Our remote working trip to Athens: What we learned

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Added on by 3 min read

Athens

After Barcelona in 2016 and Lisbon in 2017, we decided to settle in Athens for a few days for our third Remote Working Trip.

You can now call it a tradition: every year, the Proxyclick team travels to a startup-friendly city and works from there. We believe that the quality of our work isn't dependent our location.

As long as you have an internet connection, you can work from anywhere.

While this is entirely true, I like to believe our Remote Working Trip is no “business as usual” - this would greatly undermine the value and the outcome of it. Gathering this group of talented people is not something we do every week - even if we’re talking all the time online. The trip is the perfect opportunity to put our values into practice and to use our collective intelligence to help shape the future of the company.

 

 

 

 

We’re growing at a fast pace and every month brings new challenges. It’s motivating, it’s challenging, it’s empowering. In order for everyone to stay on the same page about what we stand for as a team and as a company, we organised a Values Workshop. In no time, people were debating and adding more depth to each of our values. From that moment, it’s been clear that this remote working trip was actually perfectly aligned with our company values:

Value #1: One Team 

It’s probably the most tangible of all our values and the most clear during our trip: we are One Team. Almost all members of Proxyclick’s team flew from Brussels, Portland, Rotterdam, Barcelona, NYC, Boston and Ho Chi Minh to spend time together in Athens.

Flying from everywhere

Recruiting the best talent from anywhere in the world is something we believe in as a company. Yet nothing beats some face-to-face time every once in a while! We left Greece with a stronger team, great memories and the head full of projects for the coming year.

Value #2: Trust

Very much related to the first value, the second is a simple one: Trust. As a team, we trust each other.

Two of our new colleagues signed their contracts in Athens, a good demonstration of mutual trust. We’re thankful for their trust in the company - try flying from the other side of the world to meet a group of 30 strangers! And vice versa: you’ve got to think your new hires are very trustworthy to invest in them so much you bring them to your remote working trip even before they signed their contracts.

Image from iOS (15)

In our everyday work, trust goes beyond being able to count on each other. It’s also the management team trusting every employee to deliver, it’s the employees trusting the management team with our careers. Finally, the trust our customers grant us is our pride - we honor that trust by walking the talk. 

Value #3: Customer-centric

We are a user-driven company. So we tried a new practice during this Remote Working Trip: everyone in the team, from sales to IT and from the Founder to legal, took two 2-hour shifts of customer support. We believe a connection with people who use our product on a daily basis is important regardless of your role. Taking support shifts helped us understand the needs and questions of clients and leads, and to know our product better.  

Support teams

Value #4: Do 

We are doers. And this is not location-dependent. We worked on our usual tasks during the trip. There has been a lot of “do's” to bring the company from startup to scale-up and you need a hands-on mindset to do so - we take this mindset wherever we go.

We also organized a collaboration meetup with Workable, the recruiting software, to share our experiences and ideas on how to grow.

wrokable

Value #5: Aim high 

The last few months have been quite successful for Proxyclick and each night, we celebrated a new high: reaching 35 team members spread across 3 continents (#oneteam is growing!) and celebrating a great month of October where we exceeded all records.

These achievements are great and looked very far at some point - now they’re yesterday’s news. Gregory and Geoffroy presented our ambition for the next 5 years - we have to prepare next year’s trip celebrations, right?

achievements

In the end, values are more than cool posters to hang on our meeting room walls. Whether we’re talking to a customer, building a new feature, planning campaigns, hiring a new colleague or cheering at an after-work - these values shape our culture. Our trip to Athens (just like Lisbon and Barcelona before) embodies these values, reminds everyone what we stand for and grows our team stronger.

 

One question remains: Where next? ✈️

 

athens


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