One week in a remote location — WeGaw team building annual meetups

Since the beginning of our startup WeGaw, we loved the idea of getting all together in a remote environment to let ideas flow. Actually, the origins of WeGaw can be traced back to a coding intense week on a remote island in Thailand.

Coworking space in KoHub, Thailand

Recently we realized we were not the only ones. The guys from Buffer have been doing this for quite some time to make their remote teams collaborate and meet each other. They call them mini-retreats and are focused on bringing an area of the startup together to work on high level topics like: vision, objectives, etc.

At WeGaw we believe our team is the epicenter of everything, in order for them to thrive and truly innovate, we needed to leave space for creativity to step in. That’s how we came up with the ideas of our Annual Meetups.

Once a year, we go to a remote location, with as little working WiFi as possible (sometime is inevitable to avoid connecting back to the world!) and we spend one week transferring knowledge between us, doing workshops, having lunch together, taking the time to know each other and celebrating all the past achievements.

This year we chose a remote location in Cinque Terre, Italy:

Wegaw team somewhere in the middle of Portugal :)

If you are thinking of organizing an Annual Meetup, here are some guidelines on how to make it a success.

Set-up Clear Objectives

The objectives of our Annual Meetup were:

1- Internalization of Mission, Vision and Core Values of the Company

2- Build and foster positive Team Relationships

3- Key Knowledge development & transfer

4- Strengthen the Product process

5- Internalization & Development of Brand Identity and Strategy

6- Internal Leadership strengthening and development

7- Celebrate past year achievements together

To achieve these objectives, you will need to build targeted activities/workshops to tackle the objectives you want to achieve

User Story Mapping session

Define the activities per objective

In order to achieve these objectives we laid down activities like: Technical and product workshops, user story sessions, pitching competitions, branding exercises, performance reviews, team building games, etc.

We usually recommend creating at least 2 activities per objective and define clear Key Results in order to see if the objective or goal has been achieved. In our case:

Internalization of Mission, Vision and Core Values of the Company

1. Sketch our mission, vision and core values in a blank A4 paper, selecting the winners by public voting
2. Play an 8 slides PowerPoint karaoke, with the objective of explaining what the vision and mission of the company is and how the core values help us achieve them.
3. Design and present a 2 minute pitch of the startup in front of a fake audience delivering another 3 minute Q&A session.

Build and foster positive Team Relationships

1. Play team building games like: Truth and Lie, Common Thread or the common book. Winners should get prices!
2. Organize an internal fuck-up night, where every team member shares a moment where they fucked-up something and how they overcame it

Key Knowledge development & transfer

1. “Tell me something I do not know”, each team member will have to perform a 15 minute presentation about any topic day believe will help them in thriving at the startup
2. We delivered technical workshops to train specific team members. In our case in topics like: Geoinformatics Programming, scrumban development or Remote Sensing.

Strengthen the Product process

1. Run a user story mapping session
2. Run a design sprint, releasing a mock-up of a new version of your product with direct customer feedback (if you have the time!)

Internalization & Development of Brand Identity and Strategy

1. Define and refine your Brand Development platform. Here is a cool example of a great exercise.
2. We defined guidelines to see how your personal brand and your startup brand can boost each other. At the end each member will have a personal marketing plan to boost their brand.

Image: Felicia C. Sullivan

Internal Leadership strengthening and development

1. HR Persona exercise. Each team member will fake a CV of the professional they would like to become in the 3–5 years mark.
2. Create a roadmap of objectives per quarter on how to get to the HR Persona.
3. Individual and collective performance reviews.

Celebrate past year achievements together

1. This one should be easy! Take time to celebrate!

After these sessions, we made sure through the activities we established, the objectives were actually achieved.

Take some free time to know each other

While we were working all day, we had the time to get to know each other when the working day was over. These kinds of events are great for fostering internal relationships and future collaborations between team members. Ideally we want to organize team building activities and experiences we will all like to have the time to learn from each other. In our case we took the time to do a wonderful hike in cinque terre, cook together, went out for dinner to one of the local restaurants, organized a fuck-up night (where we learn about the different challenges each team member had to accomplish), a BBQ, and we played board games (we still are a bunch of geeks after all)

Hike by the coast in Cinque Terre

Thanks to the Annual Meetup, we had a fantastic time while working together and getting to know us better. We truly believe this experience will help us thrive and get WeGaw to the next level.