How did we manage to organize daily tasks of 100 employees during our workation?

Last Sunday we wrapped the 2nd edition of the Mirumee Software x Saleor Commerce Workation. We spent one week on Tenerife Island together.?

Once we returned from our previous #workation, we accumulated a lot of conclusions and reflections. Some were connected to handling work and delivering our daily tasks during such a stimulating time and interesting surroundings.?

What do you think - were we able to make work during this edition of our trip more efficient? Before answering these questions, let us provide some more context for you.

At Mirumee, we specialize in supporting global ecommerce clients. Our clients web services face enormous web traffic during the months of October and November. This intensity occurs due to various promotions that are spread around the net, for example Black Week or Black Friday sales.?

Our sister company Saleor on the other hand is also in high demand during those months. Saleor is the first choice platform for thousands of customers running their smaller and larger online stores, hence its crucial for the Saleor team to be on standby 24/7.

Both of our teams need to be on-post and make sure that our customers and users are enjoying smooth transactions that result in maximum profit.?

Can you imagine what would happen if, during the peak shopping frenzy, our clients like for example Lush couldn't count on our support because the whole team had just gone to play beach volleyball?

You are laughing, but this could be a hypothetical concern, we do not allow this to happen, but very often the stereotype of a workation is connected to working less.

How did we make sure we stay focused and goal oriented? We applied a few initiatives that kept the ball rolling.

Team Mirumee (Software House):?

• we warned the clients we work with early enough that we were going on a workation and set priorities for that time
• we assured that deadlines were kept and tasks resolved
• we continued to work as we would normally, meaning that we organized daily catch ups and scrum ceremonies as per usual
• we used our slack communication channels to synchronize with each other
• each team leader had to prepare a presentation about future plan and a summary of this year achievement to present later in front of the entire company?

Team Saleor (Product):

• we organized a 4-day hackathon for the whole team, during which we managed to create 4 new apps, giving users new opportunities to integrate with external tools
• each day we took stock of what we had accomplished and planned tasks for the next day
• we kept in touch with clients and our team colleagues to ensure continuity?

Our teams were dispersed - some people worked and lived at a hotel, some in villas. Both spaces were enjoyed and used by everyone. We thought about a stable internet connection on site, hence we brought spare routers with us, just to make sure all our operations run smoothly.

Some encountered issues will still need to be worked out, but because we planned ahead and were able to foresee many things, we are proud to say, that we avoided working “after hours”, we found time to develop new ideas and we managed not to neglect our daily duties during this particularly intense time for our clients.?

And because we were able to deliver and meet our goal, we enjoyed playing beach volleyball even more!