Dalia Hamiyeh, a communications executive at Publicis in Lausanne, will spend a week this summer working remotely in her family’s homeland of Lebanon. In 2022, the French media group began allowing staff to work for up to six weeks a year from any of the 100-plus countries where it has offices. “Most of us use the time in summer,” said Hamiyeh.
She will add the working week to a fortnight’s holiday. Her cousins visiting from Singapore will do their remote work alongside her and she aims to spend breakfast, lunch and evenings with family. “I always get comments from my grandmother that I work too much, even though I only work 8am to 6pm,” she said. “But they do understand. They are super-grateful. The fact that we get to come back, even for a couple of weeks, is better than nothing.”
Summer “workcations” — essentially doing a job from a holiday location — are a relatively new item on the expanded menu of post-Covid working options. So fresh is the trend that data is still scarce. But a range of employees’ testimonies and corporate policies show demand is strong.