EchoUser's 2024 offsite in San Francisco marked our first full in-person gathering since 2020. We blended social bonding, strategy and vision, and good food. A nice reminder of the power of face-to-face.
What’s it like to work with someone closely for more than two years, completely online, and then meet that person for the first time in real life? Welcome to EchoUser’s 2024 offsite!
We've been fully remote since 2020 and our team, which has worked together closely for multiple years, has never met in person. This offsite, held in EchoUser's former hometown of San Francisco, brought us together in person for the first time since 2019. Big takeaway? It was great, and well overdue.
Given the opportunity to interact in person for the first time, our overriding goal was to hang out as a group and do things together. San Francisco, with its natural beauty and abundance of iconic sites, gave us plenty of interesting things to see and do. My personal highlight was one of our most informal activities - picking up a slice of Golden Boy pizza and enjoying it in Washington Square Park, followed by a meandering walk up and down the (in)famous hills and staircases around North Beach and Telegraph Hill.
Beyond the social aspects of the offsite, we focused on aligning everyone around our big picture strategy. 2023 was a tumultuous year and 2024 hints at continuing challenges. Accordingly, we've adjusted and we needed to share the updated vision with the team. Just as importantly, we wanted the team to react and engage with it. We centered this part of the offsite around a couple of interactive group activities that involved the team interpreting and envisioning how the strategy could manifest itself in the team's day to day work. I feel good about how this went. We generated specific, relatable, and achievable things that we will be focusing on going forward.
Looking back, we're all happy with how this offsite went. It was already a success once our team members connected in person. As effective as remote working is, there's another level of connection that comes from interacting in-person. Building on that, we were able to have deeper and productive conversations around big picture strategy. I'm confident that the team is coming out of this with a shared sense of where we're going. At an organizational level, that's a win. The one thing I'd do differently? Not wait so long to do this again.
Published on April 4, 2024
