How we threw a completely remote (online) party

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SoftwareMill Tech Blog

6 min readMar 16, 2020

The internet is now full of advice on how to set up your remote office, what tools you should use, how to stay focused with kids at home. But it’s all generally the same.

Here is something we did at SoftwareMill last Friday and it went surprisingly well — a company party online 😉

SoftwareMill is, as you might already know, a company that from day one, 10 years ago, was setup as a remote-first, no-office workplace and still remains this way today. We are 60 people strong, everyone works from home, distributed around Poland (mostly, but not limited to!).

Meeting once a month in person has always been a very important tool in building our company culture. Sadly the current pandemic put it to stop for an unspecified amount of time.

So how did the party go down?

Morale in Poland is not at its top. Human interactions are limited to an absolute minimum, kids are at home, gatherings cannot exceed 50 people, most services are shut down. I thought — why not organize an event that would engage the whole company? Like a tournament. Maybe Poker (no money, of course, just pure fun) or some other game, and I mentioned that on our #hr channel on slack.

One more thing I should mention is that we had our yearly get together company trip scheduled for that exact weekend (March 13–15). It’s always organised by the owner and remains (at least it attempts to remain) a surprise till the day of departure. This year we were supposed to fly to Kiev and then visit Pripyat (the haunted city near the Chernobyl power plant ⚗️☢️☣️). So we were all kind of put down; it had to be cancelled and we really needed a cheer up.

The idea went through a few iterations and Ola Puchta-Górska came up with a plan to have a company-wide party on Friday. The plan was:

We meet at 14:30,
We divide into groups playing different games:
Two truths and a lie,
Charades,
Poker,
Guess who you are,
Everyone is supposed to order their favourite food (most of us chose pizza 😉 ) and drinks (most of us got beer)

From a software point of view we used https://remo.co — a software that allows setting up virtual tables and whiteboarding (useful for Charades 🙂). We used the demo version which has everything in Premium, but limits tables to max 6 people and time of the event to 2.5 hours.

How did it go?

Phase 1: Zoom video call for everyone

We started around 14:00 (everyone was very keen :D), all met first on Zoom (it’s a video-conferencing software in case you haven’t heard about it) — that was a bit too crowded, it’s hard to casually talk with 40–50 people on a call at the same time. Everyone had their pizzas or pierogi and drinks. We talked for a while, but quickly decided we need to start playing those games we planned :)

Phase 2: Games

Then we moved to remo and started playing games. I first joined a poker table, then a casual table where we talked about nothing else but coronavirus, and finally joined a charades game.

That was really fun. The 2.5 hour limit ended sooner than you’d expect. We had drinks, we laughed, we played games. I won’t say it was like sitting in a bar, but it was really enjoyable.

Now about Remo itself — limiting up to 6 per table was a bit difficult, because we ended up with all tables filled up and few latecomers had nowhere to join. I understand it was a demo version, but remo is not on a cheap side — premium version costs $15 a user a month, so in our case that would generate around $10,800 a year — hard to justify just to have online parties once in a while 😉

So for that part of the party I would suggest regenerating Google Meet (Hangout) links and posting them somewhere upfront. That way you can have equally good rooms, unlimited seats and a whiteboard with the use of any drawing software you might have and like (ie. MS Paint or Gimp).

Phase 3: Back on Zoom

Once the remo limit finished we kinda naturally went back on Zoom. There were fewer of us, as some people decided to call it a day, so the conversation was easier to carry in a smaller group. There were maybe 30 of us so either this, or the few beers we had, but we just had a great flow 🙂 We did a drawing competition for a best hen (do not ask).

Some of our hen drawn for the competition with a winning Maria Wachal’s in the middle ;-)

I sat there till around 6pm, and then came back to my everyday life, thinking the party was quite great and we should do it again.

Little that I know, that few hours later, when I came back around 9pm the party was still on 🙂

There were still around 20 people, we talked about everything, we did virtual tours around our apartments, I left to go to sleep at midnight, some stayed till 1:30am! The toughest players stayed on the party, on their cameras, for 10 hours :D

Reception

I asked the team what they think about it and generally lots of them were surprised that it went so well and fun, cause they (me included) feared cringeful experience 😉 Lots of them enjoyed the “easy” part after 9pm. There was also a significant number saying that dividing into small tables focused on one activity encourages better integration.

A “How-to” for you

To summarise. If it is at all possible to get any conclusions after ONE event 😉 but here goes a list of things to do to have an event like that in your company:

Prepare a list of activities that people can do on your party
For each activity generate a room to meet on (like Google Meet for example)
Have someone responsible for each room who will set up and test any software that is required (like online bridge or chess room)
Allow for game-less rooms for people just to hang out and talk about stuff
Do not limit anything, just let it flow, you might be surprised how good it goes 🙂

We are definitely going to do it again! Since we cannot meet face to face, this is really a good alternative!

AMA session on remote work

Oh and btw, if you’re looking for more tips on remote work, watch a video from an AMA (Ask Me Anything) with me and get lessons learned from our 10-years journey of building a 100% remote team.