More Than a Retreat: Why Bringing the Rotunda Team Together Matters

Most days, the Rotunda team is spread across cities, countries, and time zones, working together through screens and Slack messages.

But once a year, we trade all that for the same place. This year, that place was Santa Teresa, Costa Rica.

Our annual retreat is a chance to step away from our usual routines, spend real time with people we normally see in little boxes on a screen, and strengthen the relationships that make a fully remote company work.

Because as well as we work together remotely, there's no substitute for actually being together.

Bringing a remote team together

A company retreat is obviously a chance to have some fun. And we did plenty of that.

But the real value is harder to capture in an itinerary.

It's the conversation between someone in Engineering and someone in Support who normally only interact when there's a problem to solve. It's Marketing getting to know the people building the products they talk about every day. It's coworkers from different countries and cultures sharing meals, stories, ideas, and a lot of laughs.

Those connections follow us home.

When you know the people on the other side of a Slack message, collaboration gets easier. Ideas move more freely. Departments feel a little less like departments. And a group of people working remotely starts to feel much more like a team.

That matters to us because we care deeply about what we build.

Every day, churches, schools, nonprofits, and other organizations use Rotunda products to bring people together and accomplish work that matters in their communities. Building great software for them takes more than talented individuals doing their own jobs well. It takes people who trust each other, challenge each other, share ideas, and genuinely enjoy working together.

Our retreats help create more of that.

Putting one of our values to work

One of the experiences we shared this year also gave us an opportunity to connect our retreat with something central to the work we support every day: volunteering.

We spent one morning with Nicoya Peninsula Waterkeeper cleaning up a local beach and learning about the ecosystem surrounding us.

Waterkeeper Alliance is a global network of more than 300 Waterkeeper groups working to protect clean water around the world. Our hosts focus specifically on the coastal waters and ecosystems of Costa Rica's Nicoya Peninsula.

Our guide, Jafet, has spent seven years protecting the coastline with Nicoya Peninsula Waterkeeper. He taught us to look more closely at what was hiding in the sand—especially tiny pieces of Styrofoam and plastic that are easy for people to overlook but can pose a serious danger to wildlife.

Then we grabbed gloves and bags and got to work.

Alicia on our Marketing team noticed the parallel with the organizations we work with every day:

"It really does take a team of people to do this. I'm in the back of the group and still finding things. More volunteers mean more helping hands. We see the same difference that makes every day with the organizations we serve."

By the end, our team had collected more than 30 bags of waste. We sorted what we found into plastic, glass, aluminum, and other materials, some of which could be recycled and put to new uses.

It was only one part of our time together in Costa Rica, but it felt fitting.

We spend our working days building tools that help organizations bring people together to serve others. For a morning, we got to be the volunteers ourselves.

Back to work, a little more connected

Eventually, the retreat ends. Everyone boards a plane, heads home, opens their laptop, and we're once again scattered across cities and time zones.

But we don't come back quite the same.

We come back knowing one another better. We have new shared experiences and inside jokes. We understand a little more about the people and departments we work alongside. And hopefully, we bring some of that energy back into the products we build and the customers we serve.

That's why these retreats matter to us.

Yes, we get to visit an incredible place together. We get to step away from our desks, have fun, volunteer, and enjoy each other's company.

But more importantly, we get to strengthen the human connections behind a fully remote company—and then bring those connections back to the work we do every day.

We're grateful to Nicoya Peninsula Waterkeeper and Jafet for letting volunteering be a small but meaningful part of this year's retreat. And we're grateful for the organizations we serve, whose own commitment to their communities reminds us why what we build matters.