Remote-first does not mean: hide from your colleagues. 😃 More than ever, we believe in meeting in-person, we are after all a hospitality company. Rather than hope for impactful serendipitous moments at a water-cooler like in more traditional companies, we bring people together in purposeful ways throughout the year. This week we will be meeting with 1,000 Mewsers in Prague for MewsCon. It will be our biggest team member event in our history. 🎉 We have seen incredible growth in the past 2 years. The last time we did MewsCon, we were just 400 people, so it was time to convene! As a remote-first company, we obviously safe a lot of money on office rents. We ensure that we invest those savings in different ways to drive engagement. One such way is through events like MewsCon. We have 3 days of events with different groups of team members, where we deliver on a clear narrative, push people out of their comfort zones a little and hopefully allow team members to create important connections. Rather than lock everyone up in a conference hall and talk at them for 3 days... something we could do on a conference call. We really mixed up the program this year. We will still have some keynote sessions, but we also ensured we have 50% of the time allocated for more social activities to help create connections. Sitting at the airport, smiling, just excited to meet all my friends and colleagues this week in Prague. 😃
I am working remote since the last 12 years, and I believe no colleague can say I hide from them. 😁 Working remote has a lot of benefits, and with all those tools, we have those days (teams, slack, whatsapp, email, phone, videocalls), I would say that if someone feels alone, it is not just because they are home based. 😁 Enjoy your time together. 🎉
I love remote working but think people still underestimate the need for human interaction which is why in-person events are so important. I was recently invited to an online "summit event" and when I questioned the organizer about the difficulty of networking at an online conference, the response was "well it's learning about new trends..." which for me is actually just a webinar. I base my event ROI and decision to attend on the probability of good networking, so glad to see that you have 50% of the time dedicated to making social connections!
I work 4 days a week at home, the one day at the office I play table football with my colleagues, darts, chess, checkers and a lot of coffemachine talk. This office day is all about generating energy, talking about personal stuff and maybe one brainstorm meeting with a lot of humor. It is not about the quantity of time together, it is about the quality of the benefits from being together.
Yep, it makes sense to go for lots of dialogue - and I love that it got a decent name, slogan and key visual. Communicating the intention and translating that into the right format is a vital part to set it up to succeed. Lots of fun and great problem-solving for you guys!
Very curious about the programme and the activities and if it’s something we can learn from for our founder events as well!
We have a similar model (we call ours 'm33tups'). This week we're in...Manchester, so I imagine your weather is rather better! Very much agree about being purposeful - for us it's more 'pop-up office' than conference, with the emphasis on connections, creativity, and alignment.
Reading this brought a smile to my face!😊 So happy to have played a part in helping make MewsCon a reality. I hope all the employees enjoyed the event and the connections they made in Prague! ✈️ #Travelperk
Love this initiative to bring all team members together and to focus on making connections and fostering relationship, especially when social activities are on the agenda alongside a more traditional format. Have a great time!
Goodness! Trying to think of where you even house 1000 people at one time near Prague. Can’t wait to see pics afterwards. 🥰
Impact management and entrepreneur I ImpactBuddy helps organizations accelerate their positive impact on people and planet I Advisor I ex-Booking.com Leader l Let's Connect!
2moEnjoy Matthijs Welle and team. It reminds me of the yearly BAM events we had at Booking.com, where at the end we brought 8.000 people together in Amsterdam, from all around the world. Coming together like this in such a way is so much more than just the end party. It increases innovation, engagement, efficiency, retention, happiness, sense of belonging and contributes to accelerating growth and exceeding expectations. We organized our Booking.com alumni event, called the FAM a few weeks ago, where 600 Booking.com alumni came together and the same magic happened. Enjoy this week and safe travels,🚀