We do a combination of retreats. Since the start of the pandemic, all of our all-company retreats have been virtual, and we've held 4 of them. Here's a bit on what we learned from doing the first three.

With vaccinations becoming available and restrictions easing up in summer of last year, we wanted to start getting together in-person, but found it too difficult to plan something for the whole team, especially as we're stretched around the world. So, we opted for smaller team gatherings, which were easier to plan. We started with a leadership team retreat last summer, and then held retreats for our product, sales, design and marketing teams.

We're continuing with this approach for this year: we've already held a leadership team retreat, we're planning in-person get-togethers for our product and growth teams this summer, and we're hoping the whole company will be able to meet up in the fall. We're not sure what the balance between team and all-company, in-person and virtual retreats in the future, but we aim to give folks 2-3 opportunities to do some type of retreat each year.

Team members are expected to communicate when they're around, but not expected to be around all the time.

We have no synchronous daily standups.

We limit recurring meetings to 1-2 hours per week per team.

See it all in action: https://github.com/ParabolInc/parabol

We trust each other to make changes, lead projects and take initiative. Our hiring process ends with a paid trial project, and for most team members, that work ships to production, often before their first day. We trust each other to make changes, lead projects and not break anything catastrophic.

We default to working in public Slack channels and minimize 1:1 direct messages, so everyone can see what others are working on and lend a hand if they’d like. We’ve been publishing a weekly update since 2015.