Work & Travel — the initiative that boosted our team productivity while exploring foreign lands.

Howdy from the Dev__Labs team. My name is Pres, People & Operations Manager at Dev Labs. We are a full-stack tribe of 24 people — bunch of FE/JS guys, bunch of back-enders, native mobile devs, two UI designers and a professional culinary Chef, based in Varna, Bulgaria. We enjoy sharing knowledge and experiences, which can bring value and awareness to other teams around the globe. Having in mind that in the next few paragraphs I would like to share with you one of our more recent adventures — the Work & Travel initiative.

What is work and travel and how this idea was born?

For a second year now, the company is investing an amount from the annual profit in different kind of initiatives, which aim to boost the overall happiness and atmosphere in the team. Last year we decided to organise for our team members to attend conferences abroad, matching their tech stack and interests. You can check recaps from a few conferences — Fullstack Fest Barcelona and DroidCon Berlin. Overall our expectations for the conferences were that they will offer possibilities for networking opportunities and insights for the biggest upcoming trends in JS/Back-end or Mobile development in the tech world. However the feedback was that neither of these were accomplished. One of the few pros was the adventure element — group of people from the team were together abroad, away from our headquarters in Varna.

Being aware of that, this year, together with both our CTO and the Founder of the company we sat down for a several brainstorming sessions to came up with a new initiative for 2018. Not long after we agreed on the same thing — why not combine the positive from the conference conquest last year — the adventure element abroad, with the possibility to relocate the office for a period of time. By mixing these ingredients Work & Travel was born.

The idea behind Work & Travel was to get rid of the everyday home-work-home routine cycle, in which most of us have deep-dived and this is resulting to more-or-less having a regime of being not very creative and productive person. Moreover we wanted to change the surrounding and the environment radically, that’s why we decided to choose a place which is not “driving distance” away from our HQ.

How did we chose the city to host our team and what was the process of destination selection ?

After several sessions together, all three of us (me, the CTO and the Founder) proposed а list of possible destinations. Having in mind that we were planning the Work & Travel to take place after the summer season, in which everyone have personal plans, priority number one was to select a destination, in which the weather should be nice during the November — December period. After we agreed on that, automatically a lot of possible destinations in Europe were scratched. One favourite was rising among the others and this was Valencia. With 300 sunny days during the year, a lot to see in the town and a lot of options for coworking spaces, with unanimous decision, Valencia was the chosen city for the pilot Work & Travel.

Organising the logistics — booking coworking space and apartments

Shortly after sharing the news to the team (approximately 5 months earlier so anyone can plan in advance his time) I’ve handled the logistics. With high priority was the co-working space, in which we had to settle and work for nearly two weeks. Based on that we chose two AirBnb apartments to be 5–10 minutes walking distance away from where we had to work. Flights booked, coworking space was reserved and we were awaiting for D-day to come.

How we spent most of the time

Once we arrived at Valencia, which was quite late, and accommodated at our apartments, we had a good rest from the nearly 16 hours long journey. On the next day we went to the coworking space. Here is the moment to share couple of thoughts about this lovely place. We spent most of our time at Vortex Coworking. It was absolute pleasure to be part of this awesome community, lead by its founder — Cristina. We received a super warm welcome by her and the whole community. No wonder one of the slogans of Vortex is “Community is the Software, Coworking is the Hardware”.

Cristina gave us a quick tour of the space and the outside area and recommended us places in cases we want to grab something to eat or drink. She also organised a welcoming breakfast on which we were given the opportunity to introduce ourselves and share were we come from and what love to do. The coworking space itself is not very close to the “city centre” or the old town of Valencia, but it was super close (literally one traffic light away) to the harbour and the beach side, which was ideal for walks. Unfortunately we were quite unlucky with the weather, being rainy most of the time, but that didn’t broke our high spirit.

Usually after spending 10 hours in Vortex, we were heading in search for some new places to grab something to eat and straight after that for either a night city walk or just drink some beers at the local bars. During the first days there was a bit of culture shock as we were the only ones or the first to arrive at the tapas bar, just to understand that Spanish people tend to go for a dinner pretty late (for our understanding). Anyway we did our best to adjust to the local peculiarities.

Benefits and outcomes

If I have to be honest, we agreed not to set too high expectations for this adventure. It was something new for us so there was no evidence if it will work out or not. In reality if we draw the line this was one of our most productive periods during the year — not only in work aspect but in social as well.

As I mentioned above we were spending nearly 10 hours a day at the coworking and most of the time we were the first ones to come and the last one to “close” it. Lunch breaks were far shorter than the usual at the office (which back home is kind of the event of the day). Distraction possibilities were close to zero and all this resulted in super productivity among the group.

Networking — we’ve met a lot of nice and interesting people in Vortex. From a passionate developer and football fan from Argentina to a guy from France (Jerome we are expecting you to be our guest in Varna), who is working as a hardware developer for a UK based start up.

In terms of the work — life balance, it was pretty successful as well. We were planning different places to visit everyday — from a late night walk to the City of Arts and Science to renting bikes and cruising with them along the Turia river park, crossing the whole city.

Another major benefit was that the tribe spent some time together, not only in the office premisses as usual (excluding the events back home that we are organising occasionally). We were together in exploring, planning, enjoying local cuisine or preparing a dinner for all in the apartments during the rainy nights.

Originally, what was planned was achieved, without forcing it, it just happened from it self.

Conclusion

Definitely we have to sit down and choose a new destination for Work&Travel vol.2. Any ideas or suggestions are more than welcome!