My suggestion for how we spend our once-a-year global in-person team meeting
What a group of coworkers that meet once a year should do with that rare opportunity
I believe we should have one simple objective for the kickoff: to help people build friendships with each other. If we do this, then it means when we are working at different locations for the rest of the year, we’ll be more willing and able to help each other.
Almost every event I go to, external or internal, the organizers try and fit too much in. This means sessions get rushed, overrun, and breaks get cut short. The breaks are often the best parts of events, because you get to discuss things you’ve heard, or want to talk about, with people that you seldom have the chance to meet. It may feel uncomfortable as an organizer as some people may perceive giving people space and time is not a full use of time together.
Then the question is how we help people build friendships. This will be through things such as structured sessions (such as updates), unstructured sessions with focus (such as unconference or working sessions), and no structure (such as just giving time for people to meet/work with who they haven’t so far on things that we are genuinely interested in). Similar to Automattic’s company meetings, if this goes well it will feel like a family reunion. Having one simple objective about forming friendships will help the organizers make decisions about which type of sessions to have.
A filter you could use to help you prioritise is: do we get a lot more value by having everyone in the same room for this activity, or could we achieve a similar result by posting on Yammer or done in a call? For example, updates and sharing stories could be done on Yammer, and while there is some value to doing these in person, I believe there is more value doing things that involves people discussing and working on things (or problem solving) in real time. For example, what things would we benefit from having small rotating teams consisting of EMEA/APAC/AMERICAS-based people bouncing ideas and solving problems in realtime?
