How to Organize a Team Building Meetup
Work doesn’t just happen in the office. And neither does team building.
Some of our Portland-area team members headed up to historic Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood to see just how remote we could go. We figured six thousand feet of elevation was a good start!
Why Meetups Matter
We love remote working. It helps us focus, gives commuting time back to our team (an average of 51 minutes a day) and saves our company money, too. Most of all, remote working reduces our carbon footprint and helps fight climate change. It’s really a win-win-win for the Triple Bottom Line.
Still, we’re human beings. We like meeting up in person sometimes. It just doesn’t have to be every day. In fact, an occasional meetup that is special and memorable—like a trip to the mountain—has lasting benefits. “It was wonderful to meet coworkers in person that I’ve only previously had contact with via chats, Skype, Anywhere Works, or Google Hangouts,” says Nichole, who works in our human resources department.
How to Plan Your Team Meetup
If you’re part of a remote team (or even if you aren’t), why not try a meetup sometime? Here are a few tips for planning the day:
Involve your team
Send a quick survey with a few options for date, time, and activity. Giving people a choice of what to do and when to do it increases engagement. We find a simple Google Form to be an easy way to get everyone’s input.
Provide transportation
Traveling separately may work for meetups close to home. For longer trips, going together in a rented bus or carpool can be fun and give your team more chances to connect with one another. “The bus rides were fun and gave me a chance to talk to coworkers I had never met before,” said Toni, one of our associates.
For our trip to Timberline, we got a couple of buses from Seat to Summit to make getting to the mountain easy for everyone.
Feed the Team
Well-fed employees are happy employees. On our trip to Timberline we enjoyed some delicious kolaches from Happy Sparrow Cafe. “I’m now obsessed with kolaches!” Toni says.
Get Feedback
Like just about any business process, it’s important to measure the success of your meetup. Send another form to ask people what went well, what could have been better, and get their ideas for future meetups! Beyond that, meetups have potential to generate concrete ideas for how to improve your business. By stepping a
Building a Team…and an Igloo
Once we were up at the mountain, we offered our team a couple of options. For those comfortable being outside in the snow, we had a great activity planned. The experts from Life-Outside showed us how to make an igloo.
Building an igloo is pretty different from our day-to-day activities—that’s part of the point. Asking your team to work together to achieve something they’ve never done before helps build team unity.
“I particularly liked seeing everyone sort themselves into positions to help with the building of the igloo,” says Calista, one of our remote team leads. “Everyone found a place to be helpful and make the work go as fast as possible, and I thought that was awesome.”
Of course, not everyone is up for an outdoor activity like building an igloo. Some of our team chose to stay inside Timberline Lodge, the National Historic Landmark built between 1936 and 1938, to play a game of Forbidden Island.
Long-Lasting Benefits
Meetups help remote teams (or any team, really) strengthen relationships. The benefits continue after everyone goes back to work. For us, the next goal is to leverage the meetups even more, by facilitating important conversations among our team members. “We want to create dialogue on how we can improve our business,” says Donny, our director of global impact. “We have people from many different areas talking together some for the first time. It would be nice to find a way to use meetups as a way to communicate with each other on how we can improve as a business or our processes and capture that at the end.”
