In the early morning hours, long before tourists conquer Stockholm's Old Town, Dilan goes for a run through Gamla Stan. Shortly after, she sits at her laptop to begin her workday. Upon finishing work, she meets friends at the trendy Coco & Carmen for dinner and drinks. And on the weekend, she has planned a trip to the Stockholm Archipelago.
Vacation vibes amidst everyday work life. Sounds almost too good to be true, doesn't it? But only almost. Because for more and more people, this is becoming reality – including our colleague Dilan Gül, Talent Acquisition Consultant at Coopers. It's called workation.
What is workation?
Workation is a portmanteau of the terms work + vacation = workation, where you go about your business as usual, but you're neither in the office nor work from home, but from somewhere else in the world.
Accordingly, workation combines the two supposed opposites of work and free time, i.e. vacation. If you're on vacation, you barely think about work (although some probably dream of a vacation while at work, now and then).
Digital nomads have led the way: Basically, all you need to get your work done is a stable, safe, and fast internet connection. Many of us came to this conclusion last year, as the pandemic got them to work from home exclusively from one day to the next.
The Corona pandemic catapulted modern work concepts like remote working and working from home into unimagined dimensions. The technical prerequisites are established now, and experience shows that collaboration also works remotely. It makes no difference whether you dial into a meeting from home or from a coworking space in Brazil. At least not for the work per se, yet it does for the employee: travelling the world while working as usual, both at the same time. Before Corona, that was nothing but a dream!
Workation is good for the soul– and for the motivation!
It just feels good to move work to a beautiful place temporarily, and to experience something new. Glancing over the laptop to see turquoise water sparkling, enjoying culinary adventures, or drifting through world metropolis. It's exciting, inspiring and, not least, motivating.
Unfortunately, workation is not suitable for every profession. A cashier or a doctor cannot stow their work into a suitcase to unpack it elsewhere and continue like nothing happened. Freelancers, self-employed and more and more employees whose work is primarily computer-based have the privilege of a workation. This includes jobs like computer scientists, designers, online marketers – as well as Coopers employees.
We at Coopers are certain that the workation concept perfectly matches our modern and openminded company culture. We sustain a strong relationship of trust among our team and each employee has a lot of personal responsibility – regardless of the location of work. We are convinced that the happier our Coopers team is, the more motivated and productive they are. A win-win situation for everyone involved.
Therefore, we officially introduced four weeks of workation to all our employees. Dilan was the first to make use of it and was very excited about her workation time in Stockholm. She appreciated the possibility to combine working and travelling. And even though she kept up her regular workload, she was able to recharge her batteries and returned well rested.
Do you want to benefit from our workation model, too and become a part of our amazing Coopers family? Send us your application, we are currently hiring.
Your Coopers Team
PS: Stay tuned – we talked to Stephan Mahler from Procloud about workation. He and his team have been practicing it for several years. The interview with him will be published shortly on the Coopers blog.
Photo by Avi Richards via Unsplash
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