The Anglicism home office found its way into everyday language usage a good two years ago at the latest, since the start of the corona pandemic has seen work increasingly shifted to home. There was some skepticism about the work ethic in the living room, but now working from home is completely normal. On the other hand, what is behind this portmanteau is comparatively new and unknown: coworkation.
There is the community, the community. There is work, the work. And then there’s vacation. Working on vacation, vacation at work, it depends. In any case, a trend with potential, and not only according to the opinion of the – attention, difficult word – coworkationists, but recently also empirically proven.
On Thursday, the “Coworkation Alps” association based in Miesbach in Upper Bavaria presented a joint study with the tourism marketing agency St. Elmo’s and the European Tourism Institute (ETI). The core questions: How many companies in the Alpine region can imagine sending their employees to a mountain hut and having them work from there? And how many workers want something like that anyway?
“Coworking hasn’t really caught on in public yet,” says Jurrien Dikken from the Tourismus Institut when presenting the results, which experts and practitioners from all Alpine countries met in Neustift in the Stubaital. But, says Dikken, the corona pandemic has “properly fueled” the topic and given it “a boost”.
“The older the people, the more stuck.”
Working away from the office and working from home is attracting increasing interest. Not just because – as so often discussed during the pandemic – people are being drawn out of the cities again. Instead, as the study shows, they are primarily concerned with networking, inspiration and exchange. Because in a coworkation domicile, you come together to work on vacation, either with colleagues from your own company or alone in the place where people from other companies are also present.
The offers are fundamentally different. At the Mesnerhof C in the Tyrolean mountains, “the chairman of the board makes the bed himself,” as operator Georg Gasteiger reports. Other coworkation providers, on the other hand, do not provide beds at all, but only a workplace in a holiday atmosphere.
The study shows that it is primarily younger people who are open to the new way of working. “The older the people, the more stuck,” says Jurrien Dikken. There is a paradigm shift, says Verena Feyock from St. Elmo’s Tourism Marketing, young people say: “If a company doesn’t offer that, then I don’t work for them.”
Overall, a good two-thirds of the companies surveyed could “maybe” or “definitely” imagine enabling their employees to work together. However, the researchers only surveyed those companies where location-independent work is possible at all, which was the case for 676 companies from southern Germany, Austria, Switzerland and northern Italy.
In Italy, driven by the pandemic, work has changed
The new German term was by far the best known in Italy. “That surprises me,” says Marion Niederkofler, who is responsible for urban development in Bruneck, South Tyrol. She then immediately has an explanation: In Italy, driven by the pandemic, work has changed. “Our lockdown was much tougher than elsewhere, so there was an even greater urge among people to get out and combine nature with work.” In the meantime, it is even more difficult to find a place to work with a coworkation provider than accommodation for the associated overnight stay.
However, the study also shows that the new trend is far from being a mass phenomenon. The percentage of those who have already coworked differs by country, but is in the single digits everywhere. The survey also revealed reservations, such as this: Leisure time and work should be separated, there is a lack of differentiation, said one participant.
Nevertheless, the inquiries are increasing, reports Julia Scharting from the “Coworkation Alps” association in Miesbach, but there are still obstacles, especially when it comes to labor law issues. After all, coworkation as a form of work has not yet been defined. According to the experts, such legal problems would have to be clarified politically across borders in order to reach even more people. Because, as Jürrien Dikken concludes: “The Alpine region is predestined for coworkation.”