These could happen during the week or (depending on the retreat) the weekend, with weekends probably being given comp time in lieu.
If you think that a modicum of face time throughout the year for a remote team has no value to a group or team, I’ve got news for you.
If you think GP was referring to additional face time in addition to face time at a workplace, then I think you may be projecting and selective quoting a bit. Note that employees at this small company can work when and where they want.
Most 100% remote places I know of that do retreats typically have them during the week. A weekend retreat would be reserved for an activity that would only happen on a weekend and has buy-in from the team.
There seems to be a lot of resistance from remote workers about remote worker retreats happening outside of work hours. Is this actually a thing? I have never heard of it other than the weekend caveat (weekend only event with team buy in) that I mentioned above.
The occasional event w/ buy-in definitely can work, but that wasn't how OP seemed to frame it. Maybe I misinterpreted, maybe he badly explained his idea, I don't know. But I'd have given anybody sh*t for trying to make me work outside of work hours, remote or not.
Just curious... does your leadership go out of their way to offer comp time for travel outside of business hours?
For example, they say or strongly suggest that folks who have to travel at night take the next morning off.
I imagine that this may not be common, but it seems like it would generate a lot of goodwill for folks who have to travel.
Those are incredibly productive (it's probably 12 hours per day of "work" topics) and help forge strong bonds in the team. They're one of the things we're literally counting down the days until we can schedule one for 15 days after the last vaccine dose is in the last arm.
It helps that the most important aspect of our hiring process is about culture-fit - so much so that the final stage of the (pretty relaxed) hiring process is a presentation to everyone in the company who wishes to attend (regardless of role). Those presentations typically see 40% or more of the company attend. Crucially, every person in that presentation gets the opportunity to vote on whether the candidate is hired.
I've made friends for life at this company.
Having guests in the company was always an excuse to do fun stuff. Like driving one weekend to a beach/volcano in one country, planning to go to the movies in another one, and lots of tasty food. We could expense the food so we only paid for a bit of extra gas or extra bus tickets with our pocket.
As a perk we have full kitchens in our offices, and a couple of times a week we cooked lunch together with the foodie/cook ones. It was usually tastier than buying food nearby. And it was fun to learn about each country's home cooking style.
I miss that and hanging out and sight seeing with coworkers on weekends or after work... The daily commute to the local office not so much.
I've just said this earlier in another comment, but I've never had what I'd consider true friendships come out from work acquaintances. I just don't consider "I have fun with you sometimes" to be friendship, and there's exactly 0 people from all the places I've worked at I would feel comfortable say, calling at 3am if I ever felt depressed. That's friendship in my eyes, and a company retreat would never bring that kind of intimacy that's for me a requirement to actual friendship.
Now there are definitely people I would work with again without hesitation, and I'd grab a drink any time with most of my old colleagues.
But when you're trying to build a small company, one approach is to make it feel like a family. And families always have people we like and people we like not so much. But there's something special about one unit working toward a single goal.
My design is for a startup with young people. This would not work nearly as well for older people and people with their own families!
Some people handle remote communications just fine. Others were raised on a steady diet of internet flame wars and approach the screen names in their company chat the same way: As enemies to argue with every day.
Putting people in front of each other associates a real person with that screen name. Everyone starts treating each other better and working more cooperatively. The transformation is almost instant.
One important tip: Face to face meetings need to happen on regular company time as much as possible. Avoid anything on weekends or after hours as much as possible. You don’t want the team building to be an extra ask on top of their normal workload. It is their workload. Obviously flights and hotel stays must be an exception, but keep it in bounds of normal working hours as much as possible.
>Face to face meetings need to happen on regular company time as much as possible.
Yep. I sometimes hear people talking about how we should have team building events on the weekend. That's a big nope. In fact, while it's sometimes unavoidable, I sort of resent it when I need to travel on a Sunday to get to some event/meeting.
As you should. It was something that should have been your time, and became company time.
Maybe you should, then. I speak to my colleagues at the very least 30 minutes to 1h a day, and work full remote.
> But when you're trying to build a small company, one approach is to make it feel like a family.
An approach I immensely dislike. IMHO it's a huge waste of time to pretend like most employees aren't just there to make a living. I'm not looking for a second family or to make friends, I'm here to provide my skills in exchange for money.
> But there's something special about one unit working toward a single goal.
I don't need to like you or my coworkers to do it, they all just have to be remotely competent and do a decent job at it, and I'll do the same. Let's have fun at work when at work, then let's close our computers and have our own lives, please. If friendships evolve from there, cool, but I'm not actively looking to make friends at my workplace.
> My design is for a startup with young people. This would not work nearly as well for older people and people with their own families!
I'm 30, I'm still quite young, AFAIK.
As a developer, at least with my limited attention span, I need periods of no interruption to get anything done. That's why sometimes I stop "working" in the afternoon and resume at 00:00 for a couple of hours to really get things done.
