This blog is written by Abhishek Nair

After over two years of remote work, much of it without seeing my coworkers’ faces even via video call, I found myself on a flight to Jaipur to meet my new team and spend a week working with them.

I was excited, curious, and a bit skeptical.

Excited to visit a place I hadn’t been to before, meet people I hadn’t met before, curious to see what the experience has to offer, and skeptical as to whether this was really something required for me to work better, considering that I had managed just fine without it for two years.

Over the week we spent our days working together in the lawns outside the resort’s conference room, the weather was too pleasant to stay in, idyllic, full with birds chirping and squirrels running around.

We also used this time to collectively reflect on our journey so far and discuss the way forward across various business functions. A key theme for the team meeting was planning for scale. 

We discussed how to refine our processes across support, consulting, and business development to ensure that they can run efficiently as we look to onboard more NGOs in the coming months. You will already see some of these changes in action; with Mohit Sharma hosting a weekly support hour on Thursdays in addition to our Discord support channel, consulting interactions becoming more structured and placing ownership on our NGO partners, and updates in the formats of our webinars and external communications.

We identified the effective use of data as another key focus for the upcoming months. We will see the development of a basic dashboard, internal to our platform, in addition to a V5 of our google data studio reports.

Akash and Achinth from Gramhal spent time with our team working to integrate their existing systems with Glific, another priority for Glific going forward is for integrations such as these to be made smoother and easier.

Between all this, Sneha, Piyali and I, shared our reflections as new joinees at Tech4Dev. The space to share our experiences and productively come up with solutions for future onboardings was something I greatly appreciated.

In the evenings we spent our time playing cricket or badminton and getting to know each other. We even spent half the day touring Jaipur and managed to get some sightseeing, snacking and shopping done.

Before I knew it, the week had gone by and I was on my way back to Mumbai. Reflecting on my time with the team, I would say that the primary benefit of such a team meeting is that it has helped me understand my colleagues better, as people with full lives outside of work, not just co-workers. Learning this about them and working with them in one place has made me feel like I am part of the team and has made everything and everyone seem all the more approachable. I am certainly looking forward to the next sprint in January!