When I first started working for euforia, I was mailed all the dates with our events and so forth that I should reserve in the upcoming months. One of them was a one week long slot and called “workation”. At first I was overtly excited. Can it get any cooler than going on a work vacation with your colleagues? My second feeling was a bit more sceptic. Isn’t this a contradiction in itself - vacation and work? How blurry do we want the line between working and free time to be? I thus arrived with a lot of curiousity, wondering what I was about to experience.
euforia works from different parts of Switzerland, France, Spain, Portugal. So I got to meet people I had not met before. We got together as euforia employees, volut’heros, and former members. The fact that we had this time and space for exchange was very enriching to me. I felt that euforia and its reach is actaully much bigger than what I see on a daily basis. I appreciated the different viewpoints that came together, depending on the individual experiences and roles of the people.
I first imagined that we would dive deep into the practical aspects of our work, get together in our circles in which we work, and advance on very specific things. As it turned out though is that we took this time and place for lots of discussions, also for the difficult discussions that on a daily basis we do not have as a team. Frankly speaking, this was at the same time inspiring and tiring for me. However, I felt that whenever we reached a dead point in a session we could then go and relax, or in other words do our vacation time, and get some distance in order to come back to the discussion more refreshed than before.
For the way that euforia operates I believe that the concept of the workation is a beautiful one because it gives the space to deeply go into dialogue, to work on our common purpose, and to (re)connect with each other.
- Clara, 18.10.2018
