Out of Office, Together

0:00Welcome to Rework, a podcast by 37signals, about the better way to work and run your business. I'm Kimberly Rhodes from the 37 Signals team, joined as always by the co-founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansen. Well, we are all three in our respective locations, but we just got back from being in person at one of our company meetups. So I thought we would talk a little bit about it. Jason, I know you recently posted on X and got a lot of questions. So I thought it'd be a great time to dig into meetups, why we do them, and how this one was a little bit different. So let's start kind of an overview.

0:34Tell me a little bit about the frequency of our meetups and why we do them in the first place. So twice a year, usually one in the spring or in the fall. And lately I've been doing one in North America and then one in Europe. It doesn't have to be that way, but we're kind of split, not exactly evenly that way, but it's good to go across the pond and shorten travel for half the company once a year and then make the other half travel more the other half um and we typically been doing them in cities not always historically we did some in some small towns way back in the day but it's been a long time since we've done like a rural kind of more adventurous meetup which was what we did this time we were up in whistler which is about two and a half hours north of vancouver in british columbia and that was really wonderful it was a little bit you know more challenging for some people especially people flying from europe it was a long haul and then plus a two and a half hour drive but once we got there, we all settled in.

1:25And I think it was just really nice to be out in the middle of nowhere with each other for a bit. It seemed a lot more personal, frankly. People were around more frequently because there were just, in some ways, plenty to do, but less to do also. You know, in a big city, there's a million things you can go do. And so people tend to scatter. And here, I think people stayed a little bit closer, even if there was activities that are a little bit closer, which was pretty nice, I thought. Weather was whatever it was. And it was just kind of a nice, cozy week together, actually. I quite enjoyed this meetup.

1:52I actually think it's one of my favorites, to be honest. It kind of felt a little bit more like camp than a meetup or like a fun hangout versus a business meeting, although there are business meeting aspects to it. So let's talk about that. What is required? What activities does everyone participate in versus what is optional? Okay, so I'll give you that and then I'll give you sort of some of the reaction online when I posted the schedule. Because at this time I posted the full schedule and it was interesting to see what people had to say. So typically we have one all hands on Monday morning, which is required for everyone to be there.

2:28And then we have a Thursday afternoon peer appreciation session where people can come up and say something about one of their coworkers. It's totally optional. Somewhere between five and 10 people typically do that. And it's a really nice way to finish the day or finish the meetup. And that's sort of a required session as well. And we have one required dinner, which tends to be on Monday night. Other than that, everything's pretty much optional. And one of the things we've done over the years, we've kind of vacillated back and forth here. And I think we're in a good spot now. We used to have far more sort of company-wide sessions that everyone was pretty much expected to attend.

3:04So our schedules were tighter. And there was fewer gaps, I should say, and less open space just to do whatever you wanted or hook up with a couple of people and do some work together. and I felt like in previous meetups, it always feels this way still, but in previous meetups, I always felt like there wasn't enough time to get to everybody and do what you wanted to do. And I think that's always going to be true because we don't see each other that often. But I feel like with the just like basically two required daytime sessions, one on Monday and one on Thursday and the rest of the day is being open, there's a lot more time just to kind of be, run into people, be spontaneous, find enough time to get together with a team.

3:39And I think it's a much better thing. And most people, by the way, online, when I shared the full schedule, I just took a screenshot from Basecamp's schedule, posted it. One of the biggest reactions was simply like, it's amazing not to have so many scheduled things. And there was a lot of scheduled things, but they're all optional activities. But for people to see that you can be together for a week and have no real schedule was sort of a revelation for many people. And I think it's unfortunate that that's the case, that people are surprised that you can do that. But I'm glad that they see that you can.

4:08I think what's key here, too, is to know why are we even doing this? Are we putting everyone in the same location for a week because there's a certain number of tasks that we have to accomplish and you can only accomplish those tasks when you're together? Not really. the main point of the meetup is to charge trust batteries in the vocabulary of rework, which we, by the way, borrowed from Toby Luke at Shopify. This idea that hanging out with people in person simply strengthens direct relationships. And those are the relationships that you rely on on the day to day when you're not sitting together in an office, when you're not sitting together at a meetup like this.

