Voys temporarily moved their headquarters 1279 kms and nobody noticed

Moving a company and nearly all its employees abroad for a week ­ a challenge or a madman’s tale?

VoIP service provider Voys decided to ‘just do it’ and relocated its operations 1279 km to the sunny city of Girona in Spain for just one week this October. Mission: To prove that even large companies can work from anywhere using the Voys Hosted PBX. The 34 member team of Voys’ sister company, based in the Netherlands, was flown to Girona for just one week. Handsets, headsets and laptops all packed. Telephone calls to the Dutch landlines were coming in as normal. While customers assumed Voys employees to be working in Groningen ­ a city in the north of the Netherlands ­ they were actually located 1279 kilometers away, in Girona Spain. http://player.vimeo.com/video/108228106 Moving a company with that many employees abroad for a week is a unique challenge. The success of the project hinged on connectivity. The quality of a VoIP call is only as good as the internet connection. The Spanish villa initially didn’t have a sufficient internet connection, so Voys set up a temporary 2.7 Mb/s low latency WiMAX connection for voice traffic ­ enough for 27 concurrent G711 calls ­ and rented a satellite dish at Satpower with an unlimited data package for the 35 laptops. Have a look at the diary of blogs, photos and videos on www.workweekabroad.com Voys, has been getting much coverage lately regarding their unique organisation model. This so­called Voys Model has no management nor functions. Voys’ organisational model is one in which people can develop to their full potential and optimally contribute to the company. Having ‘fun work’ is one of the most important core values and the project to work abroad for a week fits perfectly within this value. The idea is that people can take responsibility for their work and don’t need to be directly managed therefor employees fulfill a role and not a function.