Meeting the team

The time has finally come!

6 months into my current role and I was able to get a trip down south to meet the rest of my team in person.

Well needed

Considering how much time I’ve spent on video calls with my team, it still seemed weird that we’d never met in person — none of them is even based in the same country as me. Being in the UK, this sounds like a bigger distance than it really is.

The travel itself presented a couple of opportunities for me to be alone with my thoughts. I actually managed to spend some time reading a book, not for work, but for enjoyment! It’s been a while since I’ve been able to find the time for that.

The social side of the trip was also a good opportunity to just get to spend some time chatting with people.

Work obviously came up in conversation, that’s what our main common interest is, but it didn’t take too long for the stories of past exploits to start surfacing. Getting to know the team as people, rather than just the roles we all perform.

It certainly helps to get that face time with people that you see on calls all the time — I got to spend 2 hours talking with my line manager. That’s the longest conversation we’ve been able to have since I started — and it proved to be really useful for us both.

Future plan

Because our team is distributed across the UK, I think there will be the continuing need to meet up every so often, though perhaps on a rotating destination basis.

A slow tour of the UK offices, taken over the coming year, will be a nice way to get more and more absorbed into the culture of the organisation and to increase each of our exposures to the different teams present in each location.

With the new office nearly ready to inhabit, I now need to get myself used to leaving the house more regularly — which will make a change from starting at 8 am but still only needing to get up at half 7 in order to do so. I forget how long it takes to get a train into the city!

Originally published at https://lifeinux.com on March 26, 2022.