anchor.diff:  
   This trip has been one of the most, if not _the_ most, rewarding experiences of our lives. Not in the least because of the insights listed above, but first and foremost because of all of the amazing people we have gotten to connect with at a deeper level, all of the things we have experienced together, and all the beautiful places we have been able to see with them.
   
  -We would like to thank all of the people we visited for welcoming us with open arms into their cities and, in many ways, their lives. You (and everyone else at GitLab) are welcome in our homes any time.
  +We would like to thank all of the people we visited for welcoming us with open arms into their cities and, in many ways, their lives. You (and everyone else at GitLab) are welcome in our homes anytime.
   
   We would like to thank GitLab for making these things possible through [the way we work](/handbook/), for actively encouraging trips like this by covering a [significant portion of the cost](/handbook/#travel-to-visit-team-members), and ultimately for having built a company with a [culture](/culture/) and [team](/team/) like no other.
   
  
positive.code: 
  About halfway through the trip, GitLab CEO [Sid](https://twitter.com/sytses) realized the tremendous positive impact the trip was having on all of the people visiting, being visited, and following along through our team calls, and the ["the company will cover travel costs to visit colleagues"](/handbook/#travel-to-visit-team-members) policy [was born](https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/www-gitlab-com/merge_requests/3735) to encourage more people to make trips like this in the future.
  
  Now that the trip is concluded and that we have had a few weeks to reflect, we'd like to share with you some of the things we've learned during this trip.
  In the near future, we will also publish a followup to ["GitLab in Action"](/2016/08/24/gitlab-in-action/), covering our travels through Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Oceania in more detail.
  
  ## Insight 1: GitLab feels like one big team of friends
  
  One of the first things we realized on this trip relates to one of our core values at GitLab: [Kindness](/handbook/#kindness).
  
  Each and every one of the people we met up with, some of whom didn't even know that we were coming until mere days before we did, welcomed us with open arms, and made us feel at home in these strange cities and countries.
  Many of them invited us into their homes, introduced us to their significant others and/or [pets](/team-pets), and took us into town to show us their favorite places to see, work, eat, or have a drink.
  
  Because of the glimpses we had had into each others lives through the daily company-wide [team call](/handbook/#team-call) and the dozens of Slack channels about interests and hobbies, it immediately felt like we were hanging out with a friend, not just "someone from the internet", or "this person I work with". While early conversations often related to our single biggest shared interest—GitLab and work at GitLab—this quickly became just one of the many things we talked about.
  
  Interestingly, this was true regardless of whether they were in our department and we had already worked with them a lot, or if they did something totally different and we had never conversed before. ["There are no floors in GitLab"](/2016/12/05/how-we-stay-connected-as-a-remote-company/), and even though we have multiple [functional groups](/team/structure), GitLab feels like one big team.
  
  
negative.code: 
  While you hear about things going on in people's lives, about the places they live, and about issues they face, it's hard to truly appreciate and understand these different perspectives at a distance of hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of miles. Visiting them, getting to know them in their "natural habitat", and experiencing some bits of their life yourself, bring you closer to that understanding than anything else.
  
  An example of this occurred when we arrived in Taipei, Taiwan to meet with [Jen-Shin](https://twitter.com/godfat), and got to experience GitLab from the Asia-Pacific (APAC) region.
  
  Seen from Taipei, the European workday starts at around 4pm, and the American workday doesn't start until 10pm, so there is very little overlap with much of the rest of the team. While your mornings are nice and quiet and offer you a chance to concentrate on your work and catch up on emails and todos without interruption, that changes just when your workday is about to end. You get responses to all of the Slack messages and GitLab comments you sent earlier, people start mentioning you on new things, and you are left with a choice: Do I work a little bit more and respond to them now, or do I respond in the morning, effectively blocking them until _their_ morning, a full 24 hours later?
  
  Being the kind, helpful people we are, we chose the former, and as those things go, before we knew it the clock struck twelve and we had been working for 15 hours straight.
  
  Turns out it's really hard to stick to regular working hours when most of the people you work with are half a world away. In the end, we did what Jen-Shin had already found as working best for him: we shifted our workday a number of hours to better align with Europe. Other people work in the morning, take a break for a few hours to do whatever it is people do, and work some more in the evening. [Working hours are flexible](/handbook/#working-hours), so everyone finds something that works for them. Of course, as more people from the APAC region join the team, and as our people get more evenly distributed among timezones, much of this issue will resolve itself automatically.
  
  