Trip to Portugal With Coworkers? It’s a New World of Offsites
Tech firms are pioneering a smart way to address apathy from remote working.
Employees of Candor paint tiles during the startup’s quarterly offsite in Porto, Portugal in August 2022.
Credit: Kelsey BishopGrant Wernick is facing a challenge many other Silicon Valley startup founders will find familiar. Before the pandemic, he had 20 employees working for his cybersecurity startup Fletch.ai in San Francisco. Since then, all but one moved to cities such as Portland, Seattle, Denver and Sacramento. His company is now fully remote, and it hasn’t been easy. Productivity slid in the second year of Covid. “Keeping the spirit alive is hard,” he says. Slack and Zoom just don’t beat face-to-face interactions.
His answer to the problem has been quarterly “offsite” meetings. Everyone is required to attend unless they have a serious excuse like contracting Covid. But these have become something of a workplace perk — there’s whale watching, pub crawls in Oakland. Younger employees might not want to meet in an office, but they do like the sound of going to Hawaii if the company meets its goals, says Wernick.