Every year, our team gets together at least once for a 3 day offsite. These offsites are a great chance for us to gather, do some team bonding activities and share goals for the future, both personal and professional.
This time around, we spent three days last week at our new office upstate. Our offsites have become even more important since the office moved upstate in January, as it is one of the few times that our entire team gets to be together in one place. As always, we had so much fun that we had to share some of what we got up to while we were all upstate last week!
Site Visits
Site visits are one of the core components of any team offsite! We were able to see a number of projects currently under construction, each of which is in a different stage of completion. At Woodland Pop House, we were able to see the first part of drywall installation – the new music studio looks so good and we can’t wait to see it painted!
We were also able to stop by Raycliff, an exterior renovation that includes a screen porch, new exterior deck spaces and a new entryway. We’ve designed spaces that step down towards a steep drop-off.
We also took a trip to Cluster One, a recently completed home in Accord. We are photographing this project next week, so we’re not sharing too many shots yet, but our team had a blast checking out this beautiful home!
These days, an offsite wouldn’t be complete without a trip up to Saugerties! We started by visiting SkyHaus, where wood flooring installation and painting are ongoing.
We stopped by IRIE, where framing continues to make progress. It was fun to see Marica, Ben and Max discussing all of the different ongoing points of coordination!
Finally, we visited Fermata. The concrete polishers were onsite – we all stepped inside and immediately started admiring their incredible work!
Patterns of Collaboration
During each offsite, Marica plans an extended collaborative activity that spans across a few days. In the past, we’ve built sandcastles, birdhouses and sketched schematic plans for friends. This time around, she kept the end goal secret until we were pretty far along. We started by creating individual collages of textures from magazines that spoke to us. Each of us took a different approach!
We then swapped collages and using only a single colored pencil, sketched what we saw in one another’s collages.
Finally, Marica revealed that we were going to work with our partners to create a single pattern. We’d then paint the pattern onto linen fabric, which would be made into custom pillowcases for the bunkhouse at the office!
Speaking of bunkhouse….we were all so excited to be able to stay onsite at the office for the very first time. We’ve loved our visits upstate and our stays at the Starlite Motel, but we now have a new guesthouse / bunkhouse where we can stay while we come upstate for site visits. The finishing work on the bunks is incredible (more on that soon!), the space is comfortable and cozy, and we all loved the views when we woke up in the morning.
New Things Ahead…
We also took time to discuss personal and professional goals for the next six months. We talked about what is working well at the firm and what we want to work on, and shared our insights into what we each place the most value in. These are productive and generative discussions! During this offsite, we also had guest presentations on leadership strategies and on energy. We’re excited to bring these new ideas and skillsets forward into future projects!
DIY Dinner with EatTwoFive
Perhaps one of the biggest hits of the offsite was our collaborative cooking class with Chef Michelle of EatTwoFive, a local Hudson Valley pop-up. We had so much fun learning how to make Gimbap, a Korean dish that combines rice, proteins and lots of colorful veggies into a sliced roll. We made three types of Gimbap – mushroom, ground beef and SPAM! While some of us were apprehensive at first, we all chipped in on making fillings, rolling our own Gimbap and making sure to taste test plenty of each Gimbap variety.
If that doesn’t sound like enough of an undertaking for an evening’s meal, we were also lucky enough to learn how to make dumplings. These were filled with lots of veggies and a pork filling. Michelle patiently explained how to create the beautiful pleats of a dumpling and some us took a shot at making our own. We even went home with wrappers and leftover filling to make some of our dumplings at home!
All in all, it was both a fun and productive offsite! We loved the time spent together and all of the different adventures that had been planned!
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