🏢 Connection days.

Today I’m writing about “Connection Days”.

What is a connection day? It’s an opportunity to connect in 3D with each other. You know, old school talking to people in person. It’s the only time I ask everyone in my teams to travel into our London office so they can be in the same room as each other for a day. I do this twice a year, typically after we’ve set our plans for the next 6 months.

I started running these in 2022 for two reasons:

1. I felt we lost something following the pandemic and various lockdowns — the face-to-face spark you only get from meeting someone in person, away from your screens
2. The teams had grown a lot and it was entirely possible now that one engineer might never meet or even speak to an engineer in another team — think of all of the lost opportunities as a result of that!!

The idea was to run a day dedicated to get some of that spark going again, and to give everyone an opportunity to chat and learn from each other in a relatively laidback setting.

📝 What does a typical connection day look like?

I’ve iterated on the format over the years, but generally, here’s what we’ll do on a typical connection day:

• A fun icebreaker! (I’m not into forced fun but last connection day we ran an activity where everyone had half of a picture, and you had to locate the person who had the other half to your picture. It was great to get people chatting to each other and then once you found your pair, we asked them to share a selfie and a couple of fun facts about each other in a central slack channel)
• Some “real work” stuff — we generally try and keep these short and punchy, covering strategy, plans, key investments etc
• A deep-dive into one or two areas — for example last time we ran some sessions to dive into our technical resilience strategy, and then into how our app release process works (great opportunity for context sharing and for people to practice their public speaking skills in a safe environment!)
• Some fun recognition / awards — we run our “Platform Awards” where we nominate and vote for our colleagues to win a special prize across a number of (fun and serious) awards
• Lots of unscheduled time during the day where people get the opportunity to chat to each other informally
• Some kind of optional social activity at the end of the day — we’ve tried a few different things here, but I’ve found the more laid-back ones work best (get a big area, order in some food, and run a pub quiz!)

It’s a great opportunity to get everyone aligned on what we’re doing, but the main purpose of the day is around making connections.

💭 Are they worth it?

Yes!

My advice? If you care about building teams that can relate to each other, try it!

They take some organising (and you need to budget for it appropriately with travel and stays etc), but the value I’ve seen come from them makes the day a great investment.

The connections we’ve made on these days have resulted in some real magic moments. I’ve seen an engineer in our mobile platform team unblock a whole project elsewhere following a connection made on one of these days; two engineers who realised they lived in the same town (unbeknownst to them before!) and others who have realised they share some fairly unique hobbies that have then sparked into a friendship. All of that is good for morale and good for everyone to feel part of something bigger — and I personally think it’s something that is so much easier to achieve when you’re all physically in the same room as each other.

One of the best things for me is that I’ve seen them start to spin up in other groups across the business now — for example, our staff+ engineer group last month organised their first connection day to get our most senior technical leaders together in the for a day of getting to know each other and jamming on our biggest technical problems.

If you run something similar and have other ideas/suggestions on what you’ve found works, or you’re thinking about doing these for the first time, I’d love to hear from you! Get in touch via the channels at the top ↗️