How our Annual Mutters’ Trip Transforms Our Daily Work

It's a bit of an understatement to say it’s very cool to see your team grow, take on new projects, delight new customers, and train new colleagues. To me, that growth is never as obvious as it is when we get together for our Annual Mutter's Trip (AMT)! 💥

Our annual company event has become, among other things, a great moment to take stock, a yearly snapshot of where we are and how we got there.

Our team is the reason we can take on bigger projects and continue helping companies transform their business with data and machine learning. Our team is the reason we're excited to start work in the morning and why we can maintain a positive attitude when facing challenges. Our remote team is also spread out, which means we are very mindful about the events and initiatives that we organize to bring the team together.

One of the challenges of working in the People team at a growing company is how to keep the culture and values alive and top of mind. We believe these values are one of the things that make our team such a unique team to work with.

Our AMT is one of the Mutt Data traditions that plays a key role in fostering our values. In this post we want to share a little bit about our latest adventure, and how we planned the trip and activities to connect and continue fostering our unique culture.

Make it Memorable 💯

We start planning early. The AMT took over 5 months of preparation and involvement from +20 providers to ensure we can deliver a memorable experience. The planning, budgeting and organization is taken seriously and followed up closely like any other critical company project. Because it is.

We want it to be bigger than a typical company party or corporate retreat. We carefully plan the leadership presentations, meme-competition, team activities and even souvenirs.

Every mutter got a very unique t-shirt with our favorite Mutt and a wink to Mar del Plata's famous sea lions. 🦭

Everybody is Invited 🙋

The more the team grows and expands to new locations, the more we have to consider in our planning! But working remotely, we feel it's important to have this opportunity for some face-to-face time with everybody. Every year it gets a little more challenging, but we love a good challenge!

Setting the Tone

After the welcome lunch, our CEO Juan Pampliega and leadership spoke about our successes, challenges ahead and how we are charting our course for the future. While we always favor open-team communication and host regular all hands, we use this unique opportunity to have a big-picture conversation.

Different Activities 🤹

We wrap up the first day with a visit to a local brewery, kicking off more informal quality time with the team.

When planning the activities, we looked for things the team had maybe not done before and could learn from, activities that could let us learn a little about the local place, and that would also allow for some chill time for the team to chat.

We started day 2 with a trek along the cliffs with a local tour team that shared insights into local ecology and environmental preservation.

Hungry from the hike we shared a delicious lunch with camarones and spent a few hours playing football, volleyball and tejos on the beach. Nothing like a bit of friendly competition to get the team together!

Some decided to keep the competition going and headed to the go-kart track, while others opted for chill time back at the hotel.

We wrapped up the day with some dancing and drinks 💃🍹

The last day kicked off with an energizing breakfast and presentation before we headed into town for the obligatory tourist snapshots, one last team lunch and souvenirs.

We believe it's important to combine planned activities with downtime where the team can simply talk and get to know each other better. Much like our beloved donut-coffee breaks during the week, we believe random conversations during downtime can go a long way in helping us connect!

There's a lot more I can share about the trip, but I hope this snapshot is enough to show a little bit about the awesome culture and team we are building. I'm super excited to add this snapshot to our album. Another postcard of our journey! 📸

If you like what you've read and think you'd like to be a part of our team, good news! We're always looking for awesome people to join!