Forget quiet vacationing. GoPro says midday breaks have employees more engaged

The only thing more fun than jumping out of a perfectly good airplane, according to Eric Gonzalez, is doing it on company time. After the GoPro project manager moved to Oceanside, California, from the Bay Area, his new residence was so close to a skydiving center, he could complete a drop in a tight 70 minutes, door-to-door—and did so as often as he could. When his manager caught wind that Gonzalez was taking these jumps during office hours, he was, in Gonzalez’s words: “stoked.” It was a stark contrast to the recent “ quiet vacationing” trend —an impressive application of the company’s recent policies.



GoPro is known for making cameras that capture athletic action with you-are-there immediacy. Since the beginning of the pandemic, though, the company has made it easier for employees to inject the same carpe diem energy into their own lives. Not only is GoPro now remote-first, with 40% of U.S.-based employees working from home (or from a mountaintop yurt with Wi-Fi, if the spirit moves them), but its leadership also actively encourages all staff to reset with midday hiking or surf breaks whenever time permits. As a result, according to internal surveys, employee engagement has gone up by 18% since 2019. Rather than leave GoPro workers feeling checked out, their ability to log off has apparently made them more locked in than ever.



Eric Gonzalez during a lunchtime skydiving session [Photo: GoPro]



The company had already considered adopting remote work into its office culture as early as February 2020. At the time, leadership was experimenting with Work from Home Fridays, but had yet to commit to the idea. Then the pandemic hit and, as VP of people Tim Beltry tells it, “We realized, ‘Well, I guess this is just part of our life now, and we need to figure it out.’”



For the next several months, GoPro navigated the same sudden shift to remote work that many other companies faced at the time. Employees became intimately acquainted with the Zoom interface, along with each other’s wall decorations, pets, and homebound children. It wasn’t until fall that Beltry finally sat down with CEO Nick Woodman to begin assessing not just the current situation, but the future of the company’s in-office policies. They ended up soliciting copious amounts of employee feedback, gauging staff satisfaction with working from home, their comfort level with the prospect of returning to the office and for how many days per week. The results were unambiguous. A majority preferred working from home most of the time.



Woodman and Beltry took them at their word and plunged GoPro into a remote-first future.



Although the company still maintains 11 offices across the globe—landing pads where teams can connect, and where individual employees can choose to keep up their old routines—remote-first has become the new normal. While a lot of organizations that went remote out of necessity during the pandemic began looking for the earliest possible moment to hasten a return to the office, GoPro committed to the idea. Unbound by the change in dynamic, employees soon started moving throughout the U.S., with workers now residing in 36 states. Many of those who didn’t relocate instead began traveling to visit family or friends more often, or to attend a concert somewhere across the country—all without having to take time off to do so.



“I think everyone realized we can still be productive and get our work completed at a high standard, regardless of where it was done,” says Gonzalez.



The transition required some changes to support the new dispersed working environment. From the feedback Beltry and Woodman solicited, it was clear that employees wanted to make sure their work would be visible, while managers wanted to keep their teams engaged, connected, and aligned on goals, priorities, and expectations. In other words, everyone had essentially the same concerns as ever, only with the added complication of asynchronous workflow. To address the issue, GoPro implemented performance and talent management platform Lattice, along with a whole ecosystem of other tech solutions that kept everyone on the same page. And to help staff feel connected with one another, the company established quarterly team-building events over Zoom and encouraged in-office happy hours—which technically count as “off-sites” these days.



“I’m now on a team with employees logging in across the U.S., from Northern California to the East Coast and the South,” says deputy general counsel Jason Stephen. “And if anything, the different time zones play in our favor. We know when we need to be online to connect as a team and when we can take a step away midday to take care of life tasks.”



As for the policy that allows GoPro workers like Gonzalez to go beyond standard life tasks and possibly skydive during lunch, it took root well before the pandemic.



Back in 2015, the company introduced an initiative called Live It, Eat It, Love It, which gave employees a two-hour block every Thursday to go out and do something fun for themselves, ideally filming their adventures with—what else—a GoPro, to share footage over the interoffice social media platform Workplace. Alicia Cheney, director of marketing operations at GoPro, had a newborn at home when the Live It program began, and she remembers her immense relief at having an extra athletic outlet during the week while her hands were so full at home.



The initiative continued on until the early pandemic redefined the practicality of a two-hour block of anything-goes time on a Thursday afternoon—with parents like Cheney often having unexpected responsibilities at odd hours.



“We recognized that with a merger between work and life, there’s not going to be a perfect time to practice this,” Beltry says. “So, we decided we’re going to allow employees, if they have a break in their day, to just take time for themselves.”



GoPro leadership practiced what they preached—scheduling time with their families in between meetings—while Beltry personally started taking 90-minute bike rides during some lunch breaks. Gonzalez now tries to plan out most of his daytime activities in advance, according to his meeting schedule, but ends up squeezing in the occasional spontaneous surfing session, either when something falls off his plate or in celebration of completing an important task. Whether planned or on a whim, though, he tries to get a midday activity in twice a week. As do many other GoPro workers. The built-in free time appears to be a key contributor to the steep rise in employee engagement since 2019.



[Photos: GoPro, Tarn Nguyen /Unsplash]



“I feel as though I can truly show up for myself and my personal needs, which, in turn, allows me to thrive in my work life,” Cheney says.



The past few years have seen an epidemic of burnout and disconnection among U.S. workers. According to a recent Gallup study , only one-third of Americans were engaged in their work in 2023. Those most in need of better work-life balance appear to be carving it out for themselves. A recent Harris poll suggests that nearly one-third of workers are engaging in quiet vacationing: taking sneaky PTO breaks and scheduling emails to deliver after they slip away, the digital equivalent of Ferris Bueller’s bed-dummy system. If workers are that desperate for some midday sunshine, it makes financial sense to provide them the schedule-empathy to take it responsibly. Doing so seems to have helped GoPro land on U.S. News & World Report Best Companies to Work For rankings last year.



Agility has been one of the core values guiding GoPro through the pandemic, but one thing the company is not budging on is its commitment to a remote-first workplace. While an estimated 90% of companies plan on fully returning to the office by the end of 2024, Beltry claims the company’s leadership is not even considering it.



“When we adopted remote work, we made it very clear that this is not just a knee-jerk reaction to the pandemic, but it’s something that we were going to embed as the GoPro philosophy, now and in the future,” he says. “We created a policy and stuck with it, and it’s something that we’re not moving away from.”