Team building is an important part for any company and maybe even more if the team you’re working with is spread out over the globe.
It was the first time I would meet my foreign colleagues in person and I was really looking forward to it! Hanging out in person still beats virtual hangouts of course.
So let’s start at the beginning.
Our awesome office manager AJ organised the entire thing, from the place where we would stay, flight schedules, food to… a surprise activity!
Even the location of the retreat itself was kept a secret until a month ago.
So she definitely did a good job keeping it a secret for that long.
Divided in two teams we would meetup at the airport in Barcelona and from there on each team would drive to the retreat location.
After two hours our team arrived at a small village and after crossing a couple of small streets we entered the retreat grounds.
A wide wooden entrance lead us to a big authentic Spanish mansion! The owner greeted us and immediately started with the mansion tour. It really was something alright!
And what could go better with a big Spanish mansion than some real Spanish tapas!?
Retreat activities
The following days always started with breakfast, then presentations and then lunch.
So it was a bit like having a small internal conference every day.
Andreas kicked off the first day with his past, present, future presentation, which shed some light onto the existance of the madewithlove logo and some very neat future plans and wonderful news!
The other presentation topics that were brought varied from technical to practical topics such as working remote, Elasticsearch, talking in public, graph databases and so on… Each one of them was interesting in its own way and made me learn a bunch of new things.
In the afternoon we were didn’t have a predefined schedule so we could play pingpong, take a dive in the pool, or just get to know everyone a bit better.
Day one was the warmest day, so the entire afternoon was spent by/in the pool. Water games, swimming and capturing it with a gopro included.