4:51And you have to rely on mostly just little chatty avatars. You may occasionally do a Zoom call, but the majority of collaboration work that we do at 37signals is inside Basecamp, it's inside Campfire, now it's inside Fizzy, it's inside all these collaboration tools that we have. And they're very 2D. It's not a whole person you see. You see a colleague that you really have to be able to connect to a physical human being. And I think that's why we realized that these meetings are just very important for us to have at regular cadences because, like any battery, you can charge it up to full when you're in person together like, oh, yeah, I'm working with other humans.

5:33And then slowly but surely over the months until the next meetup, you can see that drain and you really need to re-up it. I think we got the clearest reminder that this is how it works during the pandemic. when we weren't able to see each other in person. And those relationships totally did fray. And we totally did have issues stemming from that reality that people did not see each other as much as other humans as they did them avatars. And I think especially the whole avatar sense, like we're so used to now feeling like we know people online. You may follow someone on social media and you feel like you have a connection to them and you kind of really don't.

6:15It's a very low-grade, low-fi connection. And that's not what you want for your colleagues. It's not what you want for your coworkers. And it's not how you develop the kind of trust that makes it a pleasant place to work. That you feel like you can rely on people. You feel like you have the best intentions when you read whatever they're writing. Writing has this quality sometimes that if you don't have an image in your head of someone actually saying the words, it can read kind of harsh. And I think especially for us, when we focus so much on writing, it's not like filled with all this flowery stuff most of the time.

6:55A lot of it is kind of like very specific, very targeted. Hey, can you do this? And have you seen this problem? And again, if you don't connect that to that human you just saw a few months ago, I think it can get kind of unpleasant. And I think this is why some people, especially during the pandemic, got the impression that they don't like remote work for that reason. That if you're only interacting with people that you never see in person and you're just dealing with their avatars and you're just reading their words on a very low truss battery, it seemed like an unpleasant place to work. It seemed like an unpleasant way to work.

7:29I think that's a real shame because what we've learned over these now, 15 plus years we've been doing these meetups, is that this is a key part of the secret sauce. This is what makes remote work work. You can't really do it effectively. You can't really do it in a way where people enjoy it if you don't combine it with this as well. Okay, so Jason, one of the things that I saw people on X commenting on when you were posting the whole schedule is how many, I would say, fun leisure activities there are. But it's not all fun. You know, there's some zip lining. There was some bear hunting activities, whatever.

8:08But people are working, too. I feel like there were some people who were more intense working. Maybe, David, on the technical side, kind of talk me through that, how people are using their time and making decisions on what they can and can't participate in because of work that needs to get done. There's always something going on, right, in the company. So we're about to launch a new product here. Fizzy's is coming out shortly. So we're trying to wrap that up. There's always going to be some intense working together because, as David said, we don't see each other very often. And there is some stuff you can do, but you can't do it as well.

8:40You're just better off being together and having some high intensity moments together. And so that needs to happen. And that is still the priority. So if a team has a session set up, you got to go there if you're part of that team. But teams work it out and everyone's expected to do other things. So it's not like taking anyone's day away from them. Of course, it's still work. And there are times during that week where we want to have the high intensity hour or 90 minutes together or two hours in some cases because we don't get to do this very often. So, but yeah, I did a couple of things. I usually don't do anything, frankly.

9:12I usually just kind of hang around and do some work and hang out with people. I did two activities this time and it was a nice break, frankly, because you just get your mind off work and you come back a bit more refreshed and eager to get into the thing you're doing. So that was nice. I didn't catch any fish, but I did go fishing. Michelle caught six fish, which just kind of blew me away. I also saw you went on a hike too. I went on the hike and we did some capture the flag. We had a great time. It was really fun. And I did pull a hamstring on the first day running. Hadn't sprinted like that in a while.

9:41So that was something. But it was a good overall thing. And I do feel like we got some pretty high intensity work done as well, which is just always something we need to do at these meetups. That's really ultimately still what they're about. In-person time and work time and free time and also being with your team doing things that aren't work. All that stuff matters. It all comes together, but it's not just a vacation. And I think that cadence that it's happening twice a year has a tendency to almost drive a little bit of schedule sometimes that there are certain crunch moments like getting ready to launch busy.

