How our Team Festival Embodies our Values
At SiteGround, some people work from our offices, some from home, and some alternate between the two. We are a remote-friendly, but not entirely distributed team. It’s one of the things that makes us interesting.
Our team of 500+ employees is scattered in four office locations and around the world. We usually communicate on Slack, Hangouts, and Zoom, but once a year, we try to get everyone together for our two-day SiteGround Team Festival. It’s our special way of creating bonds that last long after the event is over, and directly contribute to making us a better, stronger, and more productive team.
Like the two previous editions, our 3rd SiteGround Team Festival celebrated the things that unite us. Our company culture has always been influenced by the same core values ever since we started in 2004.
They continue to be the invisible thread keeping our team closer, however spread-out it might be. Some of these values are craftsmanship, care, empathy, mutual support, and having fun along the way.Our team lives by these values, but we work by them too. We’re building services that we believe in, improving how our clients experience making and growing their websites. We know there is real value in sharing skills and knowhow, doing what you love, and being happy at work. And this all starts with our own people.
? Sharing is caring
In the same way we love helping clients by sharing what we know about web hosting, we encourage sharing skills and knowledge with each other, – even if it’s about our hobbies! Every year, our team festival agenda is packed with workshops designed and lead exclusively by members of our team. This year, one of our project managers, Iskra, who has long made her own natural cosmetics, taught a homemade cosmetics workshop. Our software development team lead Mihail brewed his own craft beer recipe together with the team during our craft beer workshop. We also learned to build birdhouses with our affiliate team lead, Raya while supporting the National Bird Society with some custom pins showcasing birds native to the area where this year’s festival was held.
? Craftsmanship and creativity
We’ve always been committed to craftsmanship in everything we do. Similar to building and optimizing our own hosting tools, we designed and built the whole festival grounds, activity space, and stage from the ground up, ourselves! We also ran various craft stations during the festival – like tie-dye and pine-cone sculpture-making. We also had our own custom-designed temporary tattoo set so everyone could mix, match, and unleash their creativity.
❤ Commitment to work-life balance
We are firm believers that you do your best work when you feel your best, so we encourage all our team members to sit less, move more, and live more active lives all year round. In the months leading up to our team festival, we organize what we call the GetFit challenge. It’s a company-wide initiative that aims to get people, in teams of four, to commit to at least one activity for a month. This year, we had over 30 teams participate. Together, they ran and cycled a total of 19 800 km and completed 1087 workouts – all in one month! To keep up the momentum, we kicked off every festival day with yoga and training sessions, led by our team members, and had several tournaments on-site like tennis, soccer, and even paintball. Before moving on to the evening festivities, we held an awards ceremony for the teams with the most impressive results from the SiteGround GetFit challenge.
???Playfulness
Of course, no festival is complete without live music! At SiteGround, we believe in the importance of having fun – either on or off duty and with so many talented musicians on our team, we often get to sing and dance together. This year, we started out early with Lindy Hop dance classes during the day, which naturally set the mood for our headliner – a hands-down-amazing electro-swing band, Parov Stelar. As per tradition, even though our main festival headliner is different every year, our own company band always steals the show. It features members of our tech support team and is fittingly called “Technical Issues”. They’ve gotten so good, they’re getting autograph requests already! Come to think of it, maybe we should consider adding it as an option to our Helpdesk soon.
Every year, the question we get most often after the festival from people outside the company is, “is all this effort really worth it?”. But it only takes one look at our event footage to see the answer in the eyes of our people. They get to keep the spark of happiness, togetherness, and fulfillment, and bring it to work every day all year round – wherever they are. In the end, we have no doubt it is that spark that sets our team apart and truly makes a difference in our services and our work.
