Whole-Company Virtual Retreat

Movement Strategy is a social-first digital agency with offices in LA, Denver and New York, founded on a simple idea: turn brands into "internet people" and internet people into fans. By the autumn of 2020 the company had grown fast, adding 15 to 20 new hires in just five months, almost entirely during lockdown. Many of those new team members had never met a single colleague in person.

Every year, the whole company flew to Colorado for a retreat: snowboarding, games, good food and drinks, a few activities in small groups - the kind of unstructured time that builds real friendships. COVID made that impossible in 2020.

Movement's HR Director, Colette, started researching what a virtual alternative might look like and found exactly what you'd expect: pre-canned team-building games, generic icebreakers, and the kind of forced fun that makes a retreat feel like a chore. She wanted something that actually reflected the company's culture, not a template borrowed from somewhere else. She reached out to PeopleStorming in mid-August about hosting Movement's first virtual retreat in October.

Two days of virtual activities can't be designed from a brief alone, especially for a team that had never run one before. The process started with a company-wide survey, sent to every Movement employee, going well beyond logistics. Alongside practical questions (timezone, dinner schedule, comfort with tools like Zoom and Mural), the survey asked things like:

• If Movement Strategy were a person, what would they be like?
• What song embodies the spirit of Movement Strategy?
• What do you think would be a good use of our collective time and energy at the retreat?

The answers did double duty. They surfaced real constraints (who needed to be offline for childcare, who was still onboarding and had never met their team, ...) and they became raw material for the retreat itself: a word cloud built from real answers, an illustration commissioned from the team's own description of their company's personality, the seed of a few running jokes that lasted the whole event.

From there came a round of leadership interviews, partly to vet the themes and design principles that had emerged from the survey, partly to surface the things people don't write on a form: concerns about the retreat turning into a COVID 'commiseration-fest', worry about whether quieter or newer employees would feel included, disagreement among leaders about how much of the two days should be business versus pure fun.

All of it fed into a shared design document: a purpose statement, a ranked list of possible outcomes (some included, some deliberately cut), and a short set of design principles that governed every decision that followed. One of them:

Avoid Zoom fatigue: blend async and sync activities.

That single principle shaped almost everything about the agenda, from the optional pre-event activities to the live sessions.

The theme for the event also emerged from this process: Enjoy The Journey, Even In 2020.

Going in, the worry was that people simply wouldn't show up for a two-day virtual event, so almost every session was built as optional and low pressure. In practice, the entire company attended nearly every session across both days.

Beyond attendance, fun, and energy, the retreat produced a number of enduring results...

• The personal user manuals were popular enough that Movement made them a permanent part of onboarding for every new hire.
• Several leaders adopted the objective-setting process itself, something Movement's leadership said they'd never had for their in-person retreats and now wanted going forward.
• The overall cost, including facilitation, cocktail kits, swag and shipping to every home, came in much lower than any of their previous in-person retreats.
• Quieter and less physically mobile team members, who'd had less to do at past retreats, found themselves on a more even footing.
• The retreat sparked things nobody planned for, including a Slack-based book club and a gratitude ritual the team kept running long after the event ended.

Movement's leadership team said, consistently, that they could not have built this themselves, and that they wouldn't run a future retreat, virtual or in-person, without professional facilitation again.