ScreenCloud Together 2022

What is ScreenCloud Together?

ScreenCloud Together is our annual company conference & retreat that, while completely optional to attend, remains a joyfully popular and culturally incredibly significant event that provides all our ScreenClouders with the opportunity to get together for a week of bonding and cross functional collaboration.  Having all our employees in one place benefits us (individually, collectively and as a business) in so many ways. To date ScreenCloud Together has seen our ScreenClouders travel to Poland, Bangkok and Greece. In June 2022, we headed to Turkey.  

In 2021 our Bangkok hub were unfortunately unable to attend ScreenCloud Together due to the coronavirus situation in Thailand at the time. Since then, we’ve also hired over 100 people! For both our Bangkok ScreenClouders who missed out in 2021, and our newest joiners (and the whole team - of course!), the People team were really looking forward to enabling the opportunity to regroup properly after so long. 

We prioritise flexibility and want all our ScreenClouders to benefit from the best of individualised ways of working; including zero clock-watching or presenteeism, the ability to regularly work from home, vibrant and productive offices in each of our hubs, and the chance to attend get-togethers as frequently as possible. We also love ScreenCloud's diversity, which is enabled in many ways - not least by employing people across our four international hubs (Bangkok, Belfast, London and Los Angeles). The positive impact of bringing this incredible group of individuals together to collaborate in one place, is something we value highly and view as an integral part of our flexible approach… in fact, ScreenCloud Together is an opportunity for us to experience all elements of our company and culture - just condensed into one working week! 

Let me tell you a bit about how the People Team planned ScreenCloud Together 2022, and I’ll lift the lid on some of our favourite bits... 

The People Team planned numerous sessions for ScreenCloud Together 2022 to promote the facilitation of shared ideas regarding important business activities. The first two days were for our Leadership and Senior Management Team to meet and get stuck into some exciting strategic planning. After the leadership & management retreat, all our other ScreenClouders arrived in Turkey and we wanted to ensure everybody’s individual needs were met... The People Team was deliberate and intentional about ensuring there was a good balance between working  sessions and much needed downtime across the week.

Here are some of our trip highlights: 

Activity Icebreaker 

100 people all arriving at an overseas resort at the same time (as well as being quite the logistical challenge!) is potentially socially intimidating and tiring - everyone has individual boundaries, and collectively this could have felt particularly intense after the pandemic has seen so many of us out of practice when it comes to social interaction. For these reasons, and as a fun, interactive icebreaker, we organised a sports morning to ‘kick off’ our week (although technically, there was no football - either the UK or US definition!) Our ScreenClouders played badminton and basketball (we have lots of basketball fans over in our LA hub) some brave individuals took part in an intense Body Pump session led by our CEO, Mark (who is a group fitness coach on the side!) and we enjoyed some swimming and water volleyball at the pool. What better way to bond than through some fun team activities in the Turkish sun! 

Internal Conference 

The midpoint of the week was our internal conference. To start the day, we played a fun task-based game. Each task has a corresponding set of points to be won, with everyone trying to achieve a target points total and not go bust! The tasks range from “find a Founder and take their photo” to “draw your line manager” to “stand up and out loud make the sound a Turkey makes” (we realise turkeys don’t come from Turkey, but it felt like too good an opportunity to miss!), and our absolute favourite “perform a poem or a 30 second rap about working at ScreenCloud.”  We played this game at ScreenCloud Together 2021  and it was a hit so we brought it back - and are confident this has become a ScreenCloud Together staple. In 2021 we were lucky enough to witness a live rap from Dylan, our Enterprise Account Executive Team Lead in our LA hub. This year Matt, our CFO delivered a truly moving poem (yes, we’re being sarcastic) and Leroy, our Customer Success Manager in the London hub rapped about ScreenCloud while Ben, our Graphic Designer - also in the London hub - accompanied him with some beatboxing. Impressive stuff!!

Mark, our CEO, got the sessions started with his keynote speech, setting us all up for a big push for the rest of the year, before we heard from numerous other teams in the business. The Marketing team gave us a deep-dive into their new team functionality and, to give some of our non customer-facing ScreenClouders a taste of the action, some of our Sales team members gave us a live (and entertaining) ScreenCloud demo! Our Leadership team then gathered together on stage for an ‘Ask Me Anything’ (AMA), where they answered an array of questions that had been submitted by our very own ScreenClouders. 

Trust & Transparency and Integrity are some of our core values; we don’t hide from the truth and we don’t compromise on that. Our leadership AMA gave the whole company the opportunity to ask the questions they wanted to of our leadership team - with no topic being off the table, and no question considered too direct.

Cross-Functional Sessions 

Another of our core values here at ScreenCloud is ‘Unconventional & Brave’. We believe that these two words go hand in hand; to be unconventional (seek new and innovative ways of working and solving problems) you must be brave (and channel a growth mindset). It’s really important for us as a business to continuously improve and give our ScreenClouders the freedom to use their initiative to bust silos and challenge the norm. With this in mind, the People Team created a series of cross-functional sessions to give everyone at ScreenCloud the autonomy to design their own solutions to business critical topics, such as enhancing internal communications, identifying ways to improve our collection and use of data and discussions surrounding specific parts of our product. These cross-functional sessions were an effective way for us to provide our ScreenClouders with the opportunity, and the safe space, to be brave and challenge the conventional. 

Hackathon 

At ScreenCloud, company growth is a shared goal and we are ambitious about designing the best possible solutions for our customers.  We ran a customer-centric hackathon with groups forming teams across three hackathon streams, each stream aligned with a key ScreenCloud customer persona and their needs. At the end of the week, our hackathon teams were asked to put together a presentation and “pitch” their solution to the rest of the business; with our leadership and senior management team (SMT) responding with their recognition and feedback, and thoughts on what could be most viably implementable.  The hackathon was definitely one of the highlights of the week and we really loved ScreenClouders putting our customers first and working with individuals they may not normally work closely with… a truly proud People Team moment! 

Awards Ceremony 

Giving thanks and recognising all the hard work, care, thought and proactivity that goes into scaling a company, was always going to be top priority in designing our ScreenCloud Together 2022 itinerary.  We wanted to intentionally pause to reflect upon and emphasise the truly remarkable things our  ScreenClouders achieve every day. 

Awards were given to individuals and teams with nominations collected (some from the whole company, some from our senior management and/or leadership teams) in preparation for the trip.  From “The Vanilla Ice Award” (a collaboration award for the best examples of ‘stop, collaborate and listen’ - obviously!) to the “Bolt Award” (for demonstrations of sprinting to meet a deadline or goal) to the “ScreenClowns” who were nominated for their good jokes/dad jokes, entertaining anecdotes or encyclopaedic knowledge of something niche... it was incredible to see so many people win awards (and receive honourable mentions,) and to give ourselves a collective, shared moment of celebration. 

The Post-ScreenCloud-Together-Blues 

Like any awesome holiday you may have been on, the post-trip blues are always real. Much as ScreenCloud Together has become a core part of our culture, for the People team, so has the feeling of all that adrenaline (the planning, organising and delivery of a complex annual event) dissipating afterwards. The People team always makes the most of our unlimited holiday to take some time off immediately after ScreenCloud Together to relax and recuperate. The peak of activity and collaboration is intense, but we love it!! …And it doesn’t take long for the People team to start debating potential ideas for inclusion in our next ScreenCloud Together.  

…Stay tuned for ScreenCloud Together 2023!

We don’t know where we’re going yet, but we hope you enjoyed reading about our greatest hits from 2022, and can’t wait to write another of these blog posts to shine a light on our 2023 adventure.