Epoch’s Team Series will introduce you to the team members of Epoch to get to know them a little better. Since our team is located in different cities across North America, having a strong virtual workplace culture is extremely important to us. It helps to boost our team’s morale and improves team collaboration. We don’t let distance get in the way of having a connected team.
The Team Series will follow each team member’s event to engage the entire team virtually, using the Epoch platform. It will also introduce you to some exciting events ideas and best practices of using Epoch to create events for your team for improving workplace culture.
Meet Angie, who is on the Design team. Learn all about how Angie organized a yoga class for the Epoch team – using Epoch!
Since the beginning of the year has been so busy already for the entire team, I thought it'd be a great idea to help everyone wind down and recenter ourselves.
I brought in my friend Karen Chan Lim who's an aspiring yoga certified instructor to lead a 45-minute virtual class. The hatha-flow class was planned at a slower pace to be inclusive of both beginners and those looking to refine their yoga practice.
Creating the event was a breeze. In just a few steps, I added detailed information in the description, automatically generated a Zoom link with the integration, and invited the entire team so everyone would get notified that this event was taking place.
The great thing about Epoch is that I could create a pre-event questionnaire. I collected everyone's yoga experience level and injuries so that Karen could effectively plan her class for us. We could see everyone's answers in one place updating in real-time as they confirmed into the event.
I scheduled custom Slack and email reminders to confirmed guests 1 day and 1 hour before the event to make sure that my guest list was accurate before the event started.
While creating the event, I set up a feedback form to be sent to those who attended 5 minutes after the event. I created an emoji scale for sentiment analysis and asked if people would like to see similar events in the future.
The overall feedback was overwhelmingly positive – people loved being able to take a quick mid-day break to do something nourishing for their mental and physical health, ultimately leading to more productivity in the workplace. Seeing the feedback in one place helped me figure out what the team finds engaging and how to improve employee engagement going forward!
My favourite feature was sending event announcements to Slack channels leading up to the event. I sent a total of 3 announcements to our #general channel. The one the day before got me an extra 4 confirmations! It's really important to have efficient ways of getting events in front of employees so they know what's available to them.
I loved being able to automatically create a Slack channel specifically for my event. Everyone could message in this channel before and after the event, which was really great for sharing updates and photos after the event.
My biggest learning is that it's not easy to plan events! There's a lot of thought that goes into promoting an event, sending communications to different groups of people, coordinating with vendors, and gathering surveys before and after the event to get insightful data for the future.
It's so important to have a platform that consolidates and automates all of these things so I don't forget an important step along the way.
Even though we're a startup, it's surprising how much trust and collaboration exists in our team. I think those are some of the most important aspects of building strong remote culture.
Spending time together in these casual and fun events helps us build more personal rapport. One of our team values is "care personally, challenge directly" and it's impossible to do that without creating a foundation with each other first. We always try to make time for each other, whether that's showing up to each others' events or diving in to help with someone's problem at work.
I'm so grateful to the Epoch team for being a group of open-minded, kind, and intelligent people!
Epoch can help gather employees for events by reaching your team where they are, on Slack, email, or Google Calendar. You can easily promote events with the click of a button, and collect feedback after the event is over. Want to learn more? Book a demo today!
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