Visiting a city is an opportunity to reconnect with people, especially if you’re working remotely
🏝NoOffice
I run my company completely remotely. We have no office. That’s why whenever I visit a city I try to maximize my stay by checking in with people I know are from there. Is anyone from my Nozbe team there? Any of our partners? Customers?… and I try to schedule in-person meetings so we can hang out and enjoy each other’s company for a while and strengthen our personal bonds. Here’s a recap of my recent day in Wrocław:
Morning breakfast and coffee with Rafal, our VP of Product
This was my main reason to visit Wrocław - to see Rafal, our long-time VP of Product at Nozbe. We had a quick breakfast at his place and then we took the city bikes and went to “work together” in his favorite coffee shop.
Rafal, where do we go to chat?
To my favorite coffee shop!
OK, you’ve convinced me!😜
We had our coffee and instead of working on our laptops we talked - we did our quarterly chat where we check-in with each other about what’s going on in the company, in our lives, in our projects and goals. We re-align ourselves and see where we can help each other…
In the meantime we joined the rest of our directors for our Monday’s directors’ meeting. It was weird to be on one screen together. We had to use one pair of AirPods to be able to participate:
After the virtual meeting we got back to talking and concluded our chat. Again, it’s a great way to re-connect in person and hang out while casually talking about business so we can be really vulnerable and frank.
Meeting with our tech partner
Later we decided to pay a visit to our tech partner - iMad, and especially the person who truly supports us - Lukasz from iMad - because I’ve been working with him for the last year and I haven’t seen him in person yet.
We met on a coffee and talked about doing business together and potential future projects, all while enjoying finally being able to see each other face to face.
Pizza with my team… or a small part of it…
Soon after one of our Nozbe developers joined us and we hopped on city bikes again and went to eat pizza for lunch.
I normally don’t work day to day much with Michu, our senior fronted developer, so it was a great moment to catch up, ask how he’s doing and simply enjoy a meal together. We didn’t talk shop much, but we reconnected after not seeing each other recently as he couldn’t attend our last Nozbe reunion.
Using serendipitous moments to reconnect with people…
I really enjoy working with my #NoOffice team completely remotely. We work great, we’ve got everything laid out in projects, tasks and comments in Nozbe and we have virtual meetings that are regular, optional and well prepared.
That’s why when I travel and visit places, I love reconnecting with people I work with or do business with, so we can remember that behind each avatar on the screen there is a real human being who likes you, cares for you and trusts you.
What a day in Wrocław. Intensive, but very meaningful and full of reconnections with people I care about. Kinda similar to my experience when visiting Taiwan where I got to reconnect with Emilia.
Working remotely doesn’t mean you want to stay away from people. I love people and I love working with them and I use every opportunity to connect with them in person. This is double fun!