Humanising hybrid work - a new marketplace called WorkTripp

WorkTripp: What is it, and how can you get involved?

I'm founding WorkTripp: a unique booking marketplace integrating learning, culture & collective experience in high-impact offsites.

• If you want the full back story, grab a cup of tea, put your feet up and read through the below.
• If you want the short, short version, I'm founding a new business to humanise hybrid work. 2022 is all about building the community, raising early-stage investment, and running digital and in-person pilots. If you're interested in taking part in a WorkTripp pilot, becoming a WorkTripp partner, investing or advising then please do sign up to "join our community" here.

Why am I founding a new business? The rough edges of remote working...

The past two years have seen a huge shift in our ways of working. According to a PWC report, 77% of employees in the UK now want a mix of in-person and remote working. The pandemic has helped to take hybrid working mainstream, fuelled by employee expectations and employer skills needs. But for all its benefits (I've been working remotely for six years), remote working has rough edges: communicating company culture, cross-team innovation, onboarding effectively, managing burnout, and building trust. A Microsoft Works Trend Index surveying employees onboarded remotely found that 44% either had problems with gaining the trust of colleagues or properly understanding company culture.

High-impact team offsites can help but lack integration with learning and development

I believe that high-impact team offsites can help, but the current booking offer is largely transactional and disjointed. There are well-known booking websites to secure venues and experiences, and listing websites for coaching services, but nothing which integrates the venues, experiences, and leadership, company culture and development aspects which will define successful companies of the future.

(We know that the top 10% of high growth companies invest 2.6 times that of the bottom 50% and that employees are actively seeking companies that commit to their personal development).

Indeed, collaborative and social learning was shown to be on the ascent - in at number 2 - in the latest L&D Global Sentiment Survey from Don Taylor, along with coaching and mentoring.

Introducing WorkTripp

As someone who has worked across events and learning technology with a keen interest in the promise of remote work for rural and coastal areas, this piqued my interest and a fortuitous set of circumstances towards the end of 2021 allowed me the headspace to really ponder this scenario and the 1 billion knowledge workers globally that it affects.

The result has been a flurry of activity and a newly incorporated company - WorkTripp - which I have since founded to tackle this issue, alongside the old faithful, The Edtech Podcast.

So, what is WorkTripp?

WorkTripp is all about combining offsite booking capacity with the learning and business culture support needed to gain competitive edge and to retain best talent.

Imagine you are responsible for booking the next team offsite. You're in a high growth company and this used to take you four weeks minimum. Money was never a problem, as it was ring-fenced by the CEO who thought it fundamental to team cohesion, innovation and output. But now it's totally business-critical and the pressure is on. The board room plus Pret sandwiches model isn't going to cut it anymore. You've recently onboarded 70 team members remotely and are struggling with how to integrate company culture, but you also need to focus on the core business.

WorkTripp offers a marketplace where you can easily book venues, facilitator talent, experiences and learning modules in one place to bond teams and create sustained growth.?

Outside of the box

More importantly, WorkTripp venues are always in rural and coastal areas. Why? Because along with people like Steve Jobs, Immanuel Kant, and the entire Helsinki University Senior Leadership Team I interviewed on The Edtech Podcast who took their meetings whilst walking, creative leaders use natural environments to help stimulate innovation - something research like Professor Allen Alexander's recent Innovation in the Wilds programme backs up.

But also, the purpose of the company is to think about what the remote working economy can offer rural and coastal areas that traditionally have suffered from cyclical seasonal employment. The shift to hybrid offers the chance to rebalance polarised labour markets and offer year-round employment in geographically remote regions. (I'm from a rural and coastal area and understand the difference this could make).

Imagine bringing your team together in a unique natural environment to create memorable shared experiences led by the very best leadership coaches. Imagine your team raving about how your company invests in employee development and in-person experience. This is what WorkTripp is all about: we curate the best high-impact offsites, save you time, and create real business ROI at this critical phase of your mission.

