The company summer party has no work on it.

Every summer the whole company goes somewhere with a pool for two days. There is a board by the water with the schedule printed on it: arrival and breakfast, pool, barbecue, games, a film. The next morning, breakfast, something small, and home.

No strategy session. No roadmap review. No all-hands. Nothing on the board is work.

The version we used to run

The first few of these had a morning of company updates in them. It seemed obviously right: you have 85 people in one place for the only time all year, so you use the room. What actually happened is that everybody spent the first evening quietly aware that there was a session in the morning, and the session itself told them things they could have read.

The information was fine. It cost the evening, and the evening was the asset.

What it is for

85 people across three Istanbul offices and New York means most of the company works with maybe 12 of the others and knows the rest as a name in a thread. Two days at a pool fixes that in the only way it can be fixed, which is by accident, over a barbecue, with nobody chairing it.

The measurable version of the return is that a request across teams stops being a ticket and starts being a message to somebody you have met. I cannot put a figure on it. It is visible within a week and it lasts most of a year.

The two days are also the only time in the year I get a reading on the company that is not filtered through a manager. Nobody tells you anything useful in a review. They tell you at a barbecue, sideways, an hour after you stopped asking.

The part that is not generosity

Keeping a company good at this size is most of the job and it is the part that does not scale. Two days a year is a cheap instrument for it. I am not going to pretend it is a gift.