10:18that really works quite well if you have to meet up in relative short distance towards that. Because I think one of the things I personally do sort of miss sometimes is when we have those crunch moments, you're leading up to a big release, in-person is more effective. I think that's totally fine to say, even though we're a company that has embraced remote work for 30 years almost, that there are these one week or two weeks leading up to it where you can't get some special magic by being there together in person. The misanalysis here, the wrong analysis here, is to think that this is what you need all the time.

10:59No, I would absolutely hate to work at a place where it feels like crunch week every week. And I think this is why it is suited us so well to have these meetups their whole week, which, by the way, is also a fair amount of time. You're away from your family. You're away from your circumstances and in a foreign place somewhere with a bunch of colleagues for a whole week, which is kind of a lot. But we only do it twice a year. So when you compare it to that, it's completely manageable, not just manageable, but it's part of the glue. It's part of the glue that makes the whole remote work setup work.

11:36But specifically the crunch time, I really enjoy that. I like having a project, whether it's on product or sometimes we've had it on operations, getting out of the cloud or other things like that, where there's just something that feels like it's got some bite. We really need to be there together in person. I think it's actually one of the best ways to build those trust batteries as well. You can do it playing tag or going for a hike, but doing high intensity work together with other people you really respect and you really enjoy working with is a truly peak human experience. and again you don't need to do that all the time i think this is where a lot of the analysis of like oh return to office comes from this misconception that this is how you could work 50 weeks out of the year i don't believe that's true i wouldn't be able to work that much in that way but you know what you can have these things too we can be these big fans of remote work and enjoy the in-person sessions that we have a couple of times a year and then also so like hey we don't want to be in the office every time just because those were two good weeks.

12:41You can very much have too much of a good thing. And I think those high intensity moments together is exactly like that. I want that sprint and then I want a longer marathon and then a little sprint and then a longer marathon. I think a great example that's really quick was the cloud. Official cloud exit actually like closing the accounts, which Dave did on screen with Aaron or on stage, I should say. Doing it on screen would not have been the same. It just wouldn't have been the same. It was fun to hit delete in front of everybody and film it actually, which is cool too. But those kinds of moments, it's funny because they're digital moments like hitting delete on a screen, but being in person for those makes them all a bit more special.

13:21We did that once. I think it was Basecamp 2. We launched Basecamp 2, I believe at a meetup with it. Like we literally had a big red button kind of hooked up. I think I forget how we actually pulled that off, but there's like a big honking red button, which we pressed to kind of ship Basecamp 2. These are fun things to do. And it's a nice thing if you're scheduling things in advance to try to schedule big releases or big things around a meetup like that because you'll get more bang for the buck I think if you do them that way yeah that's a great point there's always something that you can do together collectively that you could have done apart but it wouldn't have been quite as exciting to do so find one of those because it's turning some of these things that are kind of maybe mundane if they happen remotely into a ceremony when they're happening in concert and happening together.

14:06The other example of this, as Jason mentioned, is that on the last day that we're together, we do the appreciation, peer appreciation, as we call it. You can appreciate your peer at any time. You could just ping someone on Basecamp and say, hey, I really like what you're doing. You can even write it in the chat room. That doesn't have the weight and the gravity of here's a session where that's just all we're going to do for like an hour or an hour and a half. We have people come up heartfelt, in-person, say the words of why they appreciate one of their peers. And that is a ceremony when it's shared together like that, that has a completely different meaning than if it had just been a post in base camp.

14:43And the same thing is true of the morning opening session. When Dan and I are doing that, we're partly conveying information, but we can convey information in a million different ways. We just have done a post again in base camp. That's not quite what we're doing. Well, it's also what we're doing. We're conveying some information. That's maybe 5 % of the value. 95 % of the value is conveying the enthusiasm, conveying the spirit, conveying the meaning of it and getting us all fired up about the same mission and where we're going and where we're heading and feeling like that is a melting moment.

