relationships with the people I work with. When I came to Barcelona, I went out for drinks with my team, went on a rural offsite with the C-suite, and even went for a home-cooked dinner at a colleague’s house. It was great!
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On a more professional level, do you feel like you accomplished more in person than you could on Zoom?
I felt like Superman! I was never really afraid of the virus for myself, though. Of course, I worried for others and had heard of people having a really difficult time. But it wasn’t something that I worried about for myself.That being said, I didn’t want to catch (or spread) the virus. I always respected all the rules for the safety of everyone. But now, although I still do that, it feels different. It feels more like it did before. People also felt more comfortable around me, so some of them even took off their masks when we were together. It was amazing to finally see people’s faces, read their expressions, see them laugh. I mean, you can read people’s emotions through their eyes, but there’s something about seeing their mouth and their whole face that brings a more human quality to everything.
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