SimplyBook.me Company Trip – Getting Together For Ideas, Development and Just Plain Fun!

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This week has seen most of the SimplyBook.me teams from around the world having a long-awaited company get together in Bukovel, Ukraine. Since we had to cancel the trip to Italy last year due to COVID and restrictions still in place for some of our team members, it’s been a well-deserved chance to get together as a company. But all work and no play makes for a very dull company trip, so there have been some fun times along the way.

A Growing Team Coming Together on the Company Trip

You may or may not have noticed, but the SimplyBook.me family has been growing significantly this past year. Not just with new support team members but with new developers, designers and administrators, too. 

It can be super challenging to integrate and welcome new team members when the situation of the past 18 months has been through enforced distancing and working from home. So everyone needed to get together and get to know each other a little better.

It’s not just a social thing. When we know and understand each other better, we can work together better. – Or at least work around each other’s quirks.

Sharing Ideas

When you have a distributed team across different countries, sharing our ideas and getting feedback from people who make the decisions can be challenging. Sometimes it could be ideas that occur out of nowhere and never even get voiced because the right person isn’t there to share them.

It’s a good idea to get together informally to make discussion easier and feel more confident about sharing our thoughts and suggestions. What can be more informal than having breakfast with someone in a beautiful setting? Or perhaps sharing a table while you work?

Experience and Expertise Combine With Fresh Perspectives

While we try our best to collaborate, most of our interactions happen between members of the same teams. Support people talk to each other, developers, marketing, we all talk to each other. However, while we all have our areas of expertise, sometimes it’s important to realise that people from different teams might have some insight.   

So this week, the working groups have been comprised of mixtures from all the teams. Sure, the legal and contractual experts are the core drivers of legal and administrative stuff, but that doesn’t mean a developer or support person can’t have valid input. 

At the same time, support personnel have a deep understanding of our users’ requests and potentially have a better idea of what will make a better addition to the SimplyBook.me platform than the developers alone. However, it will be the developers’ jobs to make those things happen. 

Of course, we have all the information about how to promote the system in the marketing team, but other staff such as design and support will know what appeals to our existing and potential users. 

Putting together the expertise and the fresh eyes is how we will generate new ideas and developments for the future.

Some Idea of What We’ve Been Working On.

Obviously, I’m not going to let the cat out of the bag right now. Some of these ideas and developments will need to stay very quiet. But I can let you in on some of the topics that might interest you.

• Ways to improve relations with our clients
• Improvements to the user experience
• Ideas for new features
• Future vision and business development
• Improvement ideas to existing features – how we can make them work better.

You’ll find out some more in the upcoming months as we start development and planning.

A Gorgeous Location and Plenty of Activity

Since this trip began on Saturday, there was plenty of time for activities and socialising before the real work started. Just look at that view!

Isn’t it gorgeous? There’s a lot to be said for getting everyone to relax in such a spectacular environment, even when there’ plenty of work to be done.

From hiking through the mountains to quad biking through the woods, group activities help to bring people to a new understanding of each other

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That’s not to say there wasn’t some time for relaxation and appreciating the scenery.

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Or maybe indulging in some musical expression

If you want to learn more about the SimplyBook.me teams you can find out who they are on our team page.

But if you want to find out what we discovered and decided in our mountain retreat, you’ll have to stay in touch with our blog updates.