Why Our Distributed Company Holds In-Person All-Hands
Building technical synchronicity across time-zones
Last week wrapped our first official ‘All Hands’ week: the majority of our company is remote, so for many of us this was our first time meeting face-to-face. As a team of seven (and counting) we brought folks from around the country to our HQ in San Francisco to cement our technical direction and foster a culture of kindness, transparency, and trust.
We spent the week getting to know one another — a picnic in Dolores Park, miniature golfing, and a bike ride across the Golden Gate Bridge. During our time together we were able to connect on a personal level and align on company-wide goals and priorities.
Our all hands week is vital to our success. We can get a lot of traction with our ‘call-hands’ and remote engagement, but our time spent together allowed us to create strong bonds that have proved invaluable to our distributed work. Some of the team shared their thoughts on the importance of spending time in-person:
“This is the best team that I’ve ever worked with, hands down. It was great seeing how quickly everyone got along and just started communicating as a team. After spending time with each other this week I feel like we’re all friends already, and Slack really just isn’t sufficient to convey our outsized personalities. Not everything is unicorns and apple pie; we have some ignition obstacles to overcome to get this startup off the ground. But I truly believe we have the best possible people working together to overcome those obstacles, and when we hit our stride, this team is going to make history.” — Casey Rosenthal, CTO
“This is a majority remote team and most of us are recent hires, so in a lot of ways we’re all on the same page already…the first page. Spending a week in the same space, eating together, and generally becoming friends was a great way to build trust quickly. What we’re doing is technical and Slack is great for that, but who we’re doing it with is what really matters. What I discovered is that we’re a team of minimum ego, which is incredibly rare. I feel like my ability to communicate with my team is 1000% better knowing that. It also helps that we all get along so well, which is no accident (good hiring practices!). There’s a certain sigh of relief knowing I’m working with people I respect and like. That feeling would be much harder to achieve if we never met.” — Kevin Cantwell, Senior Infrastructure Engineer
“Among the plethora of distributed workplaces over 20 years of Internetting, I have never experienced the kind of sincere team bonding we achieved in five days here at Backplane. It was if we had already been on the same ground, but never connected by common circuitry, so we seemed to immediately gel. Our time together was not only technological synchronicity, but also filled with deep personality insights, such that I came home feeling a lot more like I had made several new close friends rather than joined a team of tech company coworkers. This kind of human quality gives remote and asynchronous communication an entirely different dimension, surprisingly removing a lot of the cognitive guesswork in our interactions.” — Matt Davis, Senior Infrastructure Engineer
It’s clear that everyone in the company, and even the company itself benefits from the time we spend together. We’ll be doing this again soon, and if you’d like to join us — we’re hiring.
