What 2020 brought me

A personal retrospective from Kristina Bitvai, Managing Director of Eurideas

2020 was a year with a lot of challenges and changes, for everyone, both in our personal and in our professional lives. I`ve received many Happy New Year messages this year saying that hopefully 2021 will be happier than 2020. Yes, hopefully it will be.

However, for me personally, 2020 was not that bad: it meant a lot of changes, which I tried to manage and see their positive sides.

Probably the biggest challenge was to switch the entire Budapest office staff (14 people) to home office. This was an especially difficult task, as I live in Germany and travelling was not allowed while we were organizing the move. Luckily, we already had a good infrastructure for remote working, since it had been possible for the colleagues to work from home from time to time even before the pandemic. With the lockdown, we have further developed the home office concept: we moved into smaller offices, allowing colleagues to work from home 40-100% of their time. This proved a great motivator for everyone, it seems, and their commitment and quality of work became even better than before. So I would say this was a change for the better.

Another positive development was that I started to spend more time in the fresh air. Since gym was out of the question, I had to find other sport options. There is scarcely any outdoor activity more enjoyable than cycling through the Rhein Valley at weekends, sometimes visiting a vineyard too (while they were still open).

Picnicking outside also became a part of my everyday life. Having lunch on a bench in downtown Frankfurt during the week became a rather popular activity for many of us.

When the weather was not so great for outdoor activities, I had time to organize our flat. This was really nice and relaxing, and I was able to finish many tasks that I had been postponing for a long time.

Even though I always tried to find a positive side to the situation, of course there were downsides, too: the travel ban, no social life and not being able to see my parents. But I cannot complain, as I spent 2 great weeks on a Greek island during the summer, and I visited several nearby cities at the weekends. However, I was only able to travel to Budapest 4 times (instead of the regular monthly trips) to see my family and colleagues, and only once to Brussels (we also have an office there). These are not big issues, I would say, considering that other people got sick, lost their jobs, or their businesses went bankrupt.

And the most important of all, I stayed healthy. Also, my parents and the people in my immediate environment stayed healthy. Most of my friends stayed healthy. All my colleagues stayed healthy. I hope it will remain this way in the future, too.

We were so lucky that our business was not affected that much (and hopefully it will remain so) and thanks to our great marketing, sales, project management, quality assurance and linguist teams, we had quite a successful year.

I wish everyone a happier, healthy and successful 2021.

Written by Kristina Bitvai, owner and Managing Director of Eurideas Language Experts