It is quite clear to everyone now that remote working is not a temporary thing: first, the pandemic itself isn’t going away in a few days; and, second, I don’t believe anyone in our industry will go back to the office 5 days a week when it’s over, so working remote - even just part of the week - is here to stay.

One of Pragmateam's core objectives is that "learning and experimentation is recognised as an integral part of our culture".. We found that people were regularly bringing this objective to life, whether it be experimenting with new techniques, organising a learning lunch, presenting at meetups, all with a positive impact on the rest of the team. But we were lacking a way to naturally yet formally thank, reward and recognise each other.

I’ve grown a bit tired of strategies for ‘digital transformation’ that focus on agile, team structure, customer research, architecture, continuous delivery and ways of working (lots of them quite good advice, btw) but don’t say one word about the strategies to motivate and get people to change. Agile, lean, software engineering and product development practices are the easiest parts to solve but the people aspect, buy-in and ‘stickiness’ of those changes are not as straightforward.

What are your company values? How does your behaviour relate to them on a daily basis? How do you continue to evolve the company values as the company evolves? How do you onboard new team mates into an existing culture and set of values?

At our recent PragmaOffsite we took the time to revisit our 12 month old OKRs. While these OKRs have served us well, we felt it was time to evolve them further, allowing them to reflect our next horizon; balancing the growth of Pragmateam (now across multiple clients, cities and countries), while also nurturing our culture.

Every two months we come together again as a team for our PragmaOffsite. Given our recent growth, now 26 Pragmatists, across 4 clients and 2 cities, the challenge we set ourselves to address at the offsite was:

How do we maintain our culture and close connection to each other while we continue to grow, irrespective of where our team mates are located or which client they are partnering with?

Last week we experimented with the offsite format, hosting a mini conference. Each Pragmatist invited a PragmaFriend, whether it be someone they are working with at a client or someone they felt close aligned to our values and passions.

For the recent second PragmaBirthday, the whole team was asked for their favourite quote on "change". Now, that's fairly broad ask and it's hard to pick out one. Here I explain why I chose this one.

This week we held our bi-montly offsite, providing a great opportunity for us to regroup, reflect, reward and focus. The format for our offsite varies, such as hackdays, reflecting and planning, refresh OKRs and guest speakers.

Learning and sharing is a key ingredient within Pragmateam’s culture. While we have a very healthy internal shareback rhythm (more about this later) we also actively seek ways to give back to the community, sharing our techniques, experiments and learnings.

September marked the 2 year anniversary of Pragmateam. It felt timely to reflect.

While I wouldn’t say every day over the last 2 years has been smooth sailing (we would be bored, unhappy and missing a lot of great lessons for life if it were), as company directors there are a few key principles Juliano and I have subconsciously adopted which I believe have assisted us to stay on course.

Pragmateam Goals, Objective and Key Results - setting goals to keep us focused and challenged.

Every 8 weeks we spend quality time with the whole team, typically a half day offsite. Each offsite we seek to experiment in some way, shape or form. Here we share some of these experiments and what we learned from them.

Instead of a reason not to run a retro, a slow sprint can be a tremendous opportunity: How often does your team take the time to reflect on topics outside of the regular sprint activities?