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A friend of mine wrote this to me in an email recently. I take it as a huge compliment, because she works at a company with a great team culture. But what’s funny about the stuff she lists above, is that none of the activities mentioned were purposefully meant to be “teambuilding” exercises. As I said in my post about our recent day-off…
You can do those teambuilding things, but you can’t force a team to gel. A team gels when they’ve got common values and share common culture. That starts with the hiring process and I’m super proud of the feedback we get from everyone in our reviews about how much they appreciate our team (which has grown from 4 to 11 full-time in under a year). The sentiment was summed up best by our teammate Josh, who on our day out said, “This is great… but we’d have fun doing anything.” I’ll close this up Andy Swan style: Find awesome people. Do awesome stuff together. Win. |
You guys are rewriting the book on teambuilding – from transporting a 25ft. wide piece of turf up 10 flights of stairs to chaperoning goats around Austin to hiking and whiskey tasting – you’ve pretty much got it nailed.
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This redesign is a response to ebooks, to web type, to mobile, and to wonderful applications like Instapaper and Readability that address the problem of most websites’ pointlessly cluttered interfaces and content-hostile text layouts by actually removing the designer from the equation. (That’s not all these apps do, but it’s one benefit of using them, and it indicates how pathetic much of our web design is when our visitors increasingly turn to third party applications simply to read our sites’ content. It also suggests that those who don’t design for readers might soon not be designing for anyone.)
