Author: Philip Ngo (Team Lead for the Lodestar team within ChainSafe, Attendees of Wondrinn Thailand x Lodestar). For one week in November 2022, ChainSafe participated in its first corporate wellness retreat with the Lodestar team hosted by WondrInn. The retreat was curated to give our remote team from around the world time to bond, learn, grow and play. Suffice to say, the takeaways and overall experience from the week of wellness and in-person engagement in Thailand was incredible.
Why we chose a retreat?
In today’s new age of working, we need to be creative when it comes to managing teams outside of a physical environment. There’s not much watercooler chat for remote teams or even an opportunity for synchronized brainstorming replicated in a traditional boardroom. Some team members only know each other over a screen which almost replicates a similar digital relationship to those who play video games together in guilds or clans online. There is of course much more to a co-worker outside of our work environments. Just as colleagues working in an office in the same location can go out for drinks after work, there have been approaches to replicate this benefit online through zoom parties and events, however, there is still a deficiency in the experience, especially in regards to camaraderie and reality. So how do we incorporate some aspects of office life and culture into remote teams for retention, collaboration and morale? In short, retreats. Thanks to the value Wondrinn Thailand x Lodestar provide and to demonstrate our commitment to wellness and growth of our teams, ChainSafe has signed up for Wondrinn Italy, in April 2023.
Retreats as an investment into your teams dynamics & efficiency
The benefit of having remote teams is of course being able to tap into the best talent from around the world. As long as you have electricity, a laptop and a connection to the world wide web, you can create magic anywhere and in any timezone. An obvious draw back of being a remote first team, is of course the lack of in-person connection and collaboration. Having the ability for team members to meet in person creates stronger bonds in teams and unlocks unrealized potential when co-workers get to know each other in person. What are some of your personal aspirations? What are some of your fears you seek to overcome? These are questions that allow you to learn about your team with deeper context and foster conversation that you otherwise wouldn’t have had over Zoom calls. Most importantly, it builds trust in the people you work with. Trust is a requirement for effective teams and the best leaders ensure such an environment has been created for their team. Over the course of our Wondrinn retreat in Phuket, Thailand, our goal was to improve our team dynamic, not because we were unable to before, but rather to address the human dynamics within our team upfront. Whether it was to improve how we communicate with each other, learn stress relief techniques or push ourselves to realize something we didn’t know about ourselves. Strong relationships are built from going through stressful events together. For example, you’d be surprised to learn how many of our team members who grew up in tropical environments were able to last three minutes in a close to zero ice bath (Ice baths utilize “eustress”, a beneficial stress that builds resilience).
This was one example of how an immersive wellness experience (breath-work and cold exposure), challenged individuals and the team as a whole to go beyond their perceived capabilities by tapping into their true potential.
Foster the power of physical collaboration
There is one obvious benefit to getting your team from all around the world together for a retreat. You’re able to conduct the type of collaboration that is generally hard to do when everyone is behind a screen, keyboard and around other distractions. In office life, a lot of ideas and collaboration happen outside of a meeting room as much as inside one. For the duration of our retreat, the team had the ability to bounce ideas off each other, draw on a whiteboard together and share knowledge. During knowledge sharing sessions where someone would update the team of software engineers on various functionalities of the codebase, it actually turned into a collaborative, live code review with immediate feedback to propose solutions to problems. Explaining complicated concepts to others, especially within blockchain technologies, is much easier done in front of each other with a blank sheet of paper than any Excelidraw board will ever do.
Sharing fun and memorable experiences with your team is essential
Remote teams don’t have the luxury of Christmas secret santas, holiday office parties or wellness outings to the local yoga studio. There are many memories to be made as humans that cannot be replicated through digital relationships. As part of our retreat, it was essential to fit in activities that catered to the diversity of the group. For example, if part of your team has no experience with swimming, maybe it’s best to avoid scuba diving. These memories help solidify some essential needs of what creates a productive team. Remember that people won’t always remember what you did for them, but they will remember how you made them feel. It’s important to decompress by enjoying special moments you don’t get to do back in our home environments. During our retreat in Phuket, we shared dozens of beautiful moments like taking our team to watch the sunset on Bang Tao Beach, bathing & feeding elephants in a sustainable elephant sanctuary and even renting a private boat to explore the incredible islands around Phuket. It’s these types of memories that can now be attributed to why individuals stick with this team and company. Imagine combining work with growth and play anywhere in the world with people you spend more than half your day with. It’s an opportunity and tool other companies may not leverage, so take advantage of it.
Great leaders, build great teams
If there’s anything I learned from all of my years of leading people, it’s that great leadership tends to attract great team members. In a world where employee work-life balance, morale and wellness is top of mind (arguably more than money). It’s important for larger companies who are able to invest in their teams, to consider having yearly or quarterly retreats to foster the maximum potential of any team. A great company doesn’t just build a great product, but builds great people to go with it. Just like how your product vision focuses on your customer satisfaction, leaders must focus on the people who deliver that product to achieve that ideal customer satisfaction. When it comes to appreciating a teams hard work and dedication, there’s no better reward for remote teams than running a team retreat. The dedication and time put towards organizing these events so your team can enjoy won’t go unnoticed, and they will continue talking about it for years to come. Wondrinn helped us invest in our team by truly curating a bespoke experience with opportunities for growth, learning and wonder. Though a new concept to some, the wellness & personal/professional development exercises offered skills each individual can utilize throughout their life at work and at home. Remember that the world is your oyster and in this new remote world there are ways to achieve similar or better output from your teams outside of a physical office.
