It’s a Thursday, it’s raining like crazy in Oslo and we’re just outside the city at a giant hotel complex designed specifically for offsites. We’re there as 4 teams (Omni, Peil, Sports and Upnext), all part of a singular team called NextGen. In theory we’re there to discuss the future of our shared team, and how we fit into the larger organization. There’s several nationalities between us, but our teams occupying Oslo, Stockholm, Gdansk and Krakow.
A week beforehand, my manager has come to ask me to arrange some social activities. We go visit the location, and I propose the idea of cross-team speed-meeting. A reservation on a large room is required to fit all 50ish of us in with enough space that neighbours don’t have to shout over each other. We plan for 2 other activities to happen later on: a walk, and board games.
The premise is simple: you will be paired with 1 random person for 15 minutes 3 times. Talk to the other person, about whatever comes into your head. We’d been running the premise company-wide within Oslo for some months; we know it works, and (most) people like it.
This time it will be a bit different though. I will be making pairs based on who would be good to talk with each other, and who knows who already. I have a clear goal in mind: strength our cross team collaboration by putting people in touch with each other.
So back to the day at hand, we’ve set up about 25 tables 2 meters apart, each with 2 tables on. I get everyone to line up at the door, and as each person comes to the front, I place them somewhere strategical. Per column, each backwards-facing person will move to the next desk after 15 minutes. In my head I build up a map of who is where and who they will meet. There was a good couple of hours after when I could’ve told you exactly who was sitting where.
It goes pretty smoothly. People are conversing so fluidly that it seems a shame when the 15 minutes are up and we clap hands to announce the next rotation. In the middle of the second session, a hot dog man shows up and people move their conversations to the queue to obtain fresh sausages.
Afterwards, different groups go for walks together. The feedback we got was pretty positive — people liked it and would do it again, overall. Only a couple of people didn’t like it that much. If I were to do things differently, I might want to mix a bigger group discussion in with the 1-to-1s. Maybe the walking groups could’ve been assigned groups, rather than free formation.
Implementing this is pretty straightforward — and I’ve seen a lot of companies do this. So it’s nothing revolutionary. But if you’re having an offsite in the future where you have multiple teams that don’t really interact on day-to-day basis but perhaps should, maybe give it a try.
