What K15t Got Up to During Summer Team Week ’22
Team Week: The quarterly event at K15t, where the entire company travels to the main office in Stuttgart to meet up and discuss plans for the future. However, planning the future is only a small part of why we run Team Week. Otherwise we could just have team Zoom meetings from remote locations. No, Team Week means a lot more than that.
The Team Week Vision
The first Team Week at K15t was only last year, in 2021. As the pandemic forced people indoors, remote working became more normal, and we had fewer reasons to need for colleagues to come into the office. This has worked fantastically well, and it’s now normal for more than half of the employees working remotely on any given day. We have a team spread out across multiple cities and countries, but opportunities that come with meeting in person are missed in this new work environment.
Hence Team Week was born. However, the Summer 2022 Team Week is the first time it truly lived up to its original vision. This was the first time everyone at K15t was able to attend. We were able to have all our meetings completely on site. The “stand-up” sessions involved people actually standing up. We could use a real white board to organize discussion topics rather than a virtual one. Most importantly, it’s so much easier in person to simply turn to a colleague you might not have seen in 3 months to have a friendly chat.
Care and Commit
Having everyone in person also opened up other valuable opportunities beyond quarterly planning, and we wouldn’t be true to our value to Care and Commit if we didn’t grab that chance. Most notably, taking care of the health of our employees. We had health professionals come in to perform health check ups for everyone who wanted one, like blood tests and eyesight tests. I found out I am slightly colorblind, which was a shock!
We also had healthy snacks ready for everyone in the kitchen, with delicious assortments of nuts from the unpackaged shop Wandel.Handel, just around the corner from our office. Spooning yourself a handful of cashews, having an informal conversation with those who popped in for their morning coffee, which turns into a discussion on a way to improve how we work as a company. That is what Team Week is about!
Furthermore, that conversation becomes inspiration for new barcamp topics, another event we run at Team Week where everyone at the company joins discussions on different ways we work. From that barcamp session, we brainstorm our way to a better alternative to how we currently do things. All this eventually leads to great ideas on how we can do better as a company, for both our customers and each other as colleagues.
How Team Week Makes Great Better
And that is only scratching the surface of everything we do at Team Week. We ran a company raffle and raised €340 for families fleeing the war in Ukraine. There’s social events as teams go out to dinner, try their hands at bowling, embrace their inner artist with some arts and crafts, crash test some new toys with some remote control kart racing, and a big company outing planned to Heidelberg for the weekend.
Team Week lets each team meet each other, plan for the future, and simply get to know each other better. These events build internal relationships and those informal chats enable us to get to the heart of what we are aiming to achieve as a company. That is what Team Week can do and it’s how we make great better!