Ofri’s company retreat 2022
What is a company retreat?
A company retreat gives team members the opportunity to get to know each other and work together in person at a chosen location. There are several agendas on a company retreat, depending on what goal your company pursues with the trip.
The focus may be on reflection, connection and/or collaboration. The whole team meets to participate in team bonding activities or to work on specific projects that are best accomplished when everyone is collocated.
Why Ofri does company retreats
Ofri does in-person company retreats because we believe it strengthens the team spirit of our employees. It helps develop a better workflow when our employees know and understand each other. Since we consider communication is key, getting to know each other face-to-face helps with improving it, especially in a fully-remote company.
“Especially as a remote team, we need such events to connect in-person much more than any other ‘normal’ company. ”
What did Ofri do in 2022’s company retreat
In the past Ofri has done full-team and mini-retreats in Zürich, Lisbon, Dresden and Malta. This time the journey took us to Prague, in the Czech republic.
We are a very international team: 11 team members are spread over 9 countries and two continents. This required a bit of coordination, for example Bles, our newest addition to the Developer team, had to start his travels one day earlier because he had a long journey from Zimbabwe. The rest of the team traveled on the next day coming from Greece, the Netherlands, Spain, Romania, Tunisia, Montenegro, Germany and Switzerland.
During our 5-day stay in Prague we had some great yummy experiences, did some sightseeing excursions on land and on the river, played laser tag, table soccer and virtual reality games, went to a bar to taste great Czech beer, and even had time to work on some projects as a team in a wonderful coworking space. Take a look, we obviously took lots of photos to share with you…
Sightseeing
What would a city trip be without a proper sightseeing experience, right? That’s what we thought as well and booked two different types of excursions. For the walking enthusiasts a normal city tour and for the adventurous a canoe tour across the majestic Moldau river.
Game time
Games are a great opportunity to bond, that’s why we did a big variety of fun activities.
Lasertag
Here everyone fought for survival, and some showed their mad sniper skills. Danger lurked everywhere. Who would have thought that laser tag is so exhausting? After the game, everyone was out of breath.
“Honestly nothing beats laser tag, I think I saw a completely new side to everyone on the team, it felt wild, playful and uninhibited and I will remember it forever I’m sure.”
Soccer match
Between the laser tag games we played table soccer to regain our strength. Things got pretty serious here as well. Team Ofri is very determined when it comes to competition, so watch out folks!
Virtual Reality
Two research teams, one goal: find the way to the lab to ensure survival. The combination of escape game and virtual reality was terrific.
“It was so surreal to be in a different world and achieve something together besides from work. I enjoyed getting things done with my colleagues from other departments.”
Foodporn
The variety of food didn’t only surprise our fellow vegetarian and vegan colleagues, but also the meat lovers. We had a very tasty adventure throughout the week. Czech cuisine like Gulasch and chimney pastry were AMAZING. But also the vegetarian, Vietnamese, Italian, Thai, Fusion places were to die for.
“I enjoyed the little moments, like sitting in a restaurant and chatting over dinner or walking back to the apartments together. ”
Coworking action
Besides the fun we also managed to work on some projects together. We spoke about the vision of Ofri and gained some super important insights into the company’s journey and mission.
“I was surprised that each of the team members represents the company values and even though very different they are somehow professionally alike and very nice.”
“It was surprisingly effective to do brainstorming together. There were some awesome ideas feature implementation that emerged very quickly. We already have it in testing, and I don’t think that would be possible if we didn’t have such effective time together.”
How did the team members feel about the retreat?
“It was super exciting to meet all team members finally in person and it was a really positive experience for me”, reports Andrea from support. That’s how many of the team felt since the majority had actually never met in person.
But in the end “it did not feel like the first time we were together. The atmosphere was great, and everything was really easy.” says our new developer Angel.
Some of our coworkers have been with Ofri for 7 years already, others just joined recently. Like Sara from the SEO department: “I think the retreat helped us improve as a team. It is a bit easier to build personal connections in person. And get a better understanding of how to work best with someone as we are all individuals with different ways of working.”
Did it change how we felt about remote work?
Reflecting on our time spent together you might wonder, is team Ofri tired of remote work? Do they want to work all together in one location, move to Switzerland and live happily ever after?
No, don’t worry, we still know the value of remote-work life: having the freedom to work from where we want to, better work-life balance, no commuting and of course better productivity as Andrea describes it here: ”I experienced that focusing was harder than working from home. E.g. when Silvia was doing a phone call and speaking in German, I had difficulties writing an email in German and focusing on the wording.”
So at the end of the day, we have this opinion about it: remote work, check – company retreat, double check.
