Why are trips to clients standard for Boldare teams?
Find out why Boldare teams regularly travel to clients. What does it look like in practice? What are the benefits for our employees, organization, and clients? Read on to dig deeper!
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Face-to-face meetings culture
At Boldare, we don’t want to be alone and bored in front of the computer. And, with all sympathy and respect for remote working, we make sure we regularly meet up in real life to get to know each other better. It works for both our teams and our great partners. Why do we care about face-to-face meetings instead of focusing on working virtually? Because, most of all, we are people, not avatars.
We know that working face-to-face has evolved in the last few years. It’s much more difficult to take care of relationships in this remote reality. Currently, everyone likes online, comfortable work from home, and sometimes it requires an effort to choose another mode. Hence, we’ve put in the effort to create the right environment for Boldare people, encouraging them to implement team building and client relationship solutions on-site. Because still, Boldare people truly want to have something more than “just a job”.
Building strong bonds with our teammates and clients is important for Bolders, enabling us to build relationships and friendships at work. It’s a part of our culture that is based on people. We want to feel genuine emotion and create a community around Boldare that is something more than a group of avatars who don’t know anything about their coworkers from the same department and, even more so, don’t know their clients or partners at all.
Business trips in practice
Meeting our partners in real life is an essential element of Boldare life. It’s a chance to spend some valuable time together, understand product needs and expectations, boost business relationships, and set out together on a path to growth. What is more, these visits are genuinely fun experiences – the perfect occasion to engage with other cultures and people. That’s why Bolders go on business trips with eagerness, because they see it not only as a duty, but also as having a wide range of benefits and experiences.
We regularly visit our international clients face-to-face to boost our relationships and get to know each other better. It’s the perfect occasion to engage with other cultures and taste the local cuisine. There are always pleasant coffee breaks, bike tours, and time to share your hobby with teammates. — says Maciej Król, Tech Lead and Java Developer.
All costs connected with business trips at Boldare are covered by the organization (like accommodation, tickets, food, etc.) and our delivery leads and customer success leads are the decision-makers. The only exception is for Bolders who work from another country. In this case, we cover the travel to a client meeting, but they arrange their own return home. These rules allow us, on the one hand, to make it as easy and convenient as possible for employees to travel and not limit their location preferences — and, on the other hand, to maintain a fair distribution of costs to other Bolders.
As meetings with clients are a crucial part of our daily work, teams are expected to visit them regularly to reach their business goals and fulfill the duties included in their employment contracts. And how about frequency? Mostly, each team travels once a quarter, but there are also collaborations that involve more frequent trips to the client, or trips by the client to Poland (e.g. once a week or two weeks).
Communications with clients
At Boldare, the entire product team is in very close contact with the client. Consistent and transparent communication is our daily bread. It makes Boldare people and clients feel they form one close-knit team. Above all, it translates into speed of decision-making, more rapid problem-solving, and quicker implementation of improvements to the application. We don’t need unnecessary proxies like managers, and we don’t waste time on long communication chains. All developers discuss current topics, issues, and proposals directly with the client team. It increases our efficiency, helps to build the most effective solutions, and strengthens our relationships.
An example of faster and smoother communication can be seen in the last grassroots initiative made by one of Boldare teams. They ran technical talks with the product owner — a series of meetings which allowed the product owner to better understand the team’s duties and work. The technical talks are a half-hour slot once a week, which has boosted communication with clients and within the product team.
Honesty in client relationships and putting the customer first help to develop partnerships and are the way to gain valuable trust. Direct communication takes place on Slack, in phone calls, and via regular online meetings. We meet our clients at product discovery workshops and through ongoing Scrum events like refinements, sprint reviews, or sprint retrospectives. This way, we can effectively debate new features and ways to implement them.
With every new or changed functionality, the team discusses and implements new solutions that need to be optimized for the team’s backlog and meet the customer’s requirements within the specified time and budget. Our direct approach to communication helps us to treat the client’s business concerns as if they were our own. We analyze them very carefully, from various angles, to solve them efficiently.
Benefits for all sides
With such an approach to the customer, it is obvious that whenever the opportunity arises, teams also organize face-to-face meetings in various locations around the world to maintain cooperative vibes. A good relationship with the client also creates a good atmosphere for the project as a whole. With the specialists on the client side, we build software together, but we are also able to talk, even about our personal pastimes, which only confirms that our relationship is a true partnership.
The multitude of channels and situations in which the team directly communicates and meets with the client help develop team members’ business skills, communication skills, and business orientation in their technical work. It also boosts their strategic thinking and opens new doors to unknown cultures, people, places and possibilities. We would say these trips broaden Bolders’ horizons and allow faster self-development.
From the perspective of the company, all methods of working face-to-face, including business trips, boost team morale and create a sense of belonging in the organization. We all know that when people truly know each other, they are more likely to brainstorm and consult on various topics to find better solutions. That’s why face-to-face meetings translate not only into people’s personal well-being but also into increased efficiency for both the team and the client.
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