Codelation Team Week

_{We brought the whole team together for a week of learning and fun}

Two weeks ago we held our first team week with the majority of our team members in-office. You may not know it, but we have team members that work remotely full-time. Some live as close as a few hours, some live as far as a few states away! Some members of the team had never met others in any other form besides video calls or messages over Slack. We wanted to facilitate days dedicated to not only strengthening our relationships, but also for solidifying our processes and learning what everyone else does during a regular week.

One of the major parts of our team week involved meetings. We wanted everyone to get a better understanding of what other parts of the crew do on a daily basis; Each department went over that in their own meeting. For one special meeting we all took the CliftonStrengths assessment to learn more about each other and ourselves. It was interesting to see similarities and differences in our top five talents. One talent that appeared often in our team was Relator; this strength gains energy from being around close friends and takes time to understand others on a deeper level. 

Saree Reveling of Inner Spark Business Coaching & Hypnosis stopped by one morning to lead us in meditation. Some of the crew had never had a meditation experience before so it was an interesting first for them. Saree did a very wonderful job helping us through the meditation. We all left the room feeling refreshed and relaxed than ever.

The web development and marketing teams took time during the week to nail down our process of working together. To practice this we got a rework started on how we showcase case studies and customer testimonials. These new changes aren’t live on our site, but we’re working on getting those and we’re really excited with how they’re turning out!

Amy Nash from Lioness Creative sat in our meetings all week to give input. At the end of the week she led us in a discussion about what Codelation’s core values mean to each of us and the idea of a “craftsman culture”. We related it to the well-known craftsman Ron Swanson, taking time to make something beautiful, and having a project be unique. 

If you know Codelation, you know we had to do some more fun activities too. Team meals were always a treat, of course. We had bellies full of pizza, wings, sushi, and tacos throughout the week. Another highlight was getting new Codelation swag from Probitas Promotions. We have been donning our shirts and hoodies around the office ever since. We had a discussion one day about our individual reasons for doing what we do based off of Simon Sinek’s Start With Why. We had nice prints made of images that represent our “why” to decorate our cubes and home offices done by our friends at Sign Badgers. 

We had our first annual Nerdlympics at Replay Games. We each attempted to get the highest scores or best times on a variety of video games, old and new. The first place trophy and golden laurel went to Josh, silver went to Nick, and bronze went to Tyson. After all that fun we stopped by TellWell to get a tour of their office and have a few drinks. It was nice to see the team we work together with on a few projects; a good chunk of our team had never met them in-person.

We packed quite a lot of things in just a few days. The better sense of camaraderie is visible in the office and in our virtual Slack office as well. We tackled the things Erick set out for us to do while also having fun. We can’t wait to have our whole team for another week like this again soon.