While most of us were either grounded or avoiding business travel in the past two years, Jeff Rogers chartered another course. Jeff, a Senior Manager on our Platform Marketing team and native of Santa Cruz, California, typically works from home in scenic Bend, Oregon, 400 miles, as the crow flies, north of our Silicon Valley headquarters.
When Jeff wants to visit his family or workmates, rather than hop on a commercial flight or drive 10 hours to our offices, Jeff pilots his own plane.
“With so much uncertainty around traveling during the pandemic and our number one goal of keeping our newborn healthy, being able to fly ourselves so our family could meet our baby boy is an absolute blessing.” he says.
What caught our eye was how easily he plugged into team meetings and didn’t skip a beat cruising at 150 knots above 11,500 feet in his Beechcraft Debonair.
“The freedom to fly and having the ability to keep my professional priorities moving while I’m in the air is a gamechanger,” Jeff says. “I try to schedule my flights around work calls including an 8:15 a.m. stand-up for a project that’s going on now,” he explains. At first, he opened his laptop simply to clean out his inbox along the three-hour flight. “Once you’re up at cruising altitude, you really just need to monitor your critical gauges and communicate with Air Traffic Control, so the pilot workload is relatively low compared to other phases of flight. As long as I have cell service, which I surprisingly do for a majority of the three-hour flight, I can conduct full-on video meetings as if I’m at my home office.”
You may be wondering, as we were, how does Jeff pull that off, exactly? The short answer is that he configures the aircraft’s autopilot, connects his laptop to his cellular hotspot, and then fires up RingCentral Message Video Phone (MVP®). The first time he tried this, his team could both see and hear him, but he quickly had second thoughts. “I wasn’t sure how well it would work at first. I ended up turning my video off eventually because it was obvious the unique office setting was a bit of a distraction for the team. I guess you could say there isn’t much need for a virtual background at 11,500 feet.”
The more complete answer is that Jeff was bred for flying — he’s a third-generation pilot. Both of his grandfathers were pilots, one of whom was a Boeing 747 cargo captain. Jeff’s other grandfather began flying out of the Watsonville Municipal Airport in 1985 and purchased a somewhat newer model single-engine Beechcraft Debonair that they dubbed “Debby”. When Jeff does fly south in his Debonair, which he nicknamed “Deborah”, he’s also able to spend time with his father at his hangar in Watsonville. Jeff and his dad flew in formation for the first time during the pandemic. “As my wife would tell you, I dream a lot about aviation, and can honestly say that I never dreamed I’d be able to experience a formation flight with my dad,” Jeff says, noting that his wife recently began training for her pilot’s license. He and his wife welcomed their first child into the world in December of 2020.
His teammates aren’t sure that Jeff realizes what an inspiration his in-flight meetings are for them, even with the camera switched off on his RingCentral MVP connections. #WFA — work from air — means you can theoretically work from anywhere.
