1xTEAM in Spain

Last weekend, team 1x travelled together to Conil, Spain for the annual retreat. Since our Icelandic Drupal Camp it has become a tradition to meet twice annually as a team, once in the spring and then again before Christmas.

Arrival

The colleagues flew from Reykjavik, Berlin and Frankfurt and we met in Sevilla where we drove down to Conil de la Frontera where our office is located. Thursday was travel day and when we arrived, most of us headed straight to the beach to dip their toes into the Atlantic ocean. 

 

Diverse team

Friday morning started off with a company presentation, where the company values were highlighted including some insights into the business and the outlook for the year. As we had a couple of new people joining the team in the last months, we decided to do a team icebreaker and split into 4 groups of 4-5 people each where they were supposed to identify at least 5-8 things all have in common, and it could not be something obvious like “We all work in 1x” or “We have all been to Spain”. The exercise was a lot of fun and interesting to see how diverse our group is.

Our diversity was also highlighted at the retreat and to give some insights, in our team of 27 colleagues we have:

  • 12 different nationalities (Iceland, Germany, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Italy, England, Ukraine, Hungary, Bosnia, Chile, Pakistan and Belgium)
  • 8 women (30%)
  • Age
  • At least 5 different religious backgrounds

The team explicitly highlighted the importance of having a team that is diverse and how much value it brings to their daily life.

The workshop

After our icebreaking activity, we sat together as a group and collected some general topics that we wanted to work on and improve in the next 2 quarters. The team decided as a group what they thought it was important to improve and will this be our focus in the next couple of months. It is very important to sit down together and listen to different views about certain internal processes, from being time tracking, issue creation, meeting culture, slack communication, etc. The discussions were very productive and resulted in a priorities backlog. 
After a good 4 hours of work a yoga teacher joined the group and showed us how to do “office yoga, breathing exercises and stretching for people who sit in front of the computer the whole day. This was a great exercise and the team went really relaxed into the lunch break.

 

 

Sailing in the Atlantic ocean

After lunch, we drove to a nearby harbor where we had rented two sailing boats. The trip was around 4 hours, with some swimming activities in the end. We have to admit that less waves would have been a bit more enjoyment, but that is what comes with sailing in the Atlantic Ocean :)

Again we met in the evening at a restaurant and then the nightlife in Conil was explored.

 

 

 

 

 

Office Yoga

On Saturday we started in the morning again by discussing the results from workshop in previous day and then we split the group into two groups to do more deep dive on certain topics like customer communication, frontend development, devops, documentation, etc.

The afternoon was relaxing and most of us enjoyed the time at the beach, kicking football or swimming in the mildly cold ocean. Some of us used the time to take a nap, while others enjoyed the music and tried to get some tan. 

We enjoyed our last evening at a restaurant where most of us had a local tuna or enjoyed any of the other local dishes. 

 

 

 

 

1xTEAM is going to Iceland 2020

As a remote team, with many different cultural backgrounds and diversity, it is important to regularly meet in person and get to know each other on a more personal note. I think we can all agree that no tool (Slack nor Zoom) can replace this 1xTEAM event in Conil and as promised to the team, it has already been decided where we go next: “the brightest Drupalcamp ever” that will take place in Iceland in June 2020.

Thank you all for a great time and I’m looking forward to more fun activities with this group in the future.