This past month, we took a few days away from billable client work, and instead spent some time working on ourselves!
The third annual EC Team Retreat was held at the end of February, with this year’s in-person gathering held in sunny and warm (especially for a Minneapolis-based person like myself) Austin, Texas! Team members flew in from both coasts, as well as us “no-coast” midwesterners, to a beautiful boutique hotel downtown.
It’s been well proven over the past several years that remote work and remote teams can still produce great results for our clients, while maintaining a highly functioning and (dare I say) happy work environment for our team.
But there’s more to work than just “work.” There are relationships that need to be nurtured, ideas that need space, and trust that needs to be built for us to continue to succeed as an agency.
We’re all still fully human people, living in the real world, and until that changes, we still crave (to different degrees) the opportunity to spend time in-person with one another. Our in-person team retreats are designed for all these reasons, and more.
The majority of the team retreat is about having fun and being together in the same space. But we do some work too! Just not the type of work we typically make time to do.
As in past years, we rented a great office space and meeting room to hold team workshops. There are a few pre-scheduled events each year, such as the “State of Electric Citizen” by yours truly, where I cover the state of the agency and market, and outline new initiatives for our team to focus on going forward into another year.
Technical Director and co-founder, Tim Broeker, also gives a regularly scheduled keynote around the most timely and compelling tech-related topics we should consider.
But from there, it’s really a free-form conversation. Everyone is invited to brainstorm a list of topics for conversation, and then we all vote on which topics we’ll spend the most time discussing. Conversations are free flowing, with whiteboards, notepads, and shared screens helping capture the topics at hand.
Some of the more popular topics this year included “New strategies for client support,” “going beyond Drupal”, “practical uses for AI today,” and “future of the web”.
Conversations were lively and generated a lot of new ideas and initiatives for our team to pursue. The trick is how to follow up, once we’ve back in the “real world.” To help keep up the momentum, we took extra time this year to document and track specific tasks and deliverables from our workshops. Look for future blog posts for updates on how we do!
If you had time to spend addressing pain points at your organization, or thinking about new ideas and approaches to your work, what would they be? Does your company make time for these activities? How successful have they been?
It wouldn’t be a team retreat without proof! Once again we made sure to document the good times together, with a full team photoshoot (thanks to Austin-based photographer, Julia Keim!) along the banks of the Colorado River in downtown Austin, as well as in our rented office space.
And in what is threatening to be an annual tradition, the whole team hit the water for a two-hour boat tour.
Apparently downtown Austin only allows electric-powered boats on their stretch of the river, which made for a really scenic and quiet trip down the Colorado River.
Just kayaks, little electric boats, and our fantastic, two-story boat (thanks to Capital Cruises) cruising slowly down the river at sunset.
I have personally been to Austin for almost 10 years, but it remains one of the great American cities to visit.
We did everything from fine dining at an "authentic" Mexican restaurant to a more casual Texas BBQ set in a modest wooden building (set among the many brand-new skyscrapers). I even took in a nice run one afternoon, using the busy paths downtown along the river and mingling with the natives.
Now that so many of us are working from home, making time for in-person gatherings seems like an important step every business should take. Do you have your own team retreats or other opportunities for face time with your team? How has it been for you?
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