The faces of remote work at Vio.com
It was back in 2016 when we faced a serious challenge: a valuable employee decided to leave the Netherlands and move back to their home country, Russia. We did not have an office in Russia and the team did not want to lose their team member. How about making a bold move and have the employee work remotely from their homeland?
It was back in 2016 when Vio.com, previously called FindHotel, had its remote work pioneer, Sasha, and it is due to her successful case we started hiring people remotely. Sasha joined us as an intern and made huge impact from early beginning. She not only pioneered the remote work at Vio.com, but is also a veteran today having been with the company for over 5 years.
6 years later, we’ve come far, with 39% of our team based outside the Netherlands.
We’re known for our flexibility that goes into multiple layers of the way we run our organisation. One of those layers is the work location of our people. We’ve been one of the many companies recruiting talent from abroad and investing our efforts into bringing it to the Netherlands.
Over time we’ve had people relocating and joining us from Brazil🇧🇷 ,South Africa🇿🇦 , India🇮🇳 , Russia🇷🇺 , Iran🇮🇷 , Turkey🇹🇷 , Nigeria🇳🇬 , Israel🇮🇱 , Colombia🇨🇴 , Argentina🇦🇷 , Spain🇪🇸 , New Zealand🇳🇿 , Malta 🇲🇹 and others. All of them became on-site employees working from our HQ in Amsterdam.
After Sasha’s example of remote work that turned out successful, it became very clear to us that as long as we trust and empower our people, they can work from anywhere and still deliver the same results or even better ones!
Our remote population grew in many European countries and not only. Today we have quite a big force in Latin America, The Philippines and even Tanzania! It’s really great to see how we keep conquering the world by putting the Vio.com flag on more and more lands.
In the beginning on one side, you would find the people relocating to Amsterdam and on the other side we had the people who were interviewing remotely, completed the full hiring process remotely, and naturally the team members started their first day working remotely and obviously they continued working remotely.
As years went by, due to life circumstances and due to our desire to prioritise our people’s happiness and wellbeing, we’ve discovered new faces of remote work.
Behold the resolute on-site employee — Omer! He is a veteran at Vio.com and he’d never thought of being an adopter of remote work 🙂 He has always enjoyed face to face interactions, sharing moments with the team, having a drink after work and conducting in person 1:1s. This until 2020 when the pandemic hit and he actually decided to pursue his dream of living closer to the nature and dedicating most of his time to his passions — outdoor sports. Since then, Omer has lived in the French Alps and he’s never been happier. He also travels to Amsterdam to see us every other month and it’s truly beautiful to see how he made the most of the flexibility to work from anywhere in the world that we take pride in.
Going back to Sasha, it is important to note that she was also the first in our team to work with us on-site, then move back home and work remotely and after a few years relocate back to the Netherlands and become once again an on-site employee.
Although remote work is something we adopted over time, it is not a brand new concept for some of our people. Take Antonio, for example. Antonio is a remote work veteran having worked remotely for years before joining us in 2017. He slowly became an expert on the matter, supporting us with advice and best practices when it comes to remote life at Vio.com. Antonio has very early understood how important it is to be close to family and to dedicate the time saved up on commute to close ones and to hobbies that fulfil you. He is living the good life in Poland, where he and his family have their own little chicken farm and enjoy their countryside life in the middle of nature.
While for some of our people, remote work was no news, that was not the case of many of our new hires in the past couple of years. Take Francesco’s case. He was a remote work newbee; he never worked remotely for any other company and to be fair he had his doubts whether it would be a success. He said he had the feeling that effective remote work and collaboration without an office were possible, he just hadn’t seen it working before. Shortly after he joined, he realised it was not only possible but sometimes it was actually better, that you just need to adapt and learn the tools in order to make remote work effective. For him it actually meant that he had to improve his planning and communication skills, and rely more on written communication rather than meetings (which, in turn, he considers it is better for knowledge sharing).
We mentioned in the beginning that we hired extensively from abroad and relocated many of our team members to Amsterdam. One of them was João, who relocated from Brazil back in 2016 together with his wife. We call him the remote work shifter. After a few years of living the Dutch life, he and his wife decided to return to Brazil and start a family there, close to their loved ones.
We immediately knew that for him the switch from onsite to remote work would be easy as except for the admin part, João still is an important member of our team, no matter in which corner of the world he is. Leaving this aside, we do miss having him in the office and he misses us too, but we see him 1–2 times per year, when he visits us in Amsterdam.
Another Brazilian colleague made the switch from remote to on-site. After working with us for over a year remotely from Brazil, Felipe decided to relocate to Amsterdam in 2020 together with his dog, and join the Netherlands based team. We call him the remote work forsaker. 🙂
He wanted to experience the life in The Netherlands and once we reassured him that he can always go back to Brazil and work remotely again in case things don’t work out, he was even more encouraged to join us in the office. He has been enjoying biking through the city and walking his dog in the nicest nature corners there are here and we definitely enjoy having him with us in the office and sharing moments together. .
You see, possibilities are never ending when it comes to work location at Vio.com. We love to see that our people enjoy and leverage the flexibility they have in finding their perfect place to work, whether that’s a beach in Rio 🏖, a village in south of Spain or a mountain peak in France🏔. To us, what matters most is not where you work from, but rather how happy and balanced you are; we know very well that happy and healthy people are also productive and engaged.❤
Want to be part of the team? Check out our careers page!
