With the dawning of each new year, Contentsquare hosts its annual Worldwide Kickoff, our foremost, company-wide trip abroad. This grand event spans three days, in an undertaking to bring together the 300+ employees of the company from around the world.
This year’s Kickoff panned out in the company’s native France, where the team was settled in the woodland commune of Louan-Villegruis-Fontaine for three days of workshops, presentations, games, parties and interdepartmental banter, all in the name of team-building. What can we say? We at Contentsquare do things differently.
But the excursion was not all fun and games — and business — especially if you were the one in charge of arranging the trip, sojourn and activities of a team of over 300 (323 to be precise). But Oana Migeon, our Executive Assistant in Operations managed to do it successfully, having provided a purposeful experience to start the year strong.
We sat down with her to hear her side of the story.
1. First things first. How were you able to manage a four-day company congregation from five offices across the globe?
Clearly this was a HUGE challenge, and stressful. The WWKO is Contentsquare’s biggest internal event. Preparations started in July 2018 and there has been a lot of planning and decisions taken at every step! First, we had to take a massive decision: finding the right location. France or Abroad?
Once the location was found, an organizational team was created. Weekly meetings were scheduled in order to answer typical questions, such as: how can we personalize the location,, the theme of the kick off, the team building activities, the decoration, logistics and travel, as much as possible — and all this had to be done within the allocated budget.
2. What were you looking to achieve with the Kickoff? How does the event fit in with the wider ethos of Contentsquare and what it stands for?
With each year, the impact of the WWKO on the company’s culture has gotten stronger and stronger. I try to reinforce it for those who have been with us for some time, to make it a real and lived experience for the new joiners.
The purpose of 2019’s WWKO was threefold: culture, i.e., to make everybody aware of this culture; bonding, i.e., to strengthen the international links in an offsite location and integrate the new joiners, and alignment, i.e, to have a better understanding of our vision and goals as a company.
Kickoff was a blast, literally. Here are our team members blasting each other with clouds of colored smoke.
3. What would you say were the highlights of the Kickoff?
Seeing the results of a couple of month’s intense work was such a cool personal achievement. Jonathan’s (Cherki, the founder and CEO) inspirational keynote preceded by a rock anthem was definitely a highlight. I also heard that the two parties ended with a great after-party in Bungalow 72 with Nico (Chief Operations Officer) and Pierre (Global Chief Revenue Officer of Sales).
4. Did anything from any of the events surprise you in any way? What surprised you the most?
I was surprised by the good vibes everybody was sending. The Super Hero Party was such a blast! We even had the sun shining bright right before the Color Battle! How cool was that!
5. How do you see the company transforming after a trip like this? Is it because of Contentsquare’s particular growth or the SaaS industry as a whole?
This type of event is definitely transforming the company as a whole. One should not forget our motto “work hard, play hard.” We definitely worked hard this year in order to be able to have such a precious time together for four days in a row.
The KickOff has this outstanding ability of empowering our team, engraving in our heads why we do what we do and where Contentsquare will be in the next couple of years. I feel very lucky to have been given the chance to manage such an important project.
Oana (third from left) dances among other revelers at our superhero-themed party as the Black Widow.