I went on Holiday with my Colleagues

I just spent a week living in an Airbnb with four other people. We went to the supermarket together, cooked breakfast together, visited museums, went out to the pub…all the things you (well, I) do on a holiday. But it wasn’t my four closest friends. These were my colleagues - thrown together by fate, or, more precisely, my employer.

Building Culture and Trust

With the whole COVID-shift-to-remote thing, a bunch of companies (and, primarily, employees) discovered the benefits of remote work. However, they also discovered one of the drawbacks - the difficulty in building a coherent team culture.

Some enlightened companies are trying to have their cake and eat it - Spotify have “core weeks” where all employees are required to be in an office. However, a large number of (tech) companies are now either requiring a full RTO (return-to-office) or have office-based mandates, stating the number of days you have to be present in order to fulfill your “culture-and-team-building” requirements.

Why RTO is a Blunt Tool

Now I want to be reasonable. Forcing people to sit near to each other day-on-day is clearly a way of achieving a coherent culture and team-building. Maybe you’re somebody for whom that’s not true but, if you look at schools and universities and work and…well, everywhere…when you put a bunch of people next to each other for long periods of time, they seem to be pretty good at creating little tribes.

And little tribes who all like/respect each other and can work together harmoniously and achieve greater than the sum of their parts and all of that jazz sounds like music to executive-ears.

Concentrated Meetups

I’ve worked somewhat remotely for around 7 of the last 15 years and have done so in a bunch of different situations (only remote employee at a startup, one of a few remotes, everybody remote, everybody remote and async) and I agree wholeheartedly that in-person meeting supercharges team-building.

However, I’ve found that the bit after the off-site/meetup where you all go to a restaurant/bar/pub/ski chalet/AirBnb is by-far-and-away the part where most of the team building happens.

You sit in a conference room/meeting all day talking about strategy or running a retro or doing whatever you have to do to look like you’re working. And then, you get the benefit of spending time with other people and do all that lovely team-forming that you’re really there to do.

What if…well, what if you just did the best bit? Concentrated, social-heavy meetups build culture far more effectively than mandatory office days.

Meetups/Time in Person

My part-time DPhil technically requires 30 days/year in Oxford, or 1 day per term. My strong advice to the University was that 1 day per week is probably the worst possible way of achieving 30 days/year. With 1 day per week, I’m travelling early, fulfilling my requirement, and then getting out of the office as quickly as possible to start a gruelling commute back home. Yuck. I’m sad, I don’t spend much time with my colleagues, and any time I do spend is rushed tired and grumpy time.

Instead, I spend up to a week in a single visit. I’m relaxed, rested, and am delighted to meetup at breakfast, take a pleasant lunch with people, and then have dinner/drinks with somebody else. I live and breathe in the city and its culture. I’m there less often, but the hours I’m there, I make it count.

My current employer (Automattic, a fully remote company since 2005) take an extreme approach to this very problem. Rather than offices, office hours or any of the usual approaches, they instead have a culture of meetups. Rather than the monotonous breathless grind of painful commute-filled weeks and watercooler chat, I spend a couple of very intense weeks (over a year) with my colleagues where we live in each others pockets. I think each one of those weeks comfortably builds culture more effectively than the ‘sit-next-to-people’ osmosis style approach that appears to currently be favoured.

What a Week Looks Like

You plan the week together - generally one person takes lead but they must be respectful of everybody else’s circumstances. If somebody can’t travel to a specific country, or they get the ick at the idea of sharing a house, or they have to be able to call home at a specific time each day…well, you wouldn’t plan a holiday that objectively doesn’t work for one of the attendees…so we have to be mindful of our group’s circumstances.

Choosing a location, accommodation, food, activities…these all reveal people’s preferences and help you get to know people. Then you travel and meet the avatars come-to-life, and get to laugh at how tall everybody is, or what they look like without headphones, or whether their shoes are especially outrageous.

Put smart people with a shared interest together, and you’ll be surprised at when the ‘value’ turns up. We had a group presentation one night at midnight because we were all feeling it. We didn’t start one day until midday because we fancied a walk to a coffee shop. On the walk, we discussed team structure and agreed on a plan forward. Our agenda was created on the first day and never looked at again, because we didn’t need it.

Work bleeds into the personal and personal bleeds into the work, and you end up spending the week in whatever way makes sense. No strict agenda and no checklists…just smart people working out how best to live and work together. Arguments about company culture over starters, and cool card tricks during the planning sessions.

Downsides

There are downsides to the approach I’m espousing. It can make things difficult familially (I have three small children - my wife has to perform heroics while I’m off working) or for anybody with caring responsibilities. It costs more money (assuming your employer covers travel and accommodation costs, but wouldn’t cover commuting costs). And it’s exhausting.

This approach also doesn’t guarantee anything. You’re taking smart grown-ups and you’re putting them together and hoping something good happens. It’s the organisational equivalent of jazz - maybe the horn and the bass just don’t gel and spend the song clashing rather than harmonising.

But ultimately, if you’re in a band together - you have to find a way to make it work. Perhaps the horn and the bass need to clash, until they find their rhythm.

Conclusion

Working remotely is great - when it works well it can be incredible from a personal perspective (nobody likes commuting), an organisational perspective (deep-work is much easier when you can choose where to work), and a national perspective (imagine not having all jobs located in one place!).

But it’s hard to build a culture when your employees never see each other and never get the chance to talk without an agenda.

I went on holiday with my colleagues, and it was the best team-building I’ve done since my last holiday with them.