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.

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?

September 10th was Pragmateam’s 3rd Birthday, and as tradition has it, we gathered in Centennial Park with our families to celebrate.

This day marked 3 years since we registered our business name, 3 years since we stepped out of the corporate world and started our own micro world, a world based on the foundations of our values: Pragmatic | Delivery | Outcomes | Empathy | Behaviours.

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.

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.

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.