From the first day, we aspired to build a remote-first team and culture at Spoke. This meant that despite having a small office in Berlin, our team would mostly be distributed and any team member, no matter if they are based in Dublin or Lagos, should feel equally included.
To complement our remote-first approach, we bring the team together twice per year to co-work and get to know each other. Our first offsite editions were hosted in Skopje and Berlin, so this time around we wanted to test a calm, country-side location and found a perfect spot in 🇮🇹 Puglia, Italy. This blog posts summarizes our learnings from this experience:
For most of the team it was the first time in Puglia and for some even the first time in Italy or Europe, which gave us the perfect opportunity to explore a new place together. The entire week was flexibly organised as Get Stuff Done Days (inspired by a tradition from our time at N26), meaning team members self-organised and formed groups to work on topics that were not strictly on the roadmap but important or interesting to tackle following the open beta launch of our App for Slack a few weeks before.
Beyond work, we had the chance to bond over sampling local delicacies, learning about wine production, cooking & BBQing, running & hiking and playing a (more or less) friendly 🎾 padel tennis tournament.
⚖️ A key learning from our three team offsites so far, is to generally aim for an even time split between flexible co-working, workshops or meetings and social time. Initially, we made the mistake to plan too many workshops and meetings, causing us to rush through our agenda.
Our conclusion from our first offsite in a truly remote location: if you have a lot of relatively new team members or people who have not yet had a chance to meet each other in person, having the tranquillity of a rural setting can help to create a more personal atmosphere. During everyday tasks like cooking and cleaning, you get a much better understanding of how your team members work and communicate.
If you'd like to join us at our next team offsite, check out our open positions and get in touch!
Spoke.ai is the AI-powered operating system for knowledge workers that creates the context for work. We build privacy-first AI software that helps users prioritize their work and cut through the noise with summarization. We are a remote-first, diverse team of 12 nationalities working across 6 countries in Europe and Africa.
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