Building Remote Culture – the Transcend way

Written by Gabor Varga, Product Owner

“Establish a Remote Company Culture” is a stated company goal at Transcend. We are a fully remote workforce and it’s not a requirement to go inside the office – so although we enjoy the comfort of our homes, it also creates some challenges for team building, onboarding, and others that need to be paid close attention to.

One of the questions we ask ourselves is how to have effective team building events?

Naturally every now and then we have team buildings in person, where we all meet, talk, and have fun. But we wanted to have a little experiment: how could the people in the company work together for a common goal in a virtual game?

It was surprising to me how popular this idea was. Developers, HR, assistants, and management, all played the same game in teams, where they had to achieve tasks defined by one of our team leads.

We chose to play the game Minecraft in our remote culture

Everyone got a beautiful in-game uniform so that we could distinguish each other, and a separate base location so they could start mining and crafting there. Apart from the huge fun factor, this was a social experiment at the same time! All four teams had a different approach. Some ideas worked out better than the others, but everyone could learn some tricks from the other teams.

Everybody was having fun, building the base, picking flowers, and just having fun without any stress.

Then the first night came. There was screaming, panic, and pure chaos descended upon the teams when the first monsters attacked (and killed) us, destroying half of the base. While some fought back to repel the invaders, others tried to repair and defend the walls to survive these 7 minutes of hell.

I have to admit, I LOVED EVERY SECOND OF IT.

Many Transcenders were playing a video game for the first time in their lives. They had little knowledge about what and how to do things, apart from the short tutorials we made for them. They have shown us in sticky situations how seamlessly and efficiently teamwork comes to the surface, to reach our ultimate goal: survive and succeed. Just like in real-world 😊

I strongly suggest everyone who is able to organize an event like this try it out. It really brought our people together.

And I’m just as excited about another round incoming soon with new tasks for a more battle-hardened team 😉