Infinite Red’s All Team Retreat — behind the scenes of our remote culture

Infinite Red is a completely distributed company as we’ve talked about before. In this article, I’m going to talk a bit more about our culture.

We believe culture is more of a constant than the occasional happy hour. As a remote team, work culture is especially important. At offices, working together is natural because they are physically in the same space. It takes more effort to develop the right culture at a fully remote team.

Part of maintaining our culture is our All Team Retreats where we all come together and work in person for a week. We like using this time to take advantage of being in the same space so we can collaborate on things like open-source software, Ignite 2.0 (coming soon), cook and eat dinner, play ping pong, try out new tech like the HTC Vive (VR), battle it out on classic arcade games and have team photo hunts.

One thing we miss working remotely is people’s physical mannerisms and interactions with non-work stuff, which tend to get lost in the digital world, even over video conferences. The reason we have All Team Retreats is that working together in person brings back life to your coworkers and puts a face to names we see online every day.

Here are some things we did at our last All Team Retreat in Las Vegas January 2017:

• We welcomed three new team members: GetRealPoofy ✘, CindyNguyen, RobinHeinze
• The Portland members all rode from the airport to the retreat house together
• A few members drove all the way from Portland to Las Vegas
• Todd Werth gave us a presentation on the 3D Printing
• The Team went for dinner and a show on The Strip — Penn & Teller
• Justin Huskey gave a presentation on redesigning Ignite 2.0
• Volunteers cooked delicious meals for the whole team
• Several team members had never been to In-N-Out so we introduced them to Animal Style fries
• Some of the team worked on open-source projects
• We played a live version of Rocket League in the driveway

It’s not so bad to be “required” at work once a year ish when you work from home, cafes, co-working spaces or anywhere else you can get wifi the rest of the year, especially when that one week is a blast!