Two years ago, for the first time, we decided to bring almost fifty of our remote developers and products together and introduce each other in a pleasant, relaxed atmosphere. So there was a hackathon near Chekhov in the Moscow region, it was great, everyone liked it and everyone wanted more. And we continued to bring our remote developers together “live”, we just changed the format: now it’s not a general hackathon, but individual teams’ trips. This article is about why we switched to a new format, how we organize it, and what results we got.
Why team trips?
Since the development team has grown almost three times, and the idea of taking everyone out together no longer looks attractive. Causes:
- Complicated logistics. Finding a place for one and a half hundred people and ordering a charter is half the trouble, it is much more difficult to choose a place and time that suits everyone for a general departure. In this case, in any case, someone key will surely fall off.
- The main meaning of the event is lost - team building. Such a large crowd will inevitably break into groups, but these groups are not formed according to the principle of command. Our corporate experience shows that people with the same functions usually hang out with each other, but from different teams - analysts with analysts, QA with QA, they know each other well and discuss their professional topics. And we need to introduce and make friends the guys within each team.
- As a result, everything turns into a corporate party and a fun drinking party, and this is a completely different type of event, and we hold it separately.
Realizing this, we developed the format of annual (sometimes more often) team trips. Each such trip has a specific goal, formulated consciously and in advance using the SMART technique (specific, measurable, achievable, supported and timed goal). This is an opportunity to change the environment, work next to a colleague whom I previously only saw on Hangouts, improve work efficiency, which will further affect the metrics that are important for the product.
Departure formats
Hackathon Motivational story that allows you to feel like a part of a big project. The team puts all current affairs on pause, breaks into small groups, tests a few often crazy hypotheses, discusses the results and invents something completely new as a result. The Vimbox team made such a trip last year, a new interface was invented for video calling a student with a teacher - Real Talk, which has now become the main one for platform users.
Synchronization Bringing together very different people - usually developers and business - for a better understanding of the wants and opportunities. A typical example is the departure of the CRM team, which plunged into the forests near Moscow to discuss the expectations from the system they are developing. Everyone spent one day with the founder of the company, recalled the story - the first CRM was , the next step in database automation was a Google spreadsheet, and only then one developer wrote a CRM prototype ... On another day, the team met with business customers. Everyone began to better understand what exactly they need, where to focus their attention.
Teambuilding The main idea is to show the guys that they work with people, and not with chats and video calls. The most common format of trips, during which the working context does not break, everyone continues to solve daily tasks, but all kinds of joint activities are added to them. It is especially important when the team has grown over the year with a large number of new remote people who have never personally met each other. It gives a good start for joint work in the future, but it must be borne in mind that productivity drops during such a trip, so it is better to conduct them once a year.
Who is on the team?
From the team must be representatives of all horizontals:
- Product
- Analytics
- Dev
- Design
- QA
The final list of participants is determined by the product manager, guided by the purpose and objectives of the trip, as well as the performance of employees.
How much?
The total cost of the trip depends on the budget of the team, most often it is 30-50 thousand rubles per person, excluding salary. This includes tickets, accommodation, breakfast, sometimes something else if the budget allows - but definitely not alcohol, it's yourself.
A team trip is not a vacation, the guys go to work, not to rest. Working days and weekends are counted as normal days. Therefore, we avoid peak “vacation” dates when tickets and accommodation are sky-high, but, of course, we don’t send anyone to where it’s cheap, but where no one wants.
In general, the team first determines the dates when everyone can, and expresses their wishes for cities and countries. Further, HR considers options for selected dates and regions. The output should be something more or less average and adequate. If tickets to conditional Turkey, where the team wants, cost 35 thousand on the selected dates, and Montenegro costs 25 thousand at the same time, then we will recommend Montenegro. If the spread is 23-27 thousand, then the choice will remain with the team.
At the same time, it is also necessary to take into account the cost and living conditions: the tickets may be expensive, but this is compensated by housing. And more often the opposite. In particular, there are complex cases related to the fact that guest houses, as a rule, are designed for family vacations, and not team trips. It is unlikely that our programmers will want to sleep on the same bed - which means that we need to negotiate with the owner, the price changes.
Where to go?
The team determines the dates (at least two months in advance) and forms general wishes for directions. On the part of HR, a project joins, helping to choose the best options for the entire team. For example, if most developers live beyond the Urals, they might be interested in living in the Moscow region. If the team has people from Ukraine, or even more so a country with a visa regime, there is no point in taking them to Russia, it is better to find something else. As a result, a list of possible directions is proposed, the team votes, selecting the top three options. Then the project works out these options in terms of cost and capabilities, and the product chooses a location that fits into its budget.
