Being a remote-centric company, we tremendously enjoy the rare occasions when we have a chance to meet each other in person. We strive to organise Happy Retreats every few months for exactly that purpose. In 2017 we had 2 such opportunities. In June we went to the Sulejów reservoir near Łódź, which is our city of origin and where most of our staff lives (although the geo-diversity is steadily increasing and currently out of 13 Happy Devs just 7 live in Łódź). The second gathering took place in the middle of December in Uniejów, a little town near Łódź that recently has made a name for itself thanks to massive investments in geo-thermal springs. They have built a huge aquapark with outside pools open all year round. There is also a recently renovated castle nearby which we chose as our place to stay for that weekend.
In this post I wanted to share our plans for the weekend, asses each activity and draw some conclusions for the future as well as offer advice for others with regards to organising company retreats.
Given that we all enjoy each other’s company, I cannot really state that location is the most important aspect. We could meet anywhere and have a great time. That said, it is still necessary to make sure the accommodation is to a decent standard and the area which we are visiting facilitates some interesting extracurricular activities. For our trip in June we took advantage of the early summer’s sunny days by swimming in the reservoir and taking a kayak trip down the Pilica river. Even though some of us managed to flip their kayaks everybody had a really great time. For the December’s trip our motivation for choosing Uniejów were the thermal springs. We had daily passes to the aquapark included with our accommodation and we surely made use of them. But I am getting ahead of myself. Let me report the events of our retreat chronologically.
Welcome packs, video games, and analog fun
We started the event with a dinner on Friday. We scheduled it late, so that everybody had enough time to get to Uniejów after finishing work. The evening began with a surprise - we handed out welcome packs to everyone which included: branded gadgets (e.g. a buff, keychain, mug, t-shirts and stickers) as well as a book that is the complete guide to praising people (Głaskologia by Miłosz Brzeziński). This book was recommended by the psychologist who conducted our training the next day.
We spent the first evening integrating the whole team. Everybody brought their favouirte beverages and games. We had a Nintendo Switch at our disposal and there were a few rounds played in Street Fighter as well as a few races in Mario Kart, but Fifa 17 was the king on our TV screen with countless matches being played until the early hours in the morning. However, it was the analog games that brought us the most fun from Dobble, which was already tried and tested during our previous meetings, through Innovation, which we only managed to play a few times due to high complexity of the game itself, all the way to Codenames which turned out to be the revelation of the whole retreat. We played literally dozens of games over the whole weekend and found this game a great way to get to know each other better.
Uncovering team dynamics and the four pillars of happiness
On Saturday, right after breakfast, we started a training session with a tailor made program called “Happy Boost”. The first part was focused on learning as much as possible about each member of the team. The facilitator brought Dixit cards and asked everybody to choose a few of them that they find relatable and explain why. Then we used Story Cubes to create crazy and ridiculous tales together. Afterwards, we were given piece of paper with some personal characteristics and we had to find a member of the team that fits each one of them.
Thanks to this game I learned who has a large family, who (apart from me) likes the colour yellow and speaks Spanish or who has a dog. Finally, we prepared our collective CV, entering notable traits and skills of every team member. We were all surprised with the result which clearly demonstrated that we are a well balanced and highly skilled group. This was a great exercise and it left us in a good mood for the rest of the day. We discovered many interesting things about our team mates that morning, for example somebody shared a story of having a wild boar as a pet (which became less surprising when we learned his father was a forest ranger).
After lunch we continued the training session but the focus shifted to boosting our happiness. We learned about the four pillars of happiness - sleep, food, rest and physical activity. We had many interesting discussions about sleep patterns, diets, fasting, exercise routines etc. When the training session ended it was finally time to hit the pools.
We spent most of the time in the outdoor section of the aquapark even though the temperature was just a few degrees above zero. Fortunately the geo-thermal springs were so warm that nobody caught a cold and our visit to the sauna section also helped keep everybody warm. After a few hours we decided to go back to the castle for dinner and started another long night of board games with a touch of Nintendo duels and lots of fun.
This being our second night together we have already worked out some ground rules. We re-arranged the room assignments so that people who shared rooms had similar go-to-sleep times. We also selected the room with the latest go-to-sleep time as the main venue for our festivities. In the future, we will be looking for a dedicated room for board games available for us throughout the night. We also decided to skip room sharing and offer everybody a single room to make sure they feel comfortable and can rest at night if they need to.