Want to work from a holiday destination? At Swiss Post IT, you can
Fail-safe IT solutions are vital for ensuring that Swiss Post customers receive their parcels or letters safely and on time. To this end, Swiss Post has one of the biggest IT departments in Switzerland. In order for Swiss Post to remain an attractive employer during the specialist staff shortage, the company is exploring new avenues. One of these is “workation” – remote working from a holiday destination. With this in mind, Swiss Post has carried out a six-month pilot project for IT staff.
Software developers, cybersecurity specialists and data analysts. They’re all vital to Swiss Post for planning delivery rounds and offering customers secure digital services such as track and trace. Specialist IT staff are highly sought-after. Estimates predict that by 2030, the shortage of specialist IT staff in Switzerland will number in the tens of thousands. Swiss Post is doing a great deal to adapt the IT workplace to the needs of a younger generation, as Wolfgang Eger, CIO of Swiss Post and Member of Executive Management, explained yesterday in a chat with the media: “Especially since the pandemic, models for flexible working have boomed. But it’s primarily Generations Y and Z who are demanding even more flexible options from their employers. So we have to adapt. After all, young talent is our future.”
One way to be more flexible as an employer is “workation” – a combination of “work” and “vacation”. Between August 2023 and January 2024, Swiss Post’s I/T unit tested workation in a pilot project. Employees had the option to work for up to ten working days from abroad, enabling them to take a little more advantage of sun and sea.
80 members of staff gave it a try
Wolfgang Eger is happy with the six-month pilot phase of workation: “Feedback has been very good. The staff were grateful for this additional option for combining work and leisure, even if not all of them made use of the opportunity. Many told us that they valued the new type of working experience, because it allowed them to visit family abroad for longer.” 80 members of staff have already made use of workation, working for Swiss Post from 20 countries, including locations such as Biarritz, Malta and Athens.
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Workation hits the spot
Wolfgang Eger is planning to introduce the new working model officially for staff in the I/T unit. “We fully expect this to smooth our path to employing more highly-trained specialists. In the IT market in particular, many talented individuals have a very international background. They are glad to enjoy a little more locational independence in addition to their holidays. Experiences from the pilot phase have confirmed this.” In future, a maximum of 20 working days can be used for workation. To ensure that all country-specific requirements are considered, Swiss Post is working with a partner that specializes in remote working. Interested employees make an application via this partner, who then checks all requirements in terms of social security, taxes, labour and immigration laws.
IT employees at Swiss Post have used workation in 20 countries. Within the pilot, the offer was limited to EU and EFTA countries. (Photo of Kristin Wilson on Unsplash)
Swiss Post opens IT site in Lausanne
Workation is just one measure among many that the Swiss Post CIO is using to tackle the shortage of specialists. “By speaking more languages in IT, for example, we become more interesting to new talent,” explains Wolfgang Eger, commenting on the development of the sites in Western Switzerland and Ticino. To become more attractive to specialists from French-speaking Switzerland, Swiss Post opened an IT location in Lausanne in December 2023 alongside the existing site in Neuchâtel. Currently, seven people work in Lausanne. In the next few years, Swiss Post wants to employ up to 70 specialists there. Swiss Post has also expanded its site in Bellinzona in recent years, and it now employs around 70 people. Swiss Post wants to expand this number to around 100 in the coming years.
To reach the specialists that Swiss Post cannot find in Switzerland, Swiss Post also opened an IT location in Lisbon in February 2023. Around 60 IT specialists there are now working on Swiss Post’s digitization (more on this in the 2023 media blog).
More on Swiss Post I/T
Swiss Post maintains the third largest IT department of all companies active on the domestic market in Switzerland. Around 1,400 employees and 400 external IT specialists drive forward Swiss Post’s digitization process. The department handles over 300 software projects each year, runs more than 1,000 applications and has around 5,000 databases – with these figures set to rise in future. Swiss Post is also a training company: it offers around 60 ICT apprenticeships each year, providing training in information and communication technology.
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