What are the requirements for the place?
There are two main requirements for the place, and they are purely utilitarian:
- good Wi-Fi confirmed by reviews / personal experience,
- a large workspace where you can organize places for the whole team.
Any negative feedback about the quality of the Internet is a reason to abandon the location: we are going to work, the falling Internet is not good for us at all.
The working space is either renting a conference room in a hotel, or a large space for 15-20 people on the ground floor, on the veranda, somewhere where everyone can get together and organize an open space.
The issue of food is also being worked out, but this is not necessarily a requirement for the location: it can be both inside and in a restaurant nearby, the main thing is that the guys have the opportunity to eat three times a day without leaving somewhere for kilometers.
Who chooses the format?
Departure goals are set by the product team with the help of the training department, we call them Skyway: they have the super ability to pull goals and expectations out of the stream of consciousness. Skyway communicates with the product, identifies the needs of the team meeting, and offers its own program options.
Such help is especially needed when there is a synchronization task, as was the case with the CRM team. Very different people participated there: tech-savvy developers and guys from sales departments. It was necessary to get acquainted, communicate, and at the same time not be turned off from the workflow - the team at that moment had rather tough sprints. Accordingly, Skyway helped in organizing the process in such a way that both the work went on and the necessary meetings took place (including with the founders of the company).
How are activities organized?
Activity ideas come from the team, product and project manager from HR. A channel is created in Slack, ideas are generated into it, a backlog is assembled, and then the team chooses what they want to do on the spot. As a rule, activities are paid for by the employees themselves, but there are exceptions if it is something related to the purpose of the trip. For example, if it is important to communicate in person without these internets of yours, then car rental, a trip to the forest, barbecue, tents will be paid by the company as part of the trip.
How to evaluate the results?
If the trip was a hackathon, then we simply calculate how much money the invented solution brought. In other formats, we consider spending as an investment in a distributed team, this is such a hygienic minimum when teams are scattered around the world.
In addition, we find out the satisfaction of the team and the compliance of the results with the expectations of the guys. To do this, we conduct two surveys: before leaving, we ask what people expect from him, and after that, to what extent these expectations were justified. According to the results of this year, we received 2/3 of the marks “five” and 1/3 - “four”, which is higher than last year, which means we are moving in the right direction. The fact that two-thirds of those who traveled realized their expectations by 100% is excellent.
National features: life hacks
For some reason, it so happened that our teams love Montenegro, it almost always leads the list of desired locations. But with this country, as with many other small European states, there is a problem: there is quite a bit of infrastructure adapted for team trips, more and more geared towards family vacations. And we have a team of two dozen people, everyone must live and work in one place, they don’t want to go to a hotel, they want to a villa, and, of course, they don’t want to sleep in the same bed.
The usual Airbnb could not really help us. I had to look for a local realtor - it turned out to be our compatriot, who works mainly with Russia. She found us a wonderful apart-hotel, the owner fulfills our wishes and rents the entire facility on a turnkey basis, the realtor receives a commission, everything is great. But the bill was issued not from the owner, but from a realtor, and it was indicated in Serbian that this was “payment for accommodation services.”
Naturally, we tensed up a bit and began to dig into why this was so. After negotiations with the realtor and the owner, we found out that this is the custom in Montenegro, because there is no tradition to prescribe everything in complex contracts with seals, an invoice is a sufficient document, while paying a realtor a lower tax rate. Those. with all of our furniture rearrangements and other specific wishes, as well as the realtor's commission, we ended up with less than when renting the same complex through Airbnb, which includes standard rental taxes.
From this story, we concluded for ourselves that with foreign locations, especially if we understand that the direction will be used more than once, it makes sense to spend time studying local specifics and not relying on popular services. This will save you problems in the future and possibly save money.
Another important point: one must be prepared for surprises and be able to quickly resolve them. For example, the billing team was going to go to Georgia. When everything was ready, the tickets suddenly turned into a pumpkin, I had to urgently look for a replacement. We found a suitable one in Sochi - everyone was satisfied.
Finally, you should not strive to organize everything perfectly and give the team a kind of “complete package”; one must use her own talents. This event is not for show, this is a meeting of friends, here photos and videos from the phone are more important than any professional shooting. After the departure of CRM, the front-end and QA processed video from phones, made a video and even - it's priceless.
So why is it?
Team trips increase team cohesion, indirectly affect employee retention, because people prefer to work with people, and not with Slack avatars. They help to understand the project strategy due to the fact that everyone is nearby and every day they speak with the product the question “why this product is needed at all”. At a remote location, such questions are asked only when it’s absolutely necessary; during the check-out it takes place in a relaxed atmosphere.
Source: habr.com