In a remote set-up, one of the biggest challenges is definitely to create a good social environment without having the possibility of in-person meetups. We grew so quickly over the past year, that it was getting hard to get to know each other on a more personal level. We’ve already had some team activities and online socializing happening before (like our Tech Club, online coffee breaks or lunches, game nights etc.), but we haven’t done a true big meetup with everyone at the same time yet. The goal of our first company wide remote team event was to finally be able to speak to everyone individually, like in an in-person event. And I can anticipate this much: it was a huge success!
This is what we did
We split the event into two parts. For the first part, we planned presentations from our founders, Paul and Michael. They gave a short recap of the last 2,5 years, in which receeve grew to what it is today. Especially for our new colleagues this was a good insight of the how and why. With our young company’s history in the back of our minds, we continued talking about what’s about to come next. In the second part of the event, since we grew more than double in headcount only in 2021, we thought it would be a good idea to give our colleagues a quick overview of the different departments, their areas of responsibility and their team members. The departments had very different and creative approaches to presenting themselves. The Sales team, for example, gave two true and one not so true fact for each team member. By talking to them later, we all had the chance to find out which statement was invented. Let me give you an example. Raoul, our Strategic Account Director, says he is living with his family in Barcelona, once hit on Centre Court in Wimbleton and plays the Ukulele. What do you think is the lie here? 😉
Employee awards and Gather gathering
After a more presentation format in the beginning, we now wanted more live interaction. We had the idea of having an award show. But don’t think we had normal awards. Here are the awards that we came up with:
The Giphy-Champion Award
The one that uses the most and the funniest gifs on Slack
The Screenshot-Wizard Award
The one who has the most and probably also the worst screenshots of all of us in their storage
The Coffee-Junkie Award
The one that appears most often with a cup of coffee in a call
The 911 Award
The one that can fix everything
The Different-Background-Every-Day Award
The one that has the most changes of their background in meetings
The Everything-Can-Be-An-Emoji Award 🙂 😉 😀
The one that uses for everything emojis
The Best-Home-Office Award
The one with the nicest home office set up
We let our team vote for their favorites and had a ceremony afterwards. This award show was a lot of fun and gave the perfect dynamic and mood for games and individual socializing. For that we used the platform Gather. There, you are able to create custom maps and everybody can walk around with their own game characters, talk to the other people and play games like werewolves or poker. The environment reminded me a little bit of Pokémon. It was great to have the chance to talk to different people that you normally don’t have too many touchpoints with.
Let’s do it again, very soon
From our own impression and the feedback of our colleagues, we definitely can mark this first remote team event as a successful one. Nevertheless, there are of course also some learnings and things that we are going to do differently the next time. As an example, we would definitely shorten the presentation part to have even more time in the end socializing. The type of presentations in combination with the employee awards helped create a nice dynamic though which continued in the games and group chats.
As I mentioned in the beginning, creating a good social environment is a key point if you want to be successful as a team, especially in a remote set-up. This team event brought us one step closer to creating exactly the environment we are seeking for. We are very happy with the outcome of the first of many remote team events and are taking the learnings to our next one.
Want to be part of our next remote team event? Check out all the job postings on our careers page.
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