#369 Parabol at Oktoberfest

When most of your colleagues are distributed in far off lands, it’s a rare and special occasion if a few of you end up in the same place at the same time. 

When the distance between employees is usually in the thousands of kilometers, it may come as a surprise that two of us live in Munich – just a 15 minute bike ride away from one another. 

With two of us already in town (Marcus and Gareth), and another two Parabol members passing through (Igor and Bruce), we made the most of the occasion with an ad-hoc meetup at Munich’s Oktoberfest. What better time for people to be passing through?

With no all company team retreats currently on the cards, we recently governed a policy to provide a small budget to Parabol members who fly into the orbit of another team member. 

We’ve had a few such meetings take place, with team members meeting up in San Diego, Brooklyn NY, London, Los Angeles, and with multiple ad-hoc meetups in Munich. 

We hope this approach to meetups helps us maintain connection as a globally distributed team, even when there are no company retreats on the calendar.

Okay, okay, you want the details of what happened at Oktoberfest? We had a small meal together, some drinks, and even took on a few of Oktoberfest’s rollercoasters. Some of us even wore traditional lederhosen! 

Why even mention it? Why is this important? Nowadays so many people work remotely, or just collaborate virtually. We see each other in our little video call windows, and that’s it for the most part. 

Leveraging any chance to meet the people you work with in real life, even if it means putting on your lederhosen, or even if it only happens once a year is always worth it. The relationship you can build with someone in the real world is irreplaceable.

Website traffic is down this week as we experienced a little volatility. We imagine this comes from Google’s late August algorithm update and its aftershocks. We will be looking into where we lost keyword positions and where we can gain them back. Monthly active users was flat week on week, yet the number of meetings run increased.