As a company, we look to prioritise our teams work-life balance and provide flexibility to their working days. We work as a largely remote company and benefit from being able to employ people from different countries and backgrounds. This is a big contributor towards creating new innovative ideas for our products and services. We know that it's still important that we make the effort to regularly as teams, across our offices in London, Nottingham, and Amsterdam. However, the nature of remote working means that we don’t have the opportunity to all come together as a company very often.
To offset this, we organize bi-annual company meet ups or “all-hands” so we can all get together in person, share ideas, and work on projects across different team functions. This November, we all made the journey to Spain's third largest city, Valencia, for four jam-packed days. There was a great mix of individual and team social events as well as the opportunity to work together on important product documentation. Fortunately for us, we also lucked in with lots of winter sunshine!
Exploring the city
The four days started with everyone travelling from their home destinations around the UK and Europe. To kick start the trip, we all met for dinner tasting many traditional Valencian flavours. The dinner included arguably the most famous of Spanish dishes, paella, which originated from the city.
The next couple of days involved a mixture of working and socialising. Everyone got to choose their preferred activity for their first full day in the city, from visiting the Mestalla football ground to a tour of the famous San Jose caves, in one of Europe’s largest subterranean rivers. Other options included a Valencia sightseeing tour either on bus or foot to get a real feel for what the city has to offer.
We also had a top-secret pre-arranged team activity to enjoy, which saw us competing in a GPS treasure hunt challenge across Valencia, comprising of photo and video challenges as well as trivia questions. We've found team-based activities are great for bringing people together and showcasing the strength of everyone's communication skills.
Eating with the fishes
We experienced a diverse range of flavours from around Valencia, culminating in our dinner on the final night at Oceanografic Valencia, which is the largest aquarium in Europe. It was a truly unique experience, being surrounded by all manner of sea creature as we enjoyed our meals.
Work and play
Our work meetings were split over two days and comprised of a mixture of presentations and practical team tasks. Our company leaders shared strategy and plans for the upcoming six months, to ensure all teams were on board with a joint vision and informed project planning for the new year. As openness and honesty is one of our core company values, these presentations are important for upholding our culture.
A valuable takeaway from the trip was the work we did on our Scheduler product documentation. We had a goal to make the documentation easier to navigate and find the relevant information depending on what our customers want to achieve. We worked in cross-functional groups to add important updates and new content to our existing docs site.
The new resource is split by job function, and walks our customers through making the most of the Scheduler’s capabilities depending on their specific needs. This work will benefit many existing customers and those yet to sign up. This was a great example of what we can achieve when working across teams, having people with different sets of knowledge and perspectives to create a fully rounded resource.
The whole team felt energised and inspired from the trip, not just in terms of the work planned for the next year but also the relationships cultivated with other people in the company they may not have necessarily spoken to regularly before.
"Valencia was a great opportunity to meet up with colleagues across the business who you wouldn’t normally see, and get to know each other better. The mix of social and work collaboration meant we could really enjoy ourselves. For some of our newer team members, it was a wonderful introduction to who Cronofy are, and where we are going as a business."
Mark Harbottle, Head of Talent
Our next meet up is scheduled for May, and we can’t wait to see what’s in store!