Code Enigma Away Week
The where, what and why
Every year we meet up as a team and spend the week both working and socialising together. We don’t shy away from mentioning the latter, because as a fully distributed company it’s important we meet up in person at least once a year. It’s an opportunity to remind ourselves what a great family we are. It was incredible to see the colleagues we’ve come to love over the years, and meet people for the first time! This year we met in Tuscany. This blog is a quick summary of where we’re at, what we’ve been up to and where we think we’re going next.
We said an official hello to our newest developers; Sergio and Luis. Sadly we missed Max who was a little distracted getting married, so we’ll have to wait until next time (so long as our away week isn’t on his anniversary).
We covered a lot:
We discussed Code Enigma’s success to date. New clients, improved products and services, and advancements in our certifications.
We spent a morning split into teams creating a SWOT analysis to better understand our current situation as a whole. This was actually more fun than it sounds, it gave us an insight into how we view the business individually and helped us consolidate what’s important to us and where to focus.
We learned about the design team’s ideas to improve our UX portfolio by employing small, but powerful internal changes.
We discovered what our marketing efforts have achieved since employing a marketing manager, with some particularly interesting statistic around the uptake of our social media and web presence.
We took the opportunity to hand out our new Code Enigma mugs and value cards. It’s the little things, but having an actual, tangible set of beautifully printed postcards to take away with us and keep handy is nice. And who doesn’t like a free mug?
We had our annual Information Security and Quality Management training (thank you to David and Jamie for delivering this — “welcome to ISO 27000-and-fun” — Jamie Wiseman, July 2019). We’re proud to prove that not only do we do what we say we do, but we take it to the heart of the business. We have a genuine desire to drive improvement, so much so we voluntarily adopt policies and procedures to ensure we go above and beyond the requirements of the standards we are certified in. Our clients can be assured we’re doing our best work for them.
We outlined staffing needs, so we can continue to grow in a planned and deliberate manner. Our dev team is collecting talent at at impressive rate, and we’re thinking of welcoming a HR professional to our family to keep things running smoothly.
We spent a day learning about personality types and, by extension, how to effectively communicate within the team — huge thanks to Rebecca Winn (Clarity4D) for running the session. Prior to the away week, we all took a personality questionnaire so we could go over the results together. It highlighted, tangibly, that we live by our values, because they’re genuinely a part of who we are.
Mainly, remote working can be a strange beast, so our Away Week provides a chance for us to reinvigorate and tackle the coming year with a renewed sense of purpose.
