Hey there—
Three weeks ago, we held our semi-annual meet-up in Montréal. It was our best meet-up ever, which is saying something because we’ve been doing them at least twice a year for about 20 years!
So, what’s a meet-up? 37signals is a fully remote company — no office headquarters. We have about 60 employees who work from their home offices throughout 19 countries. A little over half of our staff hails from North America, and the rest are distributed throughout Asia, Australia, Europe, and South America. We cover a lot of time zones, so the bulk of our work is done using asynchronous communication. But twice a year we meet in person for a week to engage in some valuable face to face time. We meet in a different city every time, usually Spring in Europe and Autumn in North America.
The primary goal of the meet-up is building camaraderie in a work context. Meeting new people, seeing old colleagues, forming relationships and strengthening existing ones. We accomplish this by providing a ton of free time. The meet-up agenda has a few mandatory events — the All Hands address on Monday morning, lightning talks on Wednesday morning, and the closing peer recognition & milestone anniversary celebration on Thursday afternoon. Those 3 events account for about 6 hours of a 4-day event. The rest of the time is up to individuals and teams to decide how to make the most of our short time together.
Most often that means our teams are meeting to talk about how a project is going, or to discuss their strategy for long-term work, or to hash out a recent problem. I sat in on a meeting in Montréal with Customer Support managers and some Principal Programmers in which they discussed changing how issues are bubbled up from the Support team to our On Call programmers. They came up with a new, improved process almost immediately. But then they sat together for an hour, asked questions, and learned from each other about each team’s relationship to On Call. The process update could have happened in Basecamp, from our home offices, in a few hours. The rest of the meeting — the slower, less purposeful, valuable conversation — maybe not so much.
That said, we also encourage social time! Putting away the laptop, getting outside, exploring the city we’ve all traveled to, and talking about things unrelated to work. We provide a couple planned excursions and small group dinners, and people have the option to sign up for what interests them. In Montréal, a group took a boat ride on the river, another took an architectural tour of Habitat 67, and a huge cohort attended the home opener for the Canadiens hockey team. We also provide a space for socializing within the workspace. In Montréal we had a full café to ourselves. Plenty of comfortable seating for impromptu chatting over what turned out to be an absurdly good pistachio latté.
So why was this meet-up, of the nearly 30 I’ve personally planned, our very best? This meet-up was a definitive return to quality. We booked a meeting venue that is historic, inspirational, and offers unparalleled service. We stayed a hotel 150m from the meeting space for easy access back and forth, and with the comfort amenities we like. We searched high & low for a caterer with restaurant quality food, instead of typical corporate caterers who seem to all have the same recipe for overcooked steamed vegetables with gelatinous “cheese” sauce. We brought in our own furniture, to make the auditorium space softer, very comfortable. And we used a highly professional audio-visual company to run our presentations.
Anyone who’s planned an event — personally or professionally — knows the basic list of vendors is non-negotiable. But the spectrum of quality for venues, food, and services is massive. For a long time, we stayed safely in the middle of that spectrum, sometimes erring too far on the lower end, for the sake of the budget. In Montréal we purposely went higher end, for the sake of our experience.
And it worked. The overall experience enhanced our time together and by extension, our working together. People wanted to hang out in the gorgeous space to meet. The venue was energizing — the opposite of a draining, fluorescent-lit hotel conference room. Everyone stayed for lunch because the food was so good, instead of venturing out to nearby restaurants and fracturing the day. The presentations went off without a hitch which made them light, fun, and engaging. As we begin planning our Spring 2025 meet-up, we’re looking to replicate our experience in Montréal by building an event that inspires us. It’s the only proper setting, really, for the incredible work done by our teams every day.
Some recent updates and news
New in Basecamp: Do more with Public Links
Public links let you share parts of your Basecamp projects with people outside your account. Until now, you could only share a basic message, document, or to-do. Now the sharing experience is more dynamic. To-dos and events within your public link are clickable, so recipients have access to detailed information about each item. And now you can include comments on messages, documents, and to-dos, giving more context when you share something publicly. Read more.
Basecamp Office Hours
Join Kimberly and Ashley of 37signals for a LIVE webinar on Wednesday, November 6, at 10:00AM CT. They’ll be chatting with Michael and Gabriel from the 37signals Quality Assurance team about how they use Basecamp for QA. Bring your questions and get them answered live by 4 Basecamp experts! Register here!
Talk to you next time!
Andrea, People Ops at 37signals