What Facebook has learned about leading and engaging remote workers

In her role as head of the Americas for Workplace from Facebook, Christine Trodella has a unique vantage point.

Working with clients and her own teams in the U.S., Canada and Latin America, she has had a front-row seat to how organizations of all kinds have been using technology to adapt—and cope—during the pandemic. Those lessons have been profound, with many leaders learning just how well their teams are able to function, onboard new technology, and in many cases, increase productivity while working remotely.

Trodella sees it as a “watershed moment” that could normalize remote work for companies large and small.

She’s seen the transformation in her own workplace.

“Facebook’s been a really interesting thing to observe going through this,” she says. “We are a company that creates all these tools and platforms that allow people to communicate—however, we were not a remote work company before COVID. We had offices in every major city in the world.”

That’s changing as the COVID-19 crisis has revealed just how ready these tools that Facebook and others have developed are for their moment in the sun. Teams who had tools in place were able to seamlessly transition to remote work overnight when the pandemic closed offices in March of 2020.