In mid-February, I walked into a room to grab a snack. One of my colleagues, we’ll call him William, was telling me that he wanted to go on this ski trip his friends were organizing. The dialog went like this:
William: “It would be a fun trip, but it would be great to go with more people from Stride.”
Me: “I have a car, we can fit people in it.”
From there, we worked some scheduling magic (Slack/iMessage/Gmail/ Signal), and within the next two weeks, we had an Airbnb for 10 people and a ski trip for 18.
From this, The 4th annual Stride Sponsored Plattekill Pro-Am Hack-N-Ski Funapalooza 2K17 (FASSPPAHNS) was born.
This is the infamous ‘HGTV House’
This trip was far and beyond, one of the most fun work related excursions I’ve ever been on.
There was a lot of team building on this trip. In my limited working experience in NYC, it’s been rare to find a group of people (who you work with in a professional capacity) who foster such a safe place to fail, learn, and collaborate.
A Jeffersonian Dinner, is a dinner consisting of approximately 12 people, who gather to discuss an open topic over dinner. Everyone is given the opportunity to offer their perspective on the given topic. One person speaks at a time, giving their opinion to an open floor, as opposed to speaking one-on-one with the person next to them they are speaking to everyone at the table.
Our ‘Jeffries-sonian Dinner’
We had our own ‘Jeffries-sonian Dinner’, as a Stride Senior Engineer, Mr. William Jeffries was the moderator. William kicked off the conversation, “We’re going to go around the table, and one person at a time can offer their opinion. The topic is: how we can use awesome stuff like FASSPPAHNS to attract other great people to join our [family] company.”
We ended up discussing how community was important to us, and something we really wanted to convey to others.
This ski trip brought our core values into focus in an off-site venue. If you’d like to learn more about the trip, our community, or what it’s like to work at Stride, reach out to us today. We’re adding to our team!
Benjamin Blair
