From Mallorca to Zoom: Our First Virtual Company Retreat
At LaterPay, we love being a distributed team with about 50 people spread over 13+ countries. The flexibility, focus on communication and culture work great for us. But as much as we love and promote our remote setup, we do need some in-person time as well. That’s why we get the whole team together twice a year at our AllHands (company retreat).
The benefits of AllHands
We focus hard on communication and people at LaterPay, but also realize that virtual day-to-day interactions cannot replace being together in one place. Holding an AllHands allows us to build deeper interpersonal connections more easily and naturally, which in turn helps us increase motivation and alignment across the company.
Our usual setup
We organize a one week AllHands two times per year somewhere in Europe, as that’s where most of our team is located. The schedule is a mix of updates, workshops, time for the different teams to do their own thing, AMA (Ask Management Anything), brainstorming and lots of time for socializing and eating. Food really brings us together.
Everything was set up for us to spend the first week of May at our tried and trusted resort in Mallorca. Everything was announced to the team, the hotel was booked, the flights were booked… I cannot even begin to explain how excited we all were! No venue is perfect, but this one comes pretty close for our team.
And then…COVID-19 messed up our plans
As the AllHands came closer, the coronavirus continued to spread and more and more countries were implementing lockdowns and travel restrictions. I have to admit, we were in denial for a while before we were ready to cancel the Mallorca AllHands. But once it was clear we couldn’t ask the team to travel in these circumstances even if travel restrictions would be lifted on time, our focus shifted to getting a remote AllHands set up instead.
How we organized our first remote AllHands
Schedule
Almost all of our team members are located in time zones from UTC-8 to UTC+2. With that in mind, it was important to figure out a daily AllHands time slot that would not force people in the west to wake up super early and that would also not force people in the east to keep working super late. We settled on the following:
- Start: 1200 UTC with the first hour blocked every day for something social and optional
- End: 1700 UTC
Sessions
To figure out what sessions to include in the schedule, we first figured out what the goal of the remote AllHands would be:
- Try to maintain some normalcy and the AllHands feeling
- Bring together our products and align everyone behind them
- Help build the team and interpersonal connections
Maintaining normalcy and the traditional AllHands ‘feeling’
To do this, we made sure to include sessions we always have at our normal AllHands. Examples of these sessions are:
- a fun quiz to kick off the week,
- update sessions to show progress and create alignment,
- lightning talks: a talk about any topic, but max 5 minutes long — this is a team favorite,
- team time: time for all the different teams to do their own thing
- product workshop through which the team interacts with our product and we get lots of feedback.
Bringing together our products and aligning everyone behind them
These are not regular sessions at our AllHands, but rather sessions that are specifically set up in context of what is going on in the company right now. An example is the presentation of a new part of our product followed by a Q&A.
Helping build the team and interpersonal connections
The opportunities to get to know each other as people between sessions, during meals, while playing games or while having a drink together is what makes AllHands special and worth all the effort that goes into organizing it. We quickly realized this type of social interaction and relationship building would need to be much more intentional at a remote AllHands.
We looked up some tools that could help us with this and finally decided to give Pragli a try. Pragli is a virtual office tool with voice and video channels. We instructed the team to go to Pragli regularly between sessions to chat in smaller groups as they would at a physical AllHands and to hang out there as they normally would in actual rooms or at the pool.
Additionally we set up a few extra social sessions, which all happened in Pragli:
- Daily 1 hour “Breakfast/lunch/yoga” slot at the beginning of AllHands time. During this slot, the team was encouraged to go to Pragli, to hang out there, to have their breakfast/lunch together as they would at a normal AllHands, to have a yoga session or something similar.
- Pizza party at the end of the AllHands as well as some cooking together time before the pizza party.
Communication
We’re all about transparency and clear expectations. We made sure we were transparent and updated the team while figuring out what our first remote AllHands would look like and we made expectations as clear as possible. Examples of setting clear expectations around AllHands:
- The slot for AllHands sessions is not a full work day due to time zone differences, so the expectation was to get some non-AllHands work done before or after AllHands sessions.
- The attendance expectation for each session is added in square brackets to the title in the calendar.
- The same Zoom link is used by default for every AllHands session (that’s not in Pragli) and added to the calendar events. If any session needed to be held in another Zoom link or in another tool, it had to be clearly communicated with the team and also reflected in the calendar.
Translating a very beloved, social company retreat into a virtual event is not straightforward. If you have the same challenge ahead of you, we recommend you first figure out what the goals and benefits of your company retreat are and then figure out how you can translate them into a virtual experience. Don’t be afraid to ask for help and do some brainstorming with your colleagues. Also don’t be afraid to let your team know that you haven’t figured everything out, but that you’ll keep them in the loop and that ideas and suggestions are welcome.
Stay tuned for our next article in which we’ll cover what we learned from our very first remote AllHands — and what we would do differently!
