Companies around the globe scrambled to make work life productive for their employees once health and government mandates instructed offices to close. While the Internet became awash in work from home advice for employees, it was the IT admins who had to quickly enable their workforces to be productive, secure, and fully equipped to mimic the office environment at their kitchen table.

Our world has been turned upside down by COVID-19. Whether it's strategically planning our grocery run decontamination process, or trying to keep the kids quiet for even one single moment while on a conference call — things are different. One very evident difference is the change in the way we meet with each other. And one technology enabling this change is Zoom.

Bearer's co-founders Guillaume and Cédric are big advocates for remote work. Both have written about the advantages and challenges in the past on the Bearer Blog, but today I want to share some thoughts from our team on what it's like working for a distributed, fully remote company. A few main trends came up. Some expected, and a few surprising.

A couple of weeks ago, I attended the P9 Founder Summit in Malta organized by Point Nine Capital. One of the workshops was about remote work. Soon after, I led a webinar for the #p9family and I thought I would share our experience at Bearer thus far.

At Bearer, we’ve been crafting a remote-first company since day one. Not only are we remote-first, we are, in fact, a multi-regional, multi-cultural, multi-lingual, remote-first company, something even more unique! Since we’ve been running the company this way for more than a year now, we took this as a good opportunity to reflect on the culture and process we've built, hopefully answering some questions you may have about remote-first companies too.