07/28/2026
ITNAmerica went remote in March 2020 when Covid hit, and we have never looked back. A couple of really good things happened right out of the gate. Our rent shrank from $3,000 a month to $850 because we needed a much smaller space, but our labor pool expanded from 316,000 in our greater Portland, Maine, location to 169,000,000 in the entire US. We now have full-time staff in Texas, Maryland, Michigan, North Carolina and California, as well as Maine. We all work remotely, but we do keep an office for certain purposes and go there whenever necessary. We are not anti-office, but we sure are remote work converts.
Covid did not include remote work instructions, so we made our own cow path. We installed Microsoft Teams and decided to have an all hands meeting every morning from 9:00 to 9:30 Eastern time. Our morning meeting is one of the best decisions we have ever made. It is remarkable how well we have grown to know each other and to work collaboratively with only a Teams meeting for face-to-face communication. When we do meet in person once a year, people say things like, “Oh, my goodness, I had no idea you are so tall.” Our morning virtual meeting is easy to attend for everyone on the East coast, okay for folks in Central time, a push for people in Mountain time, and a strain for staff in Pacific time.
We have one very valuable staff member in California, our Research Manager. He tried to attend morning meetings, but he has little guys who wake up early and want his attention. At first, he tried working from the garage, where theoretically they could not find him, but if you have ever tried to hide from a sleepy 5-year-old who wants his daddy, you know this is a losing game. Little ones have homing devices called crying that work perfectly on adults trying to concentrate and attend a meeting without disturbing others.
ITNAmerica has a 100% inviolable family first policy, so the challenge for us became how to include in the morning group discussions our Research Manager, whose work-day begins at 11:00am Eastern time after his little ones head to school by 8:00am Pacific time.
We decided to record all our morning meetings so he can listen to them. He then loads the audio into an AI-powered transcription and analysis tool, with instructions to summarize the call and focus on anything connected to his name into action items. The process is fast and efficient, and it works really well. Today, it conveyed a complex problem and suggested solution our Research Manager needs to address that we brought up at morning meeting.
We are developing a dashboard that reports on the progress of every project and every department in our organization. It will take a few months and a lot of reporting to build, but it will serve us well as we use our available data and technology to regularly learn how effectively we are working and make course corrections. The complex problem and solution we discussed at morning meeting is important for the work we are doing with America’s Volunteer Driver Center (AVDC), an ITNAmerica program running a national campaign to recruit 150,000 volunteer drivers by changing the way American’s think about and support transportation for older people and people with mobility challenges.
Here’s the problem we ran into that our Research Manager can solve, even though he was not at the meeting. We are recruiting nonprofit transportation providers and volunteer drivers at the same time. This is a big country. Sometimes we have an AVDC enrolled transportation provider in a community with no AVDC enrolled volunteers; sometimes we have a volunteer in a community with no enrolled providers. Sometimes we need to recruit more volunteers in a certain area, and sometimes we need to recruit more providers. Our Research Manager has designed a solution that uses ArcGIS Business Analyst, donated to us by Esri, to solve this kind of problem for AVDC. Using our Rides in Sight database of all transportation providers in the U.S., together with our AVDC portals for volunteers and transportation providers, he maps available volunteers and available providers together to identify the gaps we need to fill.
Without attending the meeting, after packing two lunches and getting the little guys dressed and out the door, he solved the problem by 11:00am Eastern time, thanks to Teams, AI, and ArcGIS. He does join morning meeting every Friday when we all take turns leading Fairly Fun Friday. That is the day we are all challenged to be creative when it is our turn to run the meeting and come up with a prompt that makes us all laugh, invent something new, answer a curious quiz or challenges us to remember something from our childhood. It helps us get to know each other virtually. It feels like we are all right there together, and we are.