On the family topic, I guess it's a matter of our experiences. Even at my current company, I feel like at least 2-3 of my close colleagues are sort of family. We can discuss some life issues, and we clearly care about each other. We also are totally committed to a shared goal, and we give our all in a sort of intimate way to get the result we agree on. This is the kind of sentiment I want to foster.
So working in an environment that values and supports employees creating friendships that extend outside of the office has been a huge benefit for me.
A friend is someone I feel I can confide in and would not hesitate to call if I ever needed help with something personal. I can count those on a single hand, and in my case, none of those came from work, and that kind of deeply rooted relationship definitely wouldn't come from a company or team-wide organized retreat.
I have a close group of friends that I made at my current company. Some of them have moved on, others are still here but pre-covid we made time to hang out on the weekends or after work and during covid we've done zoom hangouts and stuff like that. A number of them were at my wedding, we were all there for support when someone's mom died during the pandemic and she couldn't travel home for the funeral, and we all supported each other when one of our friend group took his own life last year.
Obviously you won't find that applicable to every job or company, but I see a lot of similarities to making friends at work and when you're in school. You spend a lot of time with the same people everyday and you probably have a shared interest or two. Sometimes that means you find people you can be friends with outside of the time you're "forced" to spend together with.
This is not the US startup scene. There are decent alternatives which don't use people up. No VCs, so no short term fixations beyond having enough runway to last 6 months.
All that said, I do believe that doing things well and providing a great collaborative atmosphere (even family-like perhaps) can lead to high performance.
What I do not want is people merely trading their time, their lives, for a bit of money. That is not living.
Similar things tend to happen when one has a circle of "friends" related to a physical activity: when they stop or change clubs, they often lose most of those "friends", as often the only thread holding things together is a shared activity and location.
At least by recognizing this, people can opt to not put all their eggs in one basket, which lessens any potential loss. Also, it allows them to look at different ways to establish friendships, in a way they can withstand more changes. Finally, there is no third party (the employer) that can use a potential insecurity against them (e.g. less financial growth because Bob is so afraid of rebuilding his circle of friends, he'll accept a stellar performance netting him 1% wage growth).
And as others point out: forced participation into social activities is not something everyone is favorable towards.
When I was 22 and taking on my first development job, I would have loved to have a family-centric groups of smart, motivated people to be a part of. Instead, I did a contract with an IBM subsidiary. We worked sort of like a family, but our idiot manager ignored our scheduling advice and promised delivery in half the time we recommended. So we worked our asses off, as a small ad-hoc family, and still lost the next contract.
What if instead this "family" could be led by a manager who understands reality and doesn't overpromise and underdeliver?
If you ever work with any person or person in a high stress situation, they will become your family or your enemy. Family is much better. And if the greater circumstance is also comprised of family, then you can take on the world. If you don't get this, then you haven't experience it yet. This is not some Cali startup bullshit. This is real people pouring themselves into something they believe in - foolishly or otherwise.
Salary is fine, but I know firsthand that if there is good free food, I will stay and work through lunch (or at least talk with my colleagues about work challenges while eating the nice food).
Look, if someone is not happy with their work, free food or free trips is only going to hold them in place for a short while. They absolutely will leave at some point, and chances are they'll either do some damage on the way out or take some IP if possible. If you don't treat people well, you get what you deserve.
I think you are dreaming of the first kind, and everyone against you in this thread is having nightmares about the second.
But I've also learned something about dealing with "corporate BS" -- if it's at least reasonably well intentioned, one can still decide to make the most of it instead of fighting everything and killing everyone else's motivation.
But I do know what fun is. I worked in the gaming industry at one point, and later in life I worked in places with Friday parties and foosball and food and spirits. Party play time can be a whole lot of fun - the kind you talk about Monday and even Tuesday and then look forward to next Friday.
Foster an environment where people work hard and you all gain, and you get to play nicely on a regular basis, and you have a place where you don't have to compete for talent. People seek you out.
those who went out for lunch did because they needed some air and distance, and that was not frowned upon at all. but trust me, good free food is a powerful motivator to stick around!
Isn't it a big net tax advantage to provide this rather than they pay in after tax (and after employer's portion of payroll tax) dollars?
I'm fully remote and this is weird to me. I might go a day or two and not talk to anyone because I'm busy on a problem, but there's always sprint planning every couple of weeks. We also have a general rule that if a slack convo gets too complicated we just start an impromptu video call in the channel and talk it out. This normally leads to a bit a banter after figuring out what we needed.
As much as I appreciate (most of) my coworkers, on nights and weekends I want to close my computer and spend quality time with my family, not see and talk to the same people I am already forced to talk to 35-40h a week. They might be ideal to you, but you're assuming quite a lot about everyone's situations if you think they work for everyone.