Summer camp: idea and reasoning

And here comes another crazy idea I am going to implement - I call it “Summer camp”.

Reasoning

mallorca I believe that happy people work better. What makes people happy? Work, vacations and the sun. So I thought why not combining all these 3 components into the one. That’s how I came up with the idea of the summer camp. Besides, I’ve heard similar experiments went well for GitHub here is a talk of Ryan Tomayko on Distributed management and even more examples from Nimax.

What is “Summer camp”?

So to the essence. I plan to take my team to work offsite for 10 days in September somewhere summer stays longer. After initial brainstorming with the team due to our wish to keep it low cost for the beginning, we’ve selected Mallorca island. So we will book a villa, take our families or friends with us and go there to accomplish the mission. I don’t know yet what the mission will be about, it might be some new cool feature to our product or some grand refactoring of current solution or anything else, the main requirement - it should be significant, valuable and needful.

I will try to go deeper into organizational details in my further posts.

What do I expect from it?

There are lots of benefits I see in this experiment, but the main are:

Performance. I think the team performance should increase because of the focus on one major task for 10 days.
Teambuilding. I believe the effect will be strong. Whole team located in one place for 10 days! We’ll really be more connected to each other.
Happiness. Increased happiness and motivation. I believe that after such work vacation there will be more energy and will to work.

I’ll make series of blog posts on how it goes further with this idea. Keep on following me :)

P.S.: Have you tried something similar? How it went?