“Are you okay with us buying 20 knitted shrimps from Etsy?” asked a member of my team a few weeks ago.
Yet another discussion item that 2015 Sam never imagined would come up for 2025 Sam.
We had asked each of our consulting teams at OpenTent to pick a swag gift to give to everyone at our team retreat. Team Sapphire wanted to get a little soft shrimp for everyone since that’s their team mascot.1
Who am I to say No?
The total came to $200.45. On inedible shrimp.
Was it worth it?
What about the retreat itself which cost about $50k? Not counting everyone’s time spent taking a week away from client work.
Was that worth it?
The truthful answer is: who knows? None of the ROI here is particularly quantifiable or directly attributable.
But looking around the room last week, I felt a certainty that the $50k would more than pay off. Specifically:
Retention: when a team member leaves and is replaced, the costs of offboarding that person - followed by hiring, onboarding, and incorporating the new person - all add up, sometimes up to $50k if we use a recruiter or if the hiring process is quite laborious. Being together in person makes work feel like A Thing rather than just a bunch of tiny faces in Zoom thumbnails. We show ourselves to be a group of real people who care about each other and actually like being together. It’s impossible to measure but I really think that the in person time we’ve spent together is what has kept several members of my team sticking around for so long.
Agility: our industry is changing rapidly and we are going to make some big shifts in the next few months. We were able to get to a real depth in our team conversations at the retreat because we were in person, looking each other in the eyes, picking up on tiny body language cues, even remembering the discussion more vividly because we moved around to different corners of the room and it sticks in your brain more when you do that. Now when the time comes for me to ask my team to leap with me into a new direction, I think we’ll be able to go much quicker and smoother because we laid this groundwork.
Loyalty-driven performance: we don’t pay our team based on billable hours or commission - it’s a flat salary every year. So what incentivizes someone to go a little above and beyond, to really come through? For most people, I think it’s how they feel about their teammates. They want to come through for the human in front of them who is in the work with them - and they are much more likely to do so if they have spent time with their team in person, in real life, around a fire, walking through the trees, snacking on cheese and crackers by the pool, laughing about the funny billboard we saw on the long car ride to the airport…
On my way home walking through the airport, I happened to see this sign in the Southwest Airlines baggage office:
That’s it, isn’t it? That’s what happens when we gather as a team: we express to each other whether we are bound by love or fear. Both are reasons to come together but one is a far more powerful glue than the other.
And in this age of remote work, when it feels easy to hop from one company to another since it’s all just a bunch of Zooms and Slacks anyway - stickiness matters.
I hope you and your team have a sticky week in all the best ways!
1 The fact that they selected this as their team mascot is a whole story probably worth another post at some point…