Interview 047 with Muhammad Yasin

Listen to Black American Muhammad Yasin — from Ohio and living in Indiana — share about working as an executive in tech and the organic development of remote work for employees in his company that began in 2019. They asked questions like: “How do you collaborate when everyone’s not together?” “We found we were more productive in the six months following going home than we had ever been... I think a part of that was when you have control over nothing, you try to find something to get control over, and producing a thing or making a thing was the one thing we could all feel like we could control, while we were stuck in our house.” Muhammad recalls. “We bought a house a year in [to the pandemic]… It was interesting… So, one, the housing market really boomed…starting eight months into the pandemic… Then the actual going out and finding a place… It was challenging because, one, houses were generally going off the market within 24 hours… And, two, no one wanted to be in a space… Everyone was masked. But it was usually one realtor going into a house at a time with their client, walking through, leaving, then the next person coming in. What that means, though, is that in a suburban area you have lines literally out into the street and cars up and down the road with people cued up and waiting to walk into the house… So a lot of pressure if you find something, cause you know when you walk out there’s like 20 people literally standing outside about to go in there and you don’t know what’s going to happen.” Muhammad remembers. “I will note that we are recording on a milestone day for Covid… Today they loosened more of the masking guidelines, including on airplanes.” Muhammad notes.