IWA currently employs over 60 software development professionals. Out of these employees a whopping 70% traveled to our winter office in Vietnam.

We’ve had tremendous amounts of snow and ice this winter in Helsinki. Vietnam is a perfect winter getaway to some of our talents to get to a more warmer and pleasant climate for a few weeks or even a month.

One of these talents is Waleed who has ended up via many challenging circumstances to Helsinki as a web developer. Waleed is originally an IT entrepreneur from Mosul in Iraq from where he came to Helsinki as a refugee a few years ago. Nowadays Waleed is a front-end developer here at IWA and he manages UX development for our client projects.

“I was at IWA’s winter office in Thailand last winter and it was such a great experience overall,” says Waleed. “It’s important to me to get away from the cold in Helsinki during winter time and it’s so nice to get to know different cultures as well. It’s amazing that we get to gather for various after-work activities with our local colleagues. I also travel a lot all over Vietnam during weekends.”

More than half of our employees come from outside Finland. One third of the IWA employees working in Helsinki are originally born somewhere else than Finland. International employees are a great resource for us since a significant part of our customers are international. IWA operates in many different time zones and we’re thus able to serve our clients 24 hours a day.

“IWA opened up a business in Vietnam’s commercial center Ho Chi Minh City last September. This year it was a logical decision to have our winter office in Vietnam, even though we’ve sent most of our employees to our winter office in Thailand the last few years. It’s great that our Helsinki-based employees get to know our local talent in Vietnam,” says IWA’s Vietnam Director Kai Lemmetty.

“IWA has embraced remote work since the very start, where our employees have been able to freely choose whether they want to work in our offices in Helsinki, Thailand, Abu Dhabi or nowadays Vietnam. Employees can work in the freezing temperatures of Helsinki or in the tropics in Vietnam or Thailand. This vastly increases work motivation and perceived meaningfulness of work.”

We reduced the climate impact of our winter office with voluntary emission compensation.