Yesterday, I used up the last one of the box of 48 sachets of yeast that I bought in bulk in March 2020 as COVID hit, and South Africa entered its first hard lockdown. When I chucked the cardboard box into the recycling, it felt symbolic. Yes, that sachet was past its expiry date. And yes, it still worked.
Around the same time, we made the hard but necessary decision to shut down our Umuzi.org studios in downtown Johannesburg and send our learners and our team home. We didn’t have a plan. We weren’t sure if we’d be back in 6 weeks or 12 weeks or a year. Our priority in that moment centred on keeping our learner community safe and enabling their learning. But we certainly intended to return. By June we had relinquished our lease and four years later, we are forever changed - a fully remote-by-choice organisation.
There are many reasons for that, which I won’t go into now but in 2024, we have a team of 40+ people, working across 6 countries and our learner numbers have grown exponentially. We are also on a continual quest to refine and define what being remote-by-choice means for us and to find intentional ways to create alignment and connection in our team. We know that this is key for us if we are to continue building what is now a global organisation. Instead of blocked toilets, queuing for the urn and water outages in Jeppestown, we now battle timezone differences, internet connectivity in multiple locations and live-in families who don’t take our meetings quite as seriously as we do. Aside from anything else, it has certainly reinforced Umuzi’s internal culture of embracing one another as whole people with full and diverse lives, as opposed to 9-5 employees.
Being fully remote doesn’t mean we don’t see each other in real life - just that we have to be intentional about the who, how and where of those moments. And we are. This year, for our annual Umuzi week (Uweek) we spent 3 full days in nature together, reflecting on our strategy, our growth, values and challenges. We cooked together, laughed and cried and left dirty, stretched and exhausted. But the alignment and connection was just what we needed to help us prepare and build for another big year.
This team blows me away every day.
