Every Summer at SiteGround for the past eight years has been invariably marked by the anticipation of our biggest internal event – our very own SiteGround Festival. We’ve been organizing it ourselves from start to finish since 2016, with a one-year Covid-induced pause that made us appreciate it even more. It’s an epic two-day outdoor get-together complete with various daytime hands-on workshops, sports tournaments, and group activities that our team members not only get to choose from, but some of them even get to lead themselves. The goal is for everyone to try out a new skill, showcase a talent, get crafty, get creative, or get moving, all while seeing the people you work with every day in a different light.
In the past we’ve had a craft beer brewing workshop hosted by a Software Engineer team lead, a DIY natural cosmetics workshop by a member of our Project Management team, a morning workout session by a passionate gym enthusiast from HR, a DIY dreamcatcher workshop with our Head Office Manager, a coffee brewing and tasting session with our barista-at-heart Video Content Editor, a locksmithing session with our DevOps team lead, where we learned how to secure a lock just as well as how to bulletproof a server – and so much more!
Here are 10 more things that you could try out at the SiteGround Team Festival this year. Hopefully, the list alone is enough to inspire you to build something, share, or learn a new skill yourself.
Pottery
You will usually find us crafting client interfaces on a workday, but this one was different. Similar to what we normally do with code, and html and css, this time we tried building a physical tool from scratch! We got to spin pottery wheels and get hands-on for real. Turns out it’s way harder when you don’t have an Undo button, or a backup to revert from – but all the more satisfying!
Screen-Printing
Changing up the glow of the laptop screen for the colors of live screen-printing! There was a constant line to make your own t-shirt or a tote-bag, and even add some extra ones to bring as a gift home – or to a colleague who had to miss the SiteGround festival this year.
Upcycling
We usually shiver when we hear the word “redesign”, but not this time! “Reduce. Reuse. Recycle.” is not only our motto when it comes to our office culture, but a way of life, too. Here we redesigned and repurposed old clothes into practical new items like shopping bags, handy clutches, or chef aprons with a twist!
Cooking like an Italian
Having Italian team members is the best – they double as a local guide on your Marketing mini-teambuilding, teach you the craft of Italian hand gestures on a Zoom call, and police you that it’s illegal to have a cappuccino after 12 pm. But this year things got even more serious than spaghetti code – we got our Marketing Manager for Italy to co-lead our cooking workshop. The result: pitch-perfect Tiramisu and Margherita!
Check out our Italian Cookbook Here
Unicorn Circuit Board
Here is where we really got into the nitty-gritty! Can you put together your own SiteGround circuit board correctly, so that it lights up in the end? It’s child’s play – so we got back to school with this Uni4kids workshop.
Floristry
How hard can it be, putting flowers in a vase, I thought. Well, just look at the faces of the people who got to answer this question in a two-hour workshop. It’s definitely not as easy as sprinkling emojis in your email subject lines!
Digital Photography
In the AI era, upping your digital photography game is a must! Our aficionado-turned-pro photographers from our Web Design and Motion graphics team, together with a member from no other than our Finance team worked with over 60 (!) enthusiasts, sharing tips and tricks. Then they put it all into practice thanks to our colleague-turned-model for a day. Now with even one look at the profile pictures in our company Slack, you can tell who visited this workshop!
Candle-Making
This candle-making workshop sure looked like anything but. Who thought candles could look so delicious?!
FPV Planes
Building an airplane while flying it is a tactic we left in the first years of our 20-year history as a company, but we still know how to do it. And this workshop proved it. Once built, we flew our FPV planes to get some stunning views from the skies!
Sumo Wrestling (Even If You Don’t Have the Physique for It)
It’s important to always have someone to do the heavy lifting for you – such as our technical support team! Here, they had to literally step up. After years of battling countless website misconfigurations, database optimizations, and tough-nut cases that they crack in a blink of an eye on a daily basis, now they added inflatable sumo under their belt.
Bonus: Stage-Diving
This we only recommend for seasoned professionals – such as our CEO. He was the one trademarking this move on our very first team festival. Eight years later, I guess nothing’s changed:
These are just some of the activities that stood out to me, and I, for one, had never tried before. But if you ask anyone of the remaining 550 SiteGround festival go-ers, their list will look completely different. Some painted landscapes, some tried salsa dancing lessons, some played board games, tennis, volleyball, ping-pong, darts or football. Some did Pilates and crossfit workouts together every morning of the festival, while still others left at 8:30 am. on a hike to a 2,516 m. mountain peak on our last day. And still, others were working 24/7 – our customer service teams were tirelessly standing by from the comfort of our hotel and festival grounds – making sure our clients were happily taken care of without a hiccup.
That’s the beauty of being a team – everyone’s different, but together, you make something way greater, and more versatile, than the sum of your skills and talents.