WORKFORCE MANAGEMENT
Suppliers are adapting to hybrid work and leisure concepts for employees, but how do you manage a deconstructed workforce?
A
URELIE KRAU HAS ONLY JUST RETURNED from a week in Munich. Before that came a short spell in Croatia. In early 2019 it was six weeks in Columbia. And in just a few weeks – as she has done for the past four years – Krau will escape Europe’s freezing winter and head off for two-and-a-half months travelling in sunnier climes.
Enviable as it seems, Krau isn’t simply on an extended holiday. Instead she combines this packed travel schedule – which makes up about 60-70 per cent of her time, she estimates – with remote working as a consultant for travel management firm Festive Road. The company is made up of 16 such consultants working as contractors and based in locations as widespread as Germany, the Nordics and Australia. The set-up means Krau’s travel schedule is a mix of pleasure and professional, too. For example, while Munich was strictly business to attend the annual GBTA conference, Columbia was leisure, with Krau a self-proclaimed “sun seeker”. “We have the luxury of being right in the middle of the business travel ecosystem as we’re talking to everybody,” says Krau of Festive Road’s company structure. She is able to catch up with a client thousands of miles away while sitting on a tropical beach. Idealistic as it all sounds, Krau and Festive Road’s approach is symptomatic of a far wider social trend. “My quest to see the world is not isolated,” she says. “I believe all younger generations now want to see the world and I’ve met many people on trips, either those who have just graduated and want to spend a year seeing the world, or who those have quit their job as their company didn’t offer them the opportunity to travel.” An increasing number though, like Krau, don’t feel the need to bookmark travel before and after a career move or quit entirely. Instead they’re combining extended trips with extended periods of remote work as so-called digital nomads.
buyingbusinesstravel.com
A study by mobile payment platform
And.Co found that 39.3 per cent of those describing themselves this way were employed by global companies, with 17 per cent combining work with travel to more than five countries per year.
GROWING TRIBE At Remote Year, a specialist travel company that creates year-long programmes for people looking to do just that, around 50 per cent of participants are full-time employ- ees, says a Remote Year spokesperson, “meaning they have received approval from their employer to keep their job and work remotely”.
And why not? After all, remote working as a concept is firmly established. A recent study by Swiss-based office provider IWG found that more than two-thirds of
WORDS MEGAN TATUM 2020 JANUARY/FEBRUARY 107
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