Total Addressable Market

The market opportunity for this is enormous, and every conversation I have uncovers another "team meeting' where a company is trying to figure out employee wellbeing, or frequency of offsites. As I mentioned before, there are 1 billion knowledge workers globally. In the UK alone, there are 24 million UK employees with at least a 1/3rd able to engage in hybrid. The average UK spend on training is ￡1,600 and the average UK savings on office costs per employee is ￡10k. A good beachhead scenario - and one I'm hearing about again and again - is high-growth scale-ups (oh! like those in the EdTech sector) onboarding distributed teams, but ultimately this is about every size of company, especially large corporates navigating this new world, and this is an international problem to crack. There are many adjacent market activities that underline the attempts to work on the problem.

For example:

• Italy's 1 billion euro project to lure digital nomads to remote villages
• Forget the Office—Salesforce Is Making a Wellness Retreat for Workers

Regards ambition, WorkTripp combines coaching (think BetterUp $1.7 billion valuation), venues booking (Airbnb $75 billion valuation / TravelPerk $1.3 billion) and Digital Nomadism (think Selina $1.2 billion valuation).?

Ultimately, I see this marketplace integrating with the best of HR and corporate learning tech to create a cycle of in-person goal setting and back at desk upskilling.?

This is all very lovely, but what am I actually doing and how can you get involved?

Well, 2022 is all about building the community, raising early-stage investment, and running digital and in-person pilots.

Take part in a WorkTripp Pilot in 2022

In 2022, we are running our in-person and digital prototypes and pilots. We are looking for companies to be our pilot customers. This could be scaling startups or large scale employers: we will take your brief, understand your needs and create you a bespoke offsite. Onboarding? Remote Leadership? BusinessHack? R&R? We've got it covered. Get in touch at sophie dot bailey at worktripp dot com. Or, navigate to "join the community" > companies here. Only a few places will be available and we already have some pilots lined up for 2H22.

Become a WorkTripp partner

We are building our community of quality-vetted suppliers, venues and excellent leadership coaches who share our vision. If you are a coach, facilitator, keynote speaker, venue or activities coordinator, please do sign up to "join our community" here.

Invest

In 2022, I am working on customer and partner discovery, validation of the concept, and running our in-person and digital prototypes and pilots. If you're an angel investor strategically aligned to learning and development, rural regeneration, business tourism or HRtech and EdTech please do get in touch. (I'll probably be in touch too!) If not, look out for our crowdfunder coming in 2022.

Advise

I am building our advisory team, after great conversations with heads of HR, L&D associations, adjacent market colleagues, and top global corporates. I'm also taking part in the SetSquared Incubator/Accelerator and in Professor Allen Alexander's Innovation in the Wilds programme. If you'd like to get involved or to share what we do with others, we are building our technical and co-founder expertise and every day is a learning day. Any efforts to build a group of like-minded people would be really appreciated. Contact us via this page.

To summarise, we are in concept and validation mode.

The hypothesis that we want to test are:

1. That hybrid working has put a new emphasis on working culture, learning, and the value of meeting in person.

2. That culture and learning are critical to competitive edge and need to be integrated into team offsites for hybrid work to work.?

3. That the current user experience is disjointed, lacking a coherent, combined offering to guide companies, and evaluate impact.

4. That coaches, keynotes, facilitators and rural and coastal venues can find better-combined value in an aggregated platform to serve paying companies.

I'd love to hear your own take on what your approach to hybrid working is, what your take on team offsites is, and what you think of the WorkTripp concept. Don't be shy, post in the comments below or send me a DM.

WorkTripp is a natural evolution of everything that got me to this point. Rural upbringing and location. Lived experience of remote working in a distributed team. Network in EdTech and learning and development. Interrogation of meaningful in-person experiences. 15+ years in curating community and audience curation, events, and storytelling. And lots of events along the way to know the value of human-centred design. So, here I am.

And I'm excited to see the WorkTripp vision - to become the global marketplace for high-impact team offsites - become reality!

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