how we handle a Workcation / digital nomad policy as a startup

We created a digital nomad policy in our company: Four weeks working from wherever you want, and we love it.

Last year I did my four weeks in Tenerife, this year I will go to South Africa. Our developers usually go further, Peru, Thailand and other places are on their lists.

If you have a whole team that has to perform, having members being offsite for months at a time is pretty tricky, especially when the team member has a role with direct customer contact.

Here are three things we learned over the years:

As biz dev, the timezone difference matters.

When having more than three hours of a timezone shift, contact with customers back home is significantly reduced. I try to have more meetings with local potential clients instead, yet, as I can't pick up the phone for our main clients back home, it puts more load on other team members covering for me.

Thus, I tend to stay closer to our main-timezone for workcations, than other team-members who do not have direct contact with customers, e.g. our developers.

Balancing work and exploration is easier when using a good coworking space.

The dedicated, unfamiliar office space helps mentally separate work from non-work. It is similar to having a dedicated office room in your home when working from home.

Your brain assumes the room with work, not hobbies.

The benefits during a workcation are even bigger: While working in the office space, you are way less distracted from things you want to do. Usually because the office space is not an exciting place to explore stuff. And, on the plus side, as soon as you leave that office space, your mind can switch off completely.

Team communication becomes more important,

because there is more asynchronous exchange of information. In other words, being clear and sometimes following template-structures when reporting or preparing things is essential to reduce the amount of confusion and back-and-forth. Just like being a PO or a DEV, who has to write a ticket to the other devs and they need to understand what you mean and want without unnecessary back and forth.

The obligatory dinopreneur on their workcation. Love the floating palm tree in the back and the sea level dropping harder than the stockmarket in early 2025, great job ai.

There are some little hacks you will figure out over time:

For instance, I made a little gpt agent I can tell what I am about to write to the team, and it transcribes it in a template form, and tells me when things are missing or potentially unclear. Refining what I want to say usually takes a few seconds and saves hours of time for everyone.

An unspoken rule is, that not an entire team can be remote at the same time. This has to do with our critical customer base, which is located in Europe after all. If things start burning, we have always someone to react on site, who can pick up the support phone and assist them.

Founder tip:

If you handle any sort of sensitive data for customers (especially in finance, health, med, or legal tech), make sure to thoroughly check if it is ok to access your servers from another country, and if so, under what circumstances.

Let me know what you think, best