How Woven’s CEO Uses Offsites To Increase Employee Engagement and Retention

Our Client

Woven (www.woventeams.com) is an evidence-based developer hiring platform. Woven designs and administers tailored ~1 hour screening exercises that save engineering time, reduce bias, and surface hidden gems.

Their exercises evaluate problem-solving, communication, collaboration, and technical aptitude in real-world scenarios. Woven uses a network of actual engineers to provide a detailed recommendation to the hiring manager after the exercise that gives them way more information about strengths and weaknesses than a resume. They also send every candidate extensive feedback to help them improve their skills and feel good about their experience with the company. Woven’s customers are high-growth technology companies hiring multiple engineers each year

Hosting An Offsite For The First Time

In late 2020, while still dealing with COVID-19, employees at Woven were feeling disconnected. After raising a seed round earlier in the year, headcount had doubled. New executives were hired to help run the company and the team was 100% remote. Much of the team had yet to meet their colleagues in-person, and yet Woven was having hard conversations at work, making trade-offs between priorities, and pushing growth in between fundraising rounds. Woven was using Slack bots, Donuts, and other virtual team-building tools, but concluded (like many companies)there is no substitute for in-person connection. They decided they wanted to get together for a team retreat, but weren’t sure how to do it. Enter Offsite.

Choosing To Work With Offsite

While Wes had previously managed a remote team, he had never planned a team retreat before as a Founder/CEO.

At his previous company, Wes noticed that in-person events led to everyone feeling more like a team, cracking jokes on Zoom, referencing the unique shared experiences they enjoyed together when they were able to meet in-person, and feeling more connected to work colleagues.

Creating great culture was (and remains) a top priority for Wes. In order to get his team to communicate more effectively as a high-growth company, he needed to help his employees build trust with one another, and so he decided to plan an Offsite.

When it came to actually executing on this vision, Wesand his executive team had lots of questions around budgeting, generating ROI from the investment of time and money, and how to actually pull off a team retreat, from location selection to travel, agenda-planning, etc.

“We had a lot of uncertainty and then came across Offsite through total luck...During an executive team meeting, we decided Offsite seemed like the way to go. They helped us not make big mistakes here and have a great experience.”

Cross-functional Collaboration and Understanding

After Woven returned home from their Offsite, it was apparent on Zoom that the team knew each other much more intimately than before the retreat.

Employees started sending more messages over Slack after getting to know each other through formal programming (such as taking Clifton Strengths assessments as a team and presenting to one another about passions outside of work) and informal sessions like spending time together late into the evening.

Now, if issues arise between the Sales and Customer Success teams (for example), where Customer Success feels like some of the features were oversold, or if the hand-off process wasn’t efficient, each department can give one another the benefit of the doubt, working towards solutions instead of blaming one another for causing issues in the first place. As a high-growth company, these positive exchanges compound, and customers are served better as a result.

Increased Employee Engagement and Retention

As Woven closes their Series A and prepares to triple their headcount over the next 12-24 months, Wes is mindful to establish a positive company culture now, before it is too late.

“There’s really good research that if you want to predict how long someone’s going to stay at a company, one of the best questions to ask is, ‘Do you have one friend at work?“

It’s difficult for remote-first companies to provide environments for their employees to build deep, meaningful relationships at work.

Allowing Offsite to help you plan regular team retreats, especially if you are a leader of a fast-growing startup, gives everyone an opportunity to connect more intentionally.

In turn, you can expect to drive better business outcomes and keep your most talented people employed at your company for years to come.

“Turnover sucks for a lot of reasons. It slows downgrowth. It costs a lot of money to re-train folks, and especially when your tenured people leave, they leave with a lot of institutional knowledge.”

Developing An Offsite Cadence

Offsite is not only a resource for company leaders looking to plan one-off team retreats.

We are long-term partners to our clients, helping them establish and invest in a recurring cadence for transformational in-person experiences as headcount, responsibility, and company growth accelerates.

Woven is now planning an annual All-Hands meeting, plus quarterly executive team meetings and regular department-level Offsites. For example, the Sales and Customer Success teams are now planning to meet three to four times per year, and the Product and Engineering teams may meet once per year by themselves outside of the All-Hands meeting.

‍