I Started A New Job A Year Ago, Just As The Pandemic Hit

This month, pundits and politicians are talking about the one-year anniversary of the COVID ’19 outbreak in this country, reflecting on the arc of the disease, the race for a vaccine and a cure, and the toll on families and the economy. My COVID story is a little different. My first day as an Oracle employee was one year ago on March 19 and corresponded almost exactly to the shutdown of company facilities worldwide. I spent that first day working alone, from my house in Atlanta.

In the year since I have never been inside a physical Oracle office. I’ve never been near an airport or boarded an airplane. I did meet my new boss once at a socially distanced dinner, where I got to use my shiny new corporate credit card for the first and last time. I have still never met any of my team members — or the rest of the marketing, sales, and product development teams I work with remotely every day. Most significantly, I have never talked to our valued customers in person, a very strange state of affairs for a seasoned road warrior like myself. 

I vividly remember my first virtual video call with my new team. I tried to set an inspiring tone and share some bold ideas, all while someone in the group forgot to press the mute button. He completely upstaged me while we listened to him soothe a crying child in a lyrical foreign language. I wasn’t quite sure how to resolve the situation, but someone must have messaged our coworker because he eventually pressed “mute.” A colleague later introduced me to Zoom’s “mute all” feature.

We’ve come a long way since then, learning how to successfully negotiate virtual meetings while appreciating the extra time we have in our personal lives by not commuting to the office. I’m very proud of all we’ve accomplished together:

• Last November, we hosted our first Oracle Live for CX event, featuring our chairman, Larry Ellison, and drawing an impressive audience.
• Then in February, we launched our first Oracle Live Innovation Day, a series of events featuring the clever product enhancements we deliver to our customers four times a year through the cloud.
• We got a jump on International Women’s Day in March by sponsoring events hosted by Women in Revenue and by our own Oracle Women’s Leadership group.
• We continued to hire and promote a diverse group of team members to insure a vibrant future for our team.
• We celebrated several impressive analyst ratings for our products.
• And we applied new creative uses of our own Advertising CX digital solutions to market more effectively in an all-digital all the time world.

Whenever we do get back to normal – whatever that is, and whatever it looks like – we’re sure to carry into the future some of the lessons we learned about our professional lives, our personal lives, and the importance of the balance we need to maintain between the two. I also know I will be forever appreciative of the hard work our team puts in day in and day out, on behalf of our customers.

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