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Surf Office is the organizer of productive, authentic and effortless company retreats. Our mission is to empower companies to bring culture, innovation, happiness and productivity to their work & lives.
We provide customized packages which include accommodation, workspace, team building activities, planning and facilitation of company retreats.
We use technology, we are the one-stop source for making planning and facilitation of company retreats and team off-sites easy – saving time and resources for our customers.
Like many of our customers, we are a remote company with team members distributed around the world.
For years, we’ve been organizing our own company retreats. And constantly experimenting, iterating, and refining what makes a retreat truly work.
Once a year, the first week of December, we organize our All-Hands retreat.
Our last retreat was in Istanbul 🇹🇷 and we made a little "vlog", documenting:
Our team includes nomads, expats, and people who regularly do personal or team workations.
This gives us deep, practical knowledge of destinations, local experiences, and what actually works for distributed teams.
We’re also an international team ourselves with 15 nationalities and 12 spoken languages 🌎
That means we’re used to navigating cultural differences, time zones, and asynchronous communication.
In many ways, we operate the same way our customers do. This is very different from traditional event agencies where everyone works from one office in one country.
Some bits from our previous workations, team retreats and All-Hands in Mallorca, Gran Canaria, Istanbul, Algarve, Peniche, Lisbon and Ericeira.
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1. Be transparent
We embrace open communication and talk not only about successes but failures too. We are transparent with our vendors and clients: no hidden costs, “no surprises” and always managing expectations. We are building a business based on trust.
2. Levelheadedness
We should be calm, considered, and thoughtful in our dealings with each other and the world at large. We don't act out of spite, we don't rush to judgment, we don't jump to conclusions. If someone disagrees with us or attacks us we listen, we think, and we respond calmly and clearly - directly addressing the idea or the situation, not the personality or the pressure.
3. Improve consistently
Trying new things, failing fast and iterate is part of our DNA. We understand that everything that we do is a constant iteration. One day we celebrate the success of something we launched and the next day we think about how to make it 3x better. We try to make radical improvements, not make something better by 5%. Every process, every product, every sentence on the website can be improved. We believe in fast iteration and constantly searching for customer feedback.
4. Be your weird self
We are a diverse team of different nationalities, living in different places. It's part of our culture and we try to leverage it. Each member of the team brings unique value to our product and the way we work.
5. Remote by default
Working in a remote team requires specific skills: We always try to be self-sufficient, take initiative and be creative in using technology. This also applies to the product we are building. When coming up with solutions we think about how we can remove friction and streamline solutions by providing top-notch virtual service.
Sounds you might like working with these folks?
Join our team or work with us as a property partner.
Starting as an experiment in 2013 by Peter Fabor, the first Surf Office was set up in Gran Canaria where first class beaches, perfect warm weather, and the position within the EU made it appealing to remote workers, surf lovers, and travelers alike.
Surf Office was the first coworking & coliving space for digital nomads.
Being the first of its kind, Surf Office quickly attracted remote working professionals and those who couldn’t take time off for vacation. And while the location was great, accommodation comfy and the workspace had reliable, fast internet connection, it was the community that guests praised the most.
We came to realize that more and more companies were contacting us for company retreats rather than solo travelers and digital nomads.
It made us think long and hard about our approach, and in 2017 we shifted our focus to become company retreat facilitators rather than hosts for individuals.
