Working as a remote team has many advantages and we’re very happy to have the freedom and flexibility it gives us. We can not deny, though, that it has a significant downside: our personalities and therefore our interactions have a lot more aspects than we can ever convey sitting in front of a webcam. You can’t really learn to know a person fully without experiencing how they think and act in different situations.

That’s why we decided to have regular events where the whole team comes together at a common location for a few days. During these events — we’ve named them “freistil Days” — we share an apartment, we eat, talk, work and play together. The idea of a company meetup is not new and we’ve looked at how other distributed companies like Automattic, Buffer, Sqwiggle and Zapier have done theirs.

And finally, freistil Days are about to happen for the first time: On Monday, we’ll fly to Barcelona where Markus, Philipp and I are going to enjoy working as a co-located team for 8 days. If you’re interested in what’s happening there, be sure to follow our Twitter account!