I recently attended a huge face-to-face team meeting where we were all sequestered together in a remote lodge, spending a few days learning about new projects and getting to know one another. Since I work for a large organization in a team of people who are spread out across the world with large clusters of people in the United States, Europe and Asia, we don’t really get to see each other very often. We collaborate and work closely together on projects the rest of the year, mostly using email, IM / IRC, phone calls and other online tools. This meeting was especially helpful (and a little overwhelming), since it happened during my second week into the new job.
Karen recently wrote a post that has some interesting thoughts on why it is important to take the time to have face-to-face meetings with clients, so I’ll skip past the question of “why” and move right into some tips and techniques for finding ways to get people together in person when they are spread out all over the globe.
- Spend time optimizing the online experience. While this post is about how to get people together in the real world, don’t forget to spend time making the online collaboration experience a regular occurrence and a pleasant one. This will give people a starting point to get to know each other before you have your face-to-face event. Our team has regular online meetings, and plenty of ways for people to collaborate both formally and informally online. If you want more details on how to blend online and offline collaboration, Beth Kanter recently posted some good tips.
- Schedule a yearly summit. If at all possible, plan a yearly gathering where people get together to learn and get to know each other. The team event that I mentioned earlier is a yearly event, and we are planning another summit for our open-source community that will have project-specific content. This type of yearly event is fairly common for the larger open-source projects. Not everyone can attend, but you can make it easier for people by rotating the meeting locations between the areas where you have the largest concentrations of people. You might even think about holding it somewhere off the beaten path in a location that is near an international airport, but not in the middle of a city with many distractions. While swanky downtown locations are nice, you have a much harder time getting people to work together and get to know each other if they are always sneaking out to go sightseeing.
- Take advantage of other industry events. Look for events where you have groups of people attending and find a way to get everyone together. I’ve done this in the past by getting a formal track at a conference, and by taking advantage of informal gatherings and hosting a meetup or social activity for a group of people. The advantage here is that people are going to be attending anyway, and you can scale the meeting to fit your available time (both organizing time and attending time) and budget. I’ve attended events with big budgets where I’ve had someone buying all of the drinks and food, all the way down to gatherings with no budget. Both achieve the goal of getting everyone in one place to work together. Don’t let budget stand in the way of getting people together; organizing an informal meetup is something anyone can do.
There are many more ways to get people together in the same room even when you have people spread out across the globe. While it can be difficult and expensive to get people together, it is worth it in the long run. As Karen said in her recent post, “After spending just an hour with my clients, I had a significantly deeper sense of who they were, how they operated and their personalities. All of which will make me more productive in working with them in the future. Besides, when I email them now, or speak to them on the phone, I can see their faces in my mind’s eye.” Make the time and find the budget to get everyone together in real life, at least occasionally.
What are your tips for creative ways to get your online community or team together in person?
Photo by Dawn Foster, used with permission.

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