Nowadays: Why team offsites are crucial for a productive distributed team

An Unexpected Destination

January 2024 marked the first offsite for our tight-knit team of 4 (Anna, Sohil, Darren, and myself)! From axe throwing to scary movie nights, baking croissants, puppy playtime, braving a snowstorm, to savoring 7 different cuisines – we did it all!

Our current Nowadays team is based in Seattle, SF, Boston, and Waterloo. We hadn’t all met in-person, and strongly believe that it’s important to do so early on when new members join.

We ended up booking an Airbnb in the middle of the suburbs of Michigan. Not a traditional offsite by any means, but it turns out that the location matters a lot less than the people.

For a small team, hotels don’t really always make sense. Especially for a scrappy startup, something less corporate and home-y definitely fits the vibe better. The Airbnb was cheaper than getting separate hotel rooms and also a much better fit for our team. We were able to build our own working space, have office snacks, and have cozy movie nights with home cooked food.

It was great to start important projects together in-person, and makes it much easier to communicate now. As for remote, we’ve been joining our working zoom room that’s always open! A great way to stay connected, and simulate what it was like during our offsite.

Our Learnings

What did we learn? Offsites are strategic investments! For us, it helped 10x our team productivity and communication. Outside the brainstorming and strategic planning, the change of environment gave space for tough, necessary convos & spontaneous creative ideation.

Getting together in-person proved to be an invaluable bonding experience and left us all feeling more motivated to help other companies bring together their remote distributed teams :)