A frozen time.

Once upon a time… mmm no. It doesn’t sound like a nice beginning for a blog post (damn, despite my previous articles I am not a good blog writer yet): this is not a fairy tale. Let’s start with “Some days ago” (sounds better? time is running out, and I have to draft this post by the end of the pandemic!). Okay, so: the other day, 9 months after we closed our offices due to the COVID-19, I made a footstep into our headquarters. What did I feel? Nostalgia, a very romantic feeling. Everything was exactly where I remembered: the scent of the rosemary in front of the entrance, the plants in the office greener than ever; also the password of the alarm was still the same (lucky me!).I sat down at my desk, and my eyes noticed one strange thing: the calendar on each desk was left open on March 2020.Time in there seemed to have stopped the day we left the office to start working from home. It looked like I was dreaming a dream, as Shakespeare loved to say, with the very strange sensation to be awake and float in reality.  A place without time, like Neverland.

“Would you like an adventure now, or would like to have your tea first?”

Fortunately, at Imagicle, we happened to work from home even before the pandemic, so we didn’t feel like the Lost Boys rescued by the famous little boy, Peter Pan, born from the pen of Sir James Matthew Barrie (today I’m obsessed with English Literature, have you noticed?).  Imagicle did not leave us at the mercy of storms. We didn’t even have time to finish a cup of tea as we were already embracing this new adventure, and in the Imagicle way: bravely, like a little child who fights a fierce pirate (actually, we have some traits in common with the guy).Of course, we found some issues on the way, but we adapted fast to this new world as befits a young crew with a high survival spirit. After a short time, we accommodated ourselves very comfortably:

• we arranged our home office, taking our working instrument home, chairs included (you can’t say we don’t respect distances!);
• we scheduled virtual meetings beyond the workflows;
• Imagicle gave us a smart working voucher for conforming well in this contemporary Neverland.

 “To live will be an awfully big adventure”, said Peter, and we agree. Pandemic isn’t a joke, but opportunities arise from difficulties, and we’ve always loved challenges.

“I came to listen to the stories.”

Some time ago, we surveyed the team to understand if our grown-up Lost Boys have some issues. To the question: “on a scale of 1 to 10, how much do you feel the need to go back to work from the office?“, the average response was 4.8/10. Another interesting data is the response to the question: “on a scale of 1 to 10, how well do you feel working from home?“, with an average of 8.3/10.  However, we know this is the present, and you know we always look to the future. Now essential for a safety matter, working from home will become Imagicle’s new normal even after the pandemic.We’ll maintain this new system: indeed, we will try to improve it. If you think about it, from 6 headquarters (Massarosa, Magenta, Treviso, Miami, Dubai, and Riyadh), we built almost 90 new offices, one for each Lost Boy who is actually not so lost. We can still use our offices following a security protocol, but we feel good to carry on this modality.As a matter of fact, thinking about the future, 65% of us think of working from home three or more days per week.

“Second star to the right and straight on ’til morning.”

We brought our solutions to the Cloud, right near Neverland.We allowed trying our apps to implement and improve smart working practices worldwide, not only for us, and we are assisting customers committed in the fight against the pandemic to find solutions quickly and efficiently. When the COVID-19 emergency is over, we want more Lost Boys that will be allowed to work from anywhere. Space is no longer a problem: from the sky, we see no borders. Only time is our limit, for now, like a ticking crocodile: time is chasing us, and we want to ride it. We’ll work from home, from a cave, from a pirate ship, from Indian camping and, why not, from a mermaid lagoon: digital nomads Lost Boys.We are a company made by people who love what they do, as a child who plays its preferred game. Peter said that when the first baby laughed for the first time, its laugh broke into a thousand pieces, and they all went skipping about: that was the beginning of fairies. Fairies make magic. Magic makes Imagicle. So take your happy thoughts, a little fairy powder, and join this wonderful crew, wherever you want. And now, let me turn the calendar to the right date.Maybe it would have been better to start with “Once upon a time…”.