Tech perk: Company flies staff out for monthlong change of scenery
In a cafe somewhere in Cambodia, dozens of Americans will file in this week, crack open their MacBooks and get to work while locals try to figure out what’s going on.
It’s a sight to behold: enough techies to fill a Financial District office setting up shop as far from San Francisco as they can get.
At a time when other tech workers are taking less and less time away from the office, the expense-report software company Expensify offers to fly its entire staff to different far-flung destinations each year for a month of working — remotely.
About 95 percent of the startup’s workforce, roughly 80 people, will report to work on Monday in Phnom Penh. Then, they’ll move on to Siem Reap. From there, Railay Beach in Thailand, followed by Bangkok.
For those four weeks, the world is their office.
“The environment a company exists in is going to influence the kinds of ideas the company is able to achieve — if you have a hierarchical corporate environment, you’re not going to think out of the box,” CEO David Barrett said. “We come up with our ideas hanging out and drinking rum on a beach.”
And despite the cliff-jump
ing, partying and other distractions that come when dozens of young tech workers travel together in a foreign country, Expensify insists its annual trip abroad is its most productive month of the year.
“When you’re in the office, every day just blurs into the next, and you do the things you do because it’s what you did yesterday,” said Barrett. “When we take people out of their environment, out of their comfort zone, all the way overseas, all the things you normally do, you can’t do anymore. You start to think about how you work and why you do what you do, and whether that’s the most effective use of our time or our product.”
It’s difficult to measure productivity, said marketing director Ryan Schaffer, but the annual getaway acts as something of an incubator for new ideas and services created by employees who typically don’t cross-pollinate.
Trip’s success measured
Last year in a castle in Portugal, Expensify further automated its electronic expense reporting platform, which allows users to upload receipts and track business spending. The year before in Croatian wine country, the company redesigned its website.
This year, Schaffer said, those heading to Cambodia and Thailand will focus on “building a new onboarding flow” — an attempt to minimize any hiccups that new customers face when getting started with its service.
“We measure the success of the trip based on what was produced out of it,” Schaffer said. “Did we create anything new or innovative? We’re not reinventing the wheel every time, but did we produce something that will give us a significant advantage over the competition?”
Barrett concedes it seems counterintuitive — most people leave the country to get away from responsibilities and coworkers. But at Expensify, the annual retreat has become just a part of “how we work,” Barrett said.
Bring a guest
Expensify picks up the tab for flights for employees and a guest of their choice. The company also covers meals consumed while working and group dinners and outings. Workers file their receipts for reimbursement using the company’s software. Employees pay for their own lodging — at hotels, hostels or through Airbnbs — and any nonwork activities.
As the company has grown, so has the number of people participating in the annual trip. Barrett, 39, will be traveling this year for the first time with his infant daughter in tow.
“You should never be in a position where you have to choose between work and family,” he said. “So, we let our employees bring someone along.”
Those who choose to travel with families larger than two would need to pay for any additional tickets.
The process for picking a destination is all-consuming. For a month, every member of the company pitches locations. The list gets narrowed down to three. Then, employees said, things get serious. Fans of each destination pick a spokesperson, who gives a company-wide presentation to lobby for their destination of choice.
Competition for locale
This year, Cambodia beat out Ecuador and Costa Rica.
“It gets really competitive,” said Alexandra Revelli, head of human resources.
Off-site retreats are not unusual in corporate America: executives have long used getaways as tools for team-building. But it’s unusual to extend the invitation to everyone at the company, plus significant others.
But Revelli dismissed the idea that this is yet another lavish benefit meant to lure high-skilled workers in an increasingly competitive market.
“We don’t really use it for recruiting because, truthfully, we want more in a candidate than someone who wants to go party in another country for a month,” said Revelli, who has been on three trips abroad with the company.
Cost of trip
Expensify wouldn’t disclose the total cost of the trip, but estimated it accounts for less than 1 percent of total annual revenue. Average round-trip airfare from San Francisco to Cambodia and Thailand costs about $2,000 a head — meaning the company might spend $160,000 this year covering airfare alone.
Founded in 2009, the privately held company boasts 2.5 million users and 300,000 companies in its customer base. Last year, it became profitable.
For five years prior to that, Expensify burned venture capital dollars to fund the trip.
Blake Bartlett of OpenView Venture Partners, one of Expensify’s late-round investors, said he’s never questioned the value of the trips.
“It sounds crazy,” he said. “But when you walk through some of the product’s best features with David, he’ll sit there and say, ‘Yep, that was from this country, this country, that country.’ It’s a unique part of the company’s culture that obviously works really, really well.”
He said many companies will throw money at trainings, conventions or seminars they believe will make them more productive or yield a better product. Expensify does the same thing by flying around the world.
“Being out there with your entire team in a unique place with the daily grind removed, you get to be in a zone of clarity of thought and intense collaboration,” Bartlett said. “It might not be the way things have always been done, or things are done by every other company, but it works.”
This isn’t the only chance Expensify offers its workers to get away. The firm also offers unlimited vacation time. It’s an increasingly common perk in tech, but one researchers have said fails to live up to its promise, as many workers choose to take fewer days than those with defined vacation parameters.
Revelli, who aside from the company trip didn’t take a single vacation day her first year because she wanted to prove herself, said many coworkers travel before and after the annual getaway, since they’re already on the other side of the world.
Vacations encouraged
This year, she said, she’s stopping in Japan for a week on her way back.
Other tech companies like Netflix and Evernote, which offer similar unlimited vacation perks, have been criticized for their performance-centric culture. Taking vacation, experts have suggested, could be seen as slacking off in such hypercompetitive environments. Managers at digital notepad company Evernote even had to start offering employees a cash incentive to use their vacation days.
Some 40 percent of Americans leave earned vacation time on the table, according to a study by the U.S. Travel Association.
“We haven’t had a problem with people not taking enough time for themselves,” Revelli said. “It’s something we heavily encourage, and it’s part of our company culture to embrace travel.”