*This interview was held a month before most of all countries entered a state of emergency and were put in lockdown.
Perks and Culture is back with a third post. Times have changed and the perks that we normally talk about in these posts are related to flexibility, remote work and life balance, have become a reality for most people in the last few weeks. We’re going through complicated and uncertain times, where most employees have been “forced” to work remote for the first time in their lives and some love it but others don’t.
We have talked about how the future of how we work is changing and how remote work, when possible, will be the future of many people. Covid-19 might speed up the process and open the eyes of many people.
In the third Perks ana Culture post we sat down with Kristina Palovicova, co-founder of Secret City Trails, a platform that offers discovery games for locals and travellers to fall in love with any city.
Secret City Trails is a marketplace for self-guided gamified walks that are created by locals. Our mission is to promote and preserve the authenticity of cities through power play. Our vision is to make everyone fall in love with any city through our experiences.
We started in Amsterdam, where Wendy and myself, the founders, created the first game for locals to fall in love with their city. There was a big problem of over tourism and locals started to feel like “oh, Amsterdam is full of tourists, it’s horrible”. We wanted to change that mentality and make them realise that there were a lot of nice places to discover and look for. That’s how and why we created the first game. We really targeted locals to play and discover their city and soon enough travelers found it and now we’re going for travellers and locals.
After the first ten games that we created, we realised that it was fun but it wasn’t really scalable. The people that played our games started to ask us if it could be possible to create a game in their city and we thought it was the perfect opportunity to scale the business.
There’s a couple differences. First, we work with locals. Anyone can sign up and create a game in their city. They follow our framework, they receive a 200€ creation fee and 25% of each game sale. The only requirement is that you live in the city where you create the game, because in that way you show your own city to other people. This way we also support the local communities that do not benefit from tourism. Our competitors usually work with tourism boards and focus on the tourist areas of the city but not really with the offbeatten track places.
The other difference is that half of our clients are locals, they play in their own cities and they still enjoy it. So we really are creating a new category.
We also really focus on stories. Each game is based on a story about the places that you discover, instead of the fictional escape-room like stories that other games might have. With Secret City Trails you learn with each game, so that’s why we say that our games are fun and educational. Another good thing about it is that Secret City Trails is not an app. You don’t have to download anything into your phone, the game opens up in the browser on your phone, so it’s super easy to use.
As we are a playful brand, and we’re really trying to change the way people discover cities, we really try to be playful and live our external values also internally.
We promote flexible and remote work, we have unlimited holiday policy and we believe in work-life balance. We do try to promote playfulness on a daily basis so we have a little basketball thing in our office, we play games frequently and really stand behind transparency. Anyone can raise their voice and opinion, because that’s also how we work with locals. We don’t micromanage because we don’t have the time and we have a really flat structure in the teams so everyone can feel like they own their own projects.
Yes, specially for us as a business, we really promote exploring and going to discover, we cannot ask people to be in the office 9 to 5 every day, that doesn’t make sense for the purpose of what we are trying to achieve in the world. We really believe that giving people freedom will help them to be much more creative, effective and much better workers.
I don’t know how the corporations and big businesses, which have been around for a while, are going to deal with this. But for us, we see that the new generation requires and wants these perks, to be more flexible and free to be effective and love what they do.
We cannot ask people to be in the office 9 to 5 every day, that doesn’t make sense for the purpose of what we are trying to achieve in the world
I think that there’s still a lot to change before it becomes widely accepted, from even investors who are coming from corporate backgrounds, finance and tech. It’s not easy for them to understand that remote work is okay and you don’t need to be in an office every day. That meetings can be held online without, sometimes, having to fly across the globe for reunion.
I know that there are a lot of startups working towards a remote future, some have full remote teams. But I think that tech-wise we’re not there yet. I think we have a lot of steps ahead to get to full-time remote work and working from home, but we are developing the right way.
I also think that only working from home is not really healthy for the employees. HR managers of remote teams have to find ways to get team members to meet and socialise, which is very important for a team to work well.
There are a lot of things that we and our businesses have to think about when going remote. Use the right tools, make sure the reporting is correct, that the people know they have a team and are engaged and, most importantly, allow them to meet. Team retreats are a great way to get everyone together for a few days.
Response adapted to the current Covid-19 situation:
What we are experiencing now is a fast forward of what we planned to do in the sphere or remote work - everyone has to work from home. However, we need to be careful how we call this as we do not have a choice/option to go to an office or coworking space. I listened to a podcast Authentic Development that had an interview with Kristina Pomothy (workspace psychologist) who believes that what we are experiencing today is isolated work and not remote work. As during remote work, we can be part of communities, work from other spaces, be around people.
So I believe we learn how to use the right tools to allow remote work during this lockdown, but psychologically, we are experiencing something else, as so many of us are alone at home on calls all day long and feeling isolated.
I also think that only working from home is not really healthy for the employees. HR managers of remote teams have to find ways to get team members to meet and socialise, which is very important for a team to work well.
We don’t have full-remote workers, but we do offer flexible working. For example, Swen, our CTO works two days from home because he lives outside of Lisbon. We travel a lot, I spend part of my time in Amsterdam for personal reasons, so I actually work partially remote. We’re really working towards the solution that will allow us to do this more frequently, because that’s how we believe we want to live our lives.
I really hope so. Specially looking at the development in the cities in Europe that are facing over-tourism. The cities are being ruined and the cultural heritage is being destroyed. I really believe that we will be moving more towards a more sustainable travel where people will come to the cities to experience them like a local.
We really believe in work-life balance, a fun way of working and giving people freedom. Our interns are responsible for a lot of stuff, from business development to creating their own projects if they see a need. So we are giving people ownership of the projects that are vital for the business; we promote flexible work hours, if you come in at 7 and leave at 15h, because you want to go to the beach, it’s completely fine; we have unlimited holidays. We don’t believe in 9 to 5 or certain hours a week of work. Of course if there’s a lot of work we may need to adjust some schedules and we will need to work hard, but if you want to take the afternoon off to do something else or to do research, feel free to do that.
There’s a balance in how we see work being done that comes with both of us having worked in big corporations. After being stuck into 8 hour days no matter what and we really felt like if we had our own company we would do it differently. I would say we have a combination of factors where we try to make work more pleasant, flexible and more like part of your life.
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