15:21That's a ceremonial moment where we chart off, like, what are we going to work for or on until the next meetup? So I think having that cadence, having that ceremony, it all works together to elevate things a little above the mundane, which is the daily work that we do when we're, quote unquote, just on base cam or just on camphor and just in fizzy or these are the products that we use, which is totally fine. That's like that's what you want most things to be most of the time. And then you want the steady line to be punctuated. You want some ceremony, some jiggle in the line where there's more to it than just any other week.

16:02And again, like we were saying with the trust batteries, like you don't need that all the time. You don't want that all the time. Literally every week is just shucked full of these ceremonies. They're going to lose the special character. Part of what makes that morning briefing where we talk about where we're going and what we've been through special is that it's not happening all the time. That's also, I think, what makes it special to spend time together, that we really try to get the most out of it. There's just that one week. It's going to be six months until the next one. So let's put some good effort into making this ceremony count.

16:36OK, and on that note, we've actually changed all hands like we used to have them more frequently doing them at meetups. but then some online, on Zoom, intermixed with those. Now we only do them at meetups. Tell me a little bit about that decision. Like it's that important to do it in person. I mean, to be honest, I'm not sure if we just forgot to do them or we made the decision not to do them. But I'll tell you what it feels like. It feels like we're just repeating ourselves when we do it virtually. Even though we're kind of repeating ourselves when we do it physically, like David said, there's more of a transfer of something.

17:09I don't think that's true. It doesn't feel repetitive when it's only every six months, in my opinion. Yeah, but like to David's point, like the information we're conveying, we could have recorded a product tour. But I think every six weeks, it feels a little bit like, well, we're just talking about things everyone already knows about. Like we do post these kickoffs. We do post these heartbeats. People do have a sense of what's been happening. And just to kind of go through them again, it just feels like everyone's showing up to a meeting on Zoom. And so that feeling didn't feel well. Good. Didn't feel great.

17:37and a huge reason it doesn't feel great is zoom fucking sucks as a way of sitting together with four people now i think zoom is actually a pretty good simile for spending time together with three or four people like that can't shoulder kind of work when you can literally on a single screen see all the faces at the same time yeah absolutely fucking hate zooms where you scroll pages to see people. It just feels... It's like a webinar or some stupid fucking thing. Yeah. And I think that's part of it is that we could do these things, but given the fact that it does not have this transfer of spirit, it does not have this transfer of humanity, you're left with just the information exchange, and it doesn't feel worth it.

18:24I remember when we were doing them on Zoom during the pandemic and we kind of felt like, well, we've got to do something. I always felt like, when is this over? And I never feel like that when we're in person together. I never feel like, oh, when's this over? I've spent 45 minutes being in a room together with people I really enjoy hanging out with. It doesn't have that quality. So all the magic of it comes from it being live, from being in person, from being close. We're not literally 6 ,000 kilometers apart as we would be in Zoom, right? No, no, we're in that room together. And I think this is exactly the parallel to why Apple's new recorded keynotes are so terrible or so bad or so cringeworthy is exactly because there's nothing on the line.

19:10All of it is pre-recorded. All of it is just on this flat screen. There's no humanity in it. All of it has just been drained out of it and you're left with this sort of veneer. And I think, you know what? I'm getting some of those Zoom, oh my God, I fucking hate it, vibes with some of that pre-recorded stuff, which I think is interesting because all of it is video. When we were watching Steve Jobs dazzle the world, like we were just watching video feed, or at least I never sat at the audience of any of those auditoriums, but it felt like it was real. It was live. There was something to it. So it has all these shades of graduations to it, but being in person together, you just transfer so much more and it's not worth doing otherwise.

19:53Then written write-ups of status updates is actually, in my opinion, usually the perfect way to convey solely information. This is also why we use those automatic check-ins, why we don't do the one-on-one calls, why we don't do a lot of stand-ups, why we don't do a lot of even regular Zoom calls with the teams. Because if all you can get across is information, there are far more efficient and, frankly, enjoyable ways to consume that information. In person, it's a whole different ballgame. In fact, it should not even be put in the same category, right? You say, oh, well, we could either do a Zoom catch-up where we have 50 people on the call, or we could do the in-person.

20:34Don't talk about them as though they're interchangeable, as though they're in the same. They don't exist in the same category at all. No enthusiasm is transferred over a 40-person Zoom call. Absolutely not. But if anything, you can only drain enthusiasm over a 40-person Zoom call. You can only take away spirit and humanity by subjecting someone to a call like that. So don't contrast and compare it. They're not the same. Okay, last thing I want to ask you about, and it came up from actually people asking on X, which is how we handle family. So two parts to my question. This one, we were employees only, no spouses, families.

21:15So kind of talk me through kind of what our policies, if you will, have been on that for other people who might be wanting to do a meetup. And then someone's question specifically about family was, how are people with kids handling these events? What if they can't take a complete week off away from their family? So let's kind of talk about that, the family aspect of these meetups. To be honest, I'm not sure there's a formal policy in place. I know there was for this one. but historically people have brought their spouses, partners, whatever, sometimes kids with them. Um, and again, realizing this is a work trip.

21:48Um, but maybe you catch dinner or maybe you take a break in the afternoon and hang out with your partner or whatever it is, or your kids, whatever. It's totally fine. We're not paying for those flights from as far as I know, we're not paying for those flights. We're paying for the employees flights. Uh, but yeah, it's, it's okay. It's like, you know, when, especially when you're in a big city, you know, it was, it was like, yes of course bring somebody if we're going to go out to like a retreat style place in the middle of nowhere kind of thing we just wanted to have employees around that was just the right fit and feel for this particular meetup but historically yeah if you want to bring your your wife your husband whatever i don't really care who cares it's a nice thing to do it's also nice if you need to for whatever reason but in this case we decided it wasn't it wasn't appropriate just given the location and the size and scope and scale of the whole thing i actually feel like it felt different because of that.

22:37And I say that in a positive way because, and it could have also been like, we're kind of in the middle of nowhere. So people were more at the venue, like at the hotel. I feel like you see people more. I think it's just a reminder that like, this is a work trip. Like this is work and that's the priority. And I think when you have your family around, typically family is a priority. So it's a little bit of a mixed message in that case. I don't feel like it's gotten in the way personally, historically, people bringing. I've never brought my wife, but my wife has been there. Like I would go to a place a week before we went as a family a week before.

23:12And then the meetup begins and she would go home with the kids kind of thing. So that's sort of historically been what I've done. But anyway, that's just my story. I want to linger in that point that it's a work trip. I don't feel like there's any need to make any apologies for asking your employees who otherwise aren't forced into an office all the time, aren't forced through a daily commute that sucks up an hour or two every single day of the entire year to twice a year, spend one week together with the colleagues as a way to not make up for it, but as a supplement to the online relationships that they have.

23:52I think that's totally fine. I think there's sometimes we can lull ourselves into this overly precious idea. But oh, yeah, but what if you make arrangements, make considerations? What do you think fucking normal people do when they have a job and they have to work late? What do you think they have to do when they have to travel for work? Like there's a preciousness sometimes to this discussion in technology circles in general, because we are so fucking pampered compared to much of the rest of the world. We get to sit on our little home desks and clagger at a keyboard while someone has to be out, I don't know, fucking clearing the drain so that the city doesn't flood at goddamn 4 a.m.

24:31on a Tuesday. So I can't actually have too much of that debate. Now, again, if this was something you were asking all your employees to do like every other week. Yeah, OK, fine. That's a different discussion. But this isn't that. So don't put it in that goddamn category where everything has to be so pressured. Well, what if you had to? Yeah, OK. fucking deal with it. And I mean, there were people who had things come up just to be clear. It is not that black and white. There were some people who are missing and every meetup, there's people who can't attend. But in general, I mean, we get like what, 85, 90 % attendance.

25:05Well, the expectation is that everyone should be there. That is the expectation. And if you're sick, of course you can. If there are just circumstances you cannot overcome, but you've got to try, you know, it can't just be, well, conveniently, I can't make it. Like you really, really, truly cannot make it. Okay. And that cannot be a pattern. You can't like, cannot make it to two in a row kind of thing, three in a row. Like, of course things do happen in life where that just is what it is. But to David's point, like figure it out. We pay people well here. You can afford some care. Um, like, you know, this is work.