As a fully remote company, we don’t often get a chance to see each other. The nuances that in-person interactions provide aren’t as tangible as those in virtual interactions. To offset some of the existential watercooler conversation, we host annual offsites that bring together all beehiiv employees. It’s like your annual holiday party but better. Instead of worrying about whether your boss sees you intoxicated, we’re all really jazzed about how tall you actually are.

Since we’re fully distributed, we don’t have a headquarters, a.k.a., we don’t have a default office to send folks to, so we get to go to fun places with conference rooms. Since I’ve been here, we’ve been through the streets of Montreal, Canada, to the beaches of Cancun in Mexico. We’ve also learned that resorts are much easier to plan around than cities; however, I don’t think that’ll stop us in the future.

Our offsites span a few days and typically include one presentation from Tyler, usually a state of the hiiv, followed by extensive coworking. Then we have a company dinner, and usually on the last day we have employee pitches. Employees can propose anything from benefits to new features to improvements to existing features. No song or dance needed, just get up on the mic and pitch. We’ve had some great ideas come to fruition from these speed pitches, such as the Media Collective. It offers plenty of laughter and is a fun spotlight for people to showcase what they’re thinking or how they think. We also create sick t-shirts and, until recently, provided custom disposable cameras to all employees. We’ve learned that not everyone knows how to use flash.

I would say the above is likely similar to other offsites, and, as with offsites, there’s always that one night or two when things feel surreal…

No HR violations have been made (to my knowledge or, at least, someone’s lying), but I can neither confirm nor deny the following:

Needless to say, we’re a lot of fun. It’s a crazy 4 days together where we’re working, bonding, and doing the watercooler talk 10x.

What’s even more fascinating to me is that I’ve generally been the one planning these, and I still don’t know how. I know finance is tired of me, and I’m sure the hotels are equally annoyed with my ass, but alas. I’ve been pitched by several companies on how they can support, and they probably can, but there’s something magical? delusional? fun? about planning these at this stage of the company. There’s so much more lore that comes from these offsites that I think I’d miss planning these.

I’m planning this year’s offsite, and I’m so excited to see what happens and what we’ll be laughing at next year.

So, to recap, if you’re planning offsites:

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