Published: October 21, 2024
In March of 2020, due to the Covid-19 pandemic, the OC staff went mostly remote. It was a big change in an office where everyone saw each other and chatted and hung out and worked together. We kept our weekly creative meetings, but we moved them to Google. That let us do all kinds of things safely like digital escape rooms and discussions from the comfort of our homes, but we lost a lot of functionality that comes with being in a conference room with a white board.
We all found the convenience of working remotely kind of awesome, so we’ve remained mostly remote since then. A few employees go into the office so there’s someone to answer the phones, and we never really stopped doing in person video shoots (aside from the period before vaccines). But most of us work from home, despite many living within five minutes of the office.
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And while the convenience is nice, we’ve found our company culture of togetherness and camaraderie waning as the months turned to years. So we started brainstorming ideas for what to do. Our solution? We’re adopting a quarterly in-person meeting day. But what does that look like?
In the ancient past we used to have in-office vacation days once or twice a year, which were client-free days we used to declutter our workspaces, touch base about what was going on in our departments, and brainstorm about the future. There was always catered lunch and many snacks. And we often used those days to update team photos and headshots.
We missed those. Hence, we adopted a solution that fixed both issues. September 27 was our first one. How did it go?
How It Went
The first hour or so, we were invited to grab breakfast (bagels and bagel bites from a local place and breakfast pizza from Casey’s—if you know, you know) and coffee and get situated. We caught up, chatted, and said hello to Princess, the office dog loaf.
After everyone was fed, we moseyed into the conference room for our weekly creative meeting (usually a Tuesday, but we skipped it earlier in the week). We’d been collecting an agenda for a few weeks, complete with what people needed to bring up and how long it might take. For example, our writer, Justin (that’s me—hi), had some ideas for future blogs, but he needed input from the team to make them work. Our social media manager, Rachel, needed some cute team pictures for future posts, so we did that. And we even took time to talk about financials. We know, snore, but it was necessary and convenient to do so while everyone was in the room.
“I loved having everyone together for the day. I also really liked that we didn’t have the day completely booked, which gave us time to hang out, get work done, and whatever else we needed to do.”
-Amy, Vice Prez
There were plans to do our yearly investment meeting, too, but our investment guy was busy. He missed out on some really good food and some pretty good company.
After the meeting we all broke off and held meetings and things with each other as needed, did some internal project work, and generally had an hour of regular office day stuff. The pizza came around noon, and it was party time.
We decided that each meeting we’d celebrate the birthdays of the previous quarter. In this case, it was two members of our video team, Austin and Darren. The plan was that they picked lunch and a birthday treat, and we’d have it delivered. So we ended up with wings and a GIGANTIC pepperoni pizza from a local place—their specialty—and cookies from Insomnia Cookies. The birthday boys were gracious enough to share, and everyone ate and chatted til we couldn’t hold anymore.
“Darren and I were just there for the pizza. Kidding. It was a day of fun and catching up with each other, yet we were productive. We were able to talk about OC specific tasks without distractions. I’m looking forward to the next one in December.”
-Sara, Project Manager
With our bellies once again full, everyone was free to do whatever needed doing for the next hour or two, til 2PM, when we all escaped to our early weekend (a weekly thing we’ve been doing for years). Many members of the team used that time to tackle our wine cellar, which had become kind of a mess while no one was regularly organizing it. No, there’s no wine—at least not yet. It’s what we call our storage room. It was nice to see everyone working together to decide what could stay and what could go, what needed to be bought for organization, and what we could sell.
During that time, we made a decision to tackle cleaning up the studio at the next quarterly meeting. It’s always good to have a project to look forward to.
Takeaways
It was our first time doing this, and we all enjoyed the day, but there was room for improvement. Originally, it sort of felt unnecessary to have it be a whole work day when the idea started as just a single in-person meeting. But we realized that we suddenly had a lot to do in a short five hours. “There wasn’t enough time to do everything! I had to help everyone fix their computer stuff, so I didn’t get to play Scrabble, or help brainstorm.” shares Katie, our web director. “I think we were all very excited and didn’t know what to expect. Maybe our recommendation for next time is to keep it simple. Have a main objective and prioritize things that will be better to do or more efficient in person and capitalize on that—like organizing the office. Obviously that has to be done in person.”
It might seem like a shared meal and a meeting isn’t a big deal, but we walked away from the meeting feeling refreshed, closer, and valued.
Cleaning out a storage room is trivial, but having a sense of ownership of our space, our office, despite not being there often, makes that small act meaningful for us.
Having an in-person meeting that seems much the same as our weekly meetings doesn’t seem like anything worth writing about, but being able to pitch ideas, play verbal tennis, and have a face-to-face interaction really helps to make us feel connected.
“It was nice being able to physically walk up to each other to ask questions and collaborate on work things rather than sending messages back and forth. But it did make me appreciate the solid systems we have in place for being able to communicate remotely while we’re all at home!”
-Rachel, Social Media Manager/Videographer
So we’re going to keep doing these for the near future. Our next one is in early December, and we’re rolling our holiday party in with that one. We’re all looking forward to seeing each other again, and, of course, sharing some food.