That time the entire company boarded a flight to Portugal

You don’t really know your team until you’ve done a surf lesson together.

In August last year, EDITED took a company retreat. Five days in Portugal where we learned a lot about each other, the team values and North Atlantic waves.

Many job-hunters are first drawn to companies through their hiring videos. We’re enticed by cool open-plan offices, candid endorsements from casually-attired future teammates, and, often the promise of free food.

I’ve got to admit that I too have watched the Twitter one, the Dropbox one, and a few from Airbnb. But it’s EDITED’s that hit me in the resume. It wasn’t your normal office walk-through — it was a video about the 2016 company retreat in Greece.

I saw a tightly bonded team eating, drinking, exploring, generally being happy in each others’ company.

And they had good reason to be. The retail technology company had experienced a year of epic growth, and the team had built software that the world’s top brands and retailers use to stay ahead of their competition.

If you go down to the woods today…you’ll find the entire EDITED team picnicking.

The fact that there even is a team retreat is cool in itself, but it’s the relationships I saw between the people in that video that made EDITED my number one choice during my job search.

And now, I’m nearly a year into my role as Business Development Manager in EDITED’s New York office. That meant I got to go on (and star in the video of) the 2017 retreat in Portugal and find out what all this fun in the sun with coworkers was really about.

Here’s what I found.

Bonding is real

My colleagues are spread around the world. There’s over 100 of us, across North and South America, Europe and Asia, which means many of our work relationships are digital. We give great gif.

When we’re in our regular offices, we’re all in contact on Slack and each team has weekly meetings over Skype. We’re all well-rehearsed on the courtesies of remote dial-ins and there are buddy systems in place within departments for new staff (shout out to Chris in London!).

That’s all well and good, but how do you really get to know each other?

Well, at EDITED you start by going for a ride on a gigantic, ancient sailboat in the river Tagus.

Smiling like a couple of dudes who know they’ve applied the right SPF.

A four hour boat ride accompanied with local port, glorious sunshine and a hotly contested aux cord will break the ice for new starters and wallflowers alike.

We were all dancing before sunset — despite the fact that three newbies had actually had their first day on retreat.

Now we’re back in our various offices it’s pretty neat that I share travel memories with the finance team in London or the data scientist in Sao Paulo.

Smile if you’d rather be here than in the office.

We excel at different things & that’s why we work

Have you ever tried beating eggs until they form peaks, in 40 degree heat? Nor had I, until the Portuguese cookery class, and it turns out that some people can do it and some can’t.

But that’s ok, because maybe you’re one of the people that gets up onto the board fifteen minutes into your surf lesson, takes the seat at the back of the open-sided Jeep or has sussed out the complicated walk back to the hotel from the beach-side restaurant.

When’s a good time to tell them there’s no one in the driver’s seat?

Courage comes in many forms — being with a big group of people, across ages and nationalities, for a week gave color to the mixed bag of skills will collectively own.

And the same applies when we get back to the office. Some of us are better at speaking loudly in team meetings, some of us have impeccable grammar and some of us are great at small talk with the client that arrived 20 minutes early.

Not only do we have a little more awareness of one another’s skills, but patience for the things that aren’t our forte.

We learned the truth about cookery classes — they’re always more about wine than food.

Getting out of the office encourages honesty

While the retreats may look like a lot of eating, dancing and sunning ourselves, we get down to work too.

In fact, some of the most important sessions of the year are held on the company retreat. For one, the CEO sums up some of the biggest achievements of the year, which is incredibly inspiring as a new team member.

Many different voices got time to speak — teams presented their roadmaps, cool insights and initiatives for the months ahead, and awards were handed out to people who’d best personified the company values (as voted by the team).

The CEO takes a second to recalibrate.

One of the most rewarding sessions was the 360 mentorship. The company broke off into its various teams, and each team met for a half hour of mentoring.

Sat poolside we discussed a new process for submitting design requests and hashed out some attention-grabbing ideas for events marketing. They’re not things that a sales team often gets to weigh in on, and equally, it’s not often you approach the engineering team for ideas around prospecting campaigns.

But away from our desks, in this environment that reinforces our relationships to one another, perspective is gained. It felt easy to speak honestly and productively across the business.

This is a passionate, curious and innovative group of people I’m proud to call my team. I really miss those natas though.

Want to be on our next retreat? Check out our latest openings in product & engineering, sales, retail strategy, ops and marketing!