Connect with breakout sessions

So you’re looking to shift into a fully remote job, allowing you to balance your personal and professional life, efficiently meet your work and family responsibilities, and work from the comfort of your home office. But, how will you meet your colleagues? Will you have a chance to personally get to know members of adjacent teams? How might you break the ice and chat up someone you’ve “seen” on Slack but with whom you’ve never really talked?

Opportunities for spontaneous interpersonal connection are crucial to having a closely integrated, fully remote team. And at Rotunda, we know that deep, authentic relationships with colleagues across the organization can have profound positive effects on employee performance, job satisfaction, and ultimately create better results for our clients.

Since relationships are such a key component of doing remote work right, we’ve created a simple, intentional structure to foster these connections, all while leaning into our shared values and moving our collective work forward. We call this structure Breakout Sessions.

Each week, all Rotundans -- from the CEO to the newest part-time employee -- split up into different small groups. Each small group meets for a facilitated 30-minute video call where everyone shares their answers to a preassigned question, round-robin style. At the end, we all get a chance to build on the ideas that were discussed and share announcements.

Examples of questions we’ve discussed include:

• How have you experienced our values at Rotunda? What's something we can do to more explicitly infuse our values into our work?
• What's one of the most random jobs you've ever done? What are some skills or takeaways you learned from that position? What might be applicable to our work here?
• What is one feature of our products that you think is really cool and underutilized? How do you propose we help more people discover and use this feature?

Allowing employees from all levels of the organization and walks of life to connect and share ideas in these casual, intimate settings is one of the ways we lean into our value that ideas are selfless. And, by mixing up groups every week and alternating between timely project or product specific questions and more personal, fun questions, we’re able to have people who are unlikely to organically hang out do just that – hang out!

Over time, the cumulative benefits of meeting regularly in these short, lightweight sessions are tremendous. Not only does everyone have weekly opportunities to contribute novel ideas to drive our work forward, there are also plentiful moments of connection, empathy, and laughter. It’s no exaggeration that through breakout sessions, we forge friendships, get terrific movie and book recommendations, and gain exposure to the different perspectives that make Rotunda greater than the sum of its parts.

Interested in joining our small but mighty team? Check out our open positions.