Our unique culture of offsites

At Salsa we have a thing about offsites: we’re really into them. So much, in fact, that we’ve had 5 company-wide offsites in the past 12 months: all international, all two weeks long. As a team we’ve collected a lot of passport stamps together and we’ve built some of our best product features while working together from exciting corners of the world. I’ll take you through this unique part of our company culture, why it works for us and how we structure them. 

Like most startups, culture is something that’s crucial to what we do. When we started Salsa, our dream was to become a place where the very best talent comes to stay. Bringing in an incredible team was a huge lift, but making Salsa the place where they’ll do the best work of their careers is our never ending ideal. We faced a particular challenge because we had to build our culture in the middle of COVID and missed many of those early office moments most companies take for granted. We looked for examples of how to bring everyone closer at a time when we felt so far apart. As a bonus, we also had geographical sepration across 4 countries. We made a  decision up front to prioritize physical time together and knew we’d have to invent our own playbook to accomplish this. That’s where we came up with these offsites! 

We’ve gotten together and built payroll in some pretty incredible places across the globe: [.c-highlighted]Canary Islands, Park City, Oaxaca, Mexico City, Lisbon and one memorable build sprint in the French alps! [.c-highlighted]In these places, we’ve gotten closer as a team, we’ve welcomed new employees to our culture, we’ve had unforgettable meals and experiences and, of course: we’ve built huge parts of our product roadmap. All this for the low, low price of…. less than what we’d pay in office rent. 

We structure our offsites to be two weeks long because our teams take turns crossing the Atlantic, so longer stays are more effective in light of jet lag and long plane rides. The agenda works like this: one of the weeks is called the core week and this is where we have structured programming and activities every single day. An important part of the core week is always build days where the entire team (including non-engineers) work toward releasing a single product or feature. The other week is called flex week, and this is where we extend the housing for an additional week and have no set plans: this week is fully optional and it’s essentially just a week of working together from a cool corner of the world. What about families? It’s simple: they come too! Partners and family members are fully invited and welcome both weeks. Two weeks sounds like a long time but it goes by quickly and at each offsite most people stay for both the core and flex! 

After a lot of experimentation, here are some of the things that have been written into our offsite playbook. If you’d like to bring these ideas to your own team just reach out and we’ll share even more: 

1. Build Days: Before an offsite we pick a theme or a feature we want the whole company to contribute to and we plan at least 3 consecutive days of building followed by a demo and testing day. This is an opportunity to prevent silos from forming in the company. Salsa is mostly engineers but everyone helps the mission of the week and we expect as much impact from our non-technical team. Our learning is that successful build days come from a lot of planning so work can begin immediately at kickoff.
2. Customer and investor fireside chats: having everyone in one room creates a great opportunity to bring in outside perspectives: we love to invite customers, advisers and investors to come for an unscripted Q&A session so everyone can get exposure and learn from these insights. And we’ll never forget the time Sheel Mohnot of Better Tomorrow Ventures surprised the team at an offsite in Oaxaca from the inside of a 12 foot high Dia de Los Muertos costume and led a parade with a 12 piece local band. Yep, that happened. 
3. Small group dinners. We always pick housing that’s safely walkable to the town/city we’re in. As Salsa has grown we can no longer fit everyone into one restaurant reservation for dinner, so we book tables of 4 around the city at the same time and carefully assign the groups to prioritize people who don’t normally work together. Often during the dinner we’ll have photo contests that keep everyone connected to the larger team while they’re in their small groups, and we’ll pick a place to meet up after. 
4. Letter to future self: we love to reflect on where we’ve been and dream about where we’re heading, so at every offsite we each write a letter to ourselves in the future, and we read a letter we wrote to ourselves in the past. It doesn’t take a time capsule: you just need a google form :) 
5. Structured ways of connecting on a deeper level. One goal of our offsites is to have everyone learn something new about their teammates. There are many exercises we facilitate in both small and large groups, but one that we’ve used across a few offsites are questions we answer split in pairs that get progressively deeper and more interesting. Don’t tell anyone, but I got the questions from a surprising source and they were originally written to achieve a very different outcome.
6. Team-led courses and activities: from cooking together, to learning martial arts, how to DJ, or a new game: every offsite includes something we learn from each other, and is another way of appreciating how much experience and diversity the team has. 
7. Fast feedback: our offsites have thankfully never gone off track and maybe one reason is that we take a minute at the end of every session during the day to rate it and capture what went well and what didn’t - so that we can implement the feedback immediately for the next session. 

We believe these offsites are a key part of our success at Salsa and believe these experiences have helped us build a better-connected team that moves faster as a result. Whether it came through our stomachs from the fondue we had in France, the Jamon in Spain, the many taco tours in Mexico - - or whether it was the board games and wine in front of the fire in Utah, something brought us together and strengthened the journey and mission we’re all on here. I hope we have many more of these to come and suggestions are always welcome for which city we should build from next! If you’re looking for more offsite ideas for your own team, we’ll help you -  please reach out: this article is part of a series we’d like to use to “open-source” our culture.