It's early November, I’m sitting by the pool, watching Olga lying on the grass, having a skype call with a customer while Tong, Aleksandra and Toni are doing software development and customer service by the garden table. Inside Mikko is setting up new internet access points. If you have never experienced Finnish November, you don’t know why you should envy me right now. If you have, you probably do.
What are we doing here? Well, work, but warmer and sunnier. We are also living together. The whole thing is being done in Sievo style – with fast implementation and as many Sievonians as possible crammed in the same space. Everybody at Sievo have the opportunity to work remotely from Greece in November, with a common villa acting as an office.
And what is the point of enabling people to do remote work from a sunny place? First of all, darkness-caused symptoms of depression are an actual thing in Finland. At Sievo, we observe a yearly drop in our “monthly mood” survey figures when days start to get darker, backed by comments that cold and dark are in fact the reasons that make people less happy. And since caring is one of our values, this is one way of providing light therapy to Sievonians.
Spending time in a common house is also making us get to know each other – for better and for worse. The hopes are that our shared experience in Greece will reinforce our family feeling even more, all though we are prepared to have the occasional family disputes every now and then.
Thirdly, shaking things up a bit helps create random encounters between people who don’t typically work together. This morning I heard our Analytics designer talking about React and CoffeeScript with our Front-end guru. When people from different teams get together, knowledge is shared and who knows what great ideas emerge!
So this is why we are in Greece. So far everything is looking good. By the end of the month, we will get back to share feelings and observations about our Greek experience.
Γειά σου !
Anna