What are company offsites for?
Three weeks ago, I was on a flight to Barcelona for the second Stuart company-wide offsite ever organised, the second I was actually attending in my Stuart life. Same as last year, the French, UK and Spanish teams flew to Barcelona for three days of gigantic Stuart bonding.
Since some time, so-called “company offsites” have become a compulsory part of the life of any startup or company. How many of these team pictures have you seen in your Linkedin newsfeed? They’re on the beach, kayaking or karaoking together, with some well-chosen hashtags as captions to show the happiness and enthusiasm of the employees in these “workations” (I just came up with this one)
Stuart is no exception to the rule — we had our first company-wide offsite last year. At that time, we were all very excited and curious about what it would turn out to be.
As one of the first Stuart employee, I know a good number of team members across all countries, so any occasion to see them and spend time together is very exciting for me.
But wait a minute — what are team off sites for? Can we finally admit it is paid holidays? Chilling by the pool with sunnies on to come back with a perfect tan to rainy London? Or is that the ideal forum to brainstorm on various issues and topics that we wouldn’t have time to think of with the hectic pace of our startup day? With people to whom we don’t talk to usually?
At this year’s Stuart offsite, we did have a team workshop — we were asked to come up with an idea of product to launch in 2020, split in multidisciplinary and multinational teams of 10 people. I got to work with our CTO Lachlan Laycock, who is already someone I admire as a leader at Stuart, as well as a French Product Manager, a UK Marketing Manager, a Customer Support agent, and so on. Therefore not really the bunch of people I would necessarily involve in my daily Key Account Manager job.
When I presented our proposal to the wider global team later on alongside our CTO, on the stage, our duo pleased many, among which our CEO Damien Bon, who said he was delighted to see different people working together in such a good harmony and team spirit.
We also did other group activities, such as improvisation workshops, biking or kayaking for the adventurous ones, and of course, we had all our meals together and parties were on till very late at night — or early in the morning ;)
So being all together at the same place at the same time does encourage collaboration. But rather than immediate collaboration, I’d say it’s more about setting up the stage for future collaboration when we will be back to our respective countries, at our respective desks, with our hats of Operations managers or Sales specialists. It’s about setting up a certain mindset open to different ideas and points of views, where we will automatically think, when working on a topic — it would be interesting to see what the other countries are doing about this, or what the Product team would think about this client issue for which I cannot find a solution as Key Account Manager. Let’s ask them!
In sum, this is about being a truly global & united team vs. a bunch of people sitting in different offices or teams and doing things their way. You can push this throughout the year of course, and you should, but global off sites are the perfect occasion to make it happen. Just make sure everyone mingles and it will have long-lasting effects on your company :)
ps: Thanks to Stuart and our trio of rock star Office Managers for rocking the organisation of these global off sites — if you need any tip on this, let me know :)
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