This HR pro developed quarterly in-person gatherings for a remote-first world

In a large hotel ballroom in San Francisco this summer, more than 80 VSCO employees gathered. Teams sat at colorful banquet tables strategically positioned around the room “like a wedding” to maximize interpersonal connection. Pipe cleaners served as concentration tools for silent fidgeting during long meeting sessions.

And the centerpiece? A large wall filled with colorful Post-it style notes connected with yarn—think A Beautiful Mind or a TV detective’s evidence board. This wall was why they all came to Frisco.

“We've really got the whole company focused on our future, our strategy, what's coming up in front of us, as well as a reminder of who we're doing it for,” said Karina Bernacki, VSCO’s head of people, adding that it happens in a “kindergarten classroom”-like setting.

When Bernacki joined VSCO, a photo editing app and sharing platform, in January 2021, she got to work addressing missteps in the company’s remote-first strategy.

“They were trying to replicate the office in the virtual world,” she said.

Bernacki identified work to address transparency and best practices for remote-first communication and spearheaded the development of quarterly in-person big-room planning events so employees didn’t feel isolated.

Bernacki and her team designed the big-room planning events as a way to foster the collaboration and teamwork that many bosses across the land say can only be accomplished in-office. While the office thing didn’t work for VSCO, these quarterly in-person meetings do.

“What are some of the best things to do in person? It's that communication, get a shared understanding, align on complicated things, create memories,” Bernacki said, so that’s what they do together.

The company has hosted three of these events so far.

How do they work? VSCO hosts big-room planning events every quarter. The entire team preps for the in-person meeting in the preceding weeks. When everyone is together, it’s an opportunity to plan for the next quarter, assess what’s working and what’s not, and make sure all the disparate teams can literally see how their work fits into the big picture.

“It's just this big, communal planning, where the teams are doing their own planning, but they have access to everything that they need and everybody they need. So they can ask all the questions and get all the dependencies,” Bernacki said of day one. “So we run these cycles all day…We have these big things that are up on the board. We use yarn to connect dependencies, so you can see where the critical path is.”

On day two, teams identify risks to their quarterly plans and design for those possibilities as well. The day culminates with a shared commitment to the goals and plans identified on the big wall.

“Just imagine how much time can be wasted in a remote world, when you don't have that kind of visibility and transparency,” she said.

The third day of the event is designed for each functional team for sharing experiences and meals and team-building activities.

Answer to RTO. After the event, VSCO’s employees return to the virtual office with a fresh understanding of their own work and how it fits into the broader goals.

Before VSCO started closing its San Francisco office a year and a half ago, it was open to any local employees to use, but “nobody was going, or one person would be there, in this big empty, very expensive space.”

Bernacki wanted to invest the office space budget “back in our people and back in our business” and used the office rent to fund these events, she said.

"There's a lot of things that you get for free when you're in an office, but you don't necessarily get them for free,” she said. “You might accidentally luck upon them, or you might have a bias and you might think that you have them.”

For Bernacki, designing to intentionally reap the benefits of in-person collaboration and shared experiences made more sense than assuming those would naturally occur in the office.

“You might have an entire universe in your head built up of why you think the office is better…and most of it might be bullshit. A lot of it might just be a bunch of assumptions that you've never tested.”

The first couple big-room planning events were admittedly rough and required extra facilitation from Bernacki’s team, but employees felt like they “owned” the most recent gathering, according to Bernacki, who collects feedback on a regular cadence.

For VSCO, the quarterly in-person gatherings are the answer to the hybrid riddle. The choices aren’t based on executive preferences, but rather designed based on what activities work best for in-person vs. remote.

"The key component is ‘get together for a reason.’ What are things that are just better when you're together? Design around that,” she said. “What are the things that are better at home, and then what are the things where it really doesn't make a difference?”