commonsku’s 2023 Year-End Team Gathering: Keeping Ten Steps Ahead!

At commonsku, one of our core values is keeping “ten steps ahead” by innovating through big ideas, smart risks, and bold action. In that spirit, in December, the commonsku team gathered for an end-of-year celebration and our fast-forward planning retreat in Toronto.

Since moving to a completely remote environment (with roots still at our HQ offices in Toronto), the commonsku team makes this twice-a-year experience two days of insights, future-dreaming, brainstorming, and fun!

“Community first” is one of our values, (customers are more than clients, colleagues are more than customers: we are one community that supports one another) we always kick off any all-team gathering with an introduction to new team members while also recognizing HQ first-timers in a fun round of lifestyle questions that help us get to know our colleagues better.

Each management team member then shares about 10-15 minutes in micro-presentations celebrating our biggest feats and giving a sneak peek at some of our most ambitious 2024 plans! 

At our June gathering, we introduced the concept of a Hackathon to the team, and this year, we created a slightly modified twist on the hackathon concept by focusing on one of our fastest-growing features: shops!

Teams were divided into groups with one mission: to “Shop It Like It’s Hot” and build a commonsku shop that celebrates our company values and highlights our new brand evolution! Challenged to build a shop under deadline (so that everyone could experience exactly what our customers go through when building a shop), we then tied the shop challenge to a theme, delivering on real-world objectives.

The result? From learning how to make the build process easier to ideas on creating beautiful new templates, each team had a ton of feedback through a hands-on educational experience!

Like a lot of leading companies, we have put a ton of focus over the past few years on how to keep and kindle a creative culture with high engagement, and this year, our Director of People & Culture, Martha Carscadden, led us through an extensive overview on our overall team engagement and career ladder insight. In the afternoon, Martