Bringing Our Team Together Despite Pandemic Challenges
We just wrapped a giant Christmas bow around another successful team meetup — we called it the NYC Gather. But what’s a “gather” you might ask? A gather is The Org’s lingo for flying the whole team across the Atlantic to assemble in one place. This year, however, it presented some logistical challenges because of the pandemic. Here’s how we handled it. Nothing went as planned, but that may have been the best part about it.
One of our proudest values is “hygge,” a Danish term for that warm feeling of comfort. It covers everything from cozying up in front of the fireplace on a snowy day to bringing loved ones together and spending quality time with the people you care most about. It’s deeply rooted in us at The Org to find a time and place to bring our full team together in order to build stronger bonds and relationships. Zoom is great, but in-person is better.
After returning home from our Offsite in September, we quickly realised the huge cultural impact of bringing everyone together — not only for fun, but for work too. We therefore decided to introduce two smaller excursions to our annual company travel calendar; one at our New York office and one in our Copenhagen headquarters. We decided to call them “gathers” to differentiate them from the Offsite which would be in a new location every year.
For the NYC Gather we had initially built a four day agenda packed with workshops, social activities like dinners and ice skating and, of course, a major holiday party at a beautiful venue to top off the whole experience. But as with anything you try to plan during a pandemic, you have an agenda until COVID takes it apart. And so COVID did. With numbers rising on both sides of the Atlantic, we felt that we needed to change the format to keep our people safe.
It definitely wasn’t easy telling the team that the Christmas in New York we had all been looking forward to was now cancelled. But it had to be done; The health and safety of our team has to always be our first priority. However, with flights and hotels already booked, we came up with a compromise. We cancelled all official events and dinners, turned all workshops virtual, and communicated to both the NYC and the CPH team that taking part in the gather in-person was now 100% voluntary and only something they should do if they felt comfortable.
December’s in-person “gather” ended up being a much more spontaneous and smaller event for safety reasons, but ultimately, that didn’t take away from the experience we’d planned. In fact, it empowered people at The Org to make plans and gather safely — such as at a masked-up, outdoor skating rink in Central Park.
Reflecting back on this experience, we definitely learned that having to cancel the entire agenda was probably the best thing that happened and truly what made the gather a success. The added free time allowed team members to work like they were used to but with the huge benefit of having our colleagues in one place to get to know each other better naturally and discuss the future of The Org over coffee instead of over Zoom. So for our next gathering in Copenhagen this spring, we know that whether we have a jam packed schedule or nothing planned at all, as long as we’re all together the magic will happen on its own.
