The surprising secret to company cohesiveness and creativity

A couple of years ago, a few of us at GoEngineer started dreaming about what we could accomplish if we could gather all of our employees in the same location for a couple of days—call it networking, call it collaboration, call it an excuse to recharge. There was no doubt that the amount of talent and energy that could be shared had the potential to be game-changing for our company and customers.

Full disclosure: there had been flashes of this magic in past meetings with our technical team. We started bringing them together in one location a few years ago, thinking it’d be good to get everyone on the same page.

What we discovered was much bigger.

The impact of putting really bright, energetic, and innovative people in the same room for a few hours would actually create new and better “pages,” ones we hadn’t even considered.

So last week, after months of preparation, we invited our technical, sales, marketing, IT, admin, and management teams to spend a few days together to learn from the experts in our field and (more importantly) learn from each other.

We spent time collaborating with our partners about the future and what we can be doing today to help our customers navigate the opportunities and obstacles they face. We dedicated time across all of our departments sharing ideas regarding what works well and, just as importantly, on what areas need improvement.

Each day we started early and ended late.

The way our teams attacked the short time we had together demonstrated that they understood the value. It was an inspiration to see groups pulling together in side discussions during our breaks. It seemed that every discussion was built around the idea of improvement.

In a time where words such as “remote” and “online” dominate our business practices, it was refreshing to deal with issues in a personal, face-to-face way. I know that what I have just described isn’t reinventing the wheel; many companies of all sizes have done and continue to do very similar events.

So what is the surprising secret?

If you really want to tap in to the competitive and creative DNA within your company, I fully recommend adult Big Wheel Racing—it was EPIC!

Thank you to the entire team at GoEngineer that made this event (aptly named GoUniversity) an incredible success. Thank you to our partners who put their confidence in us to deliver their amazing technology on a daily basis.

Most of all, thank you to our customers. You are the reason that we push ourselves towards excellence. You inspire and educate us every single day and for that, we couldn’t be more grateful.

Tags: 3D printers, 3D Printing, CAD, design, Engineering, GoEngineer, innovation, Shape Your World, social, SOLIDWORKS, Stratasys, technology

Categories: 3D Printing, SOLIDWORKS

This entry was posted on Friday, October 2nd, 2015 at 10:25 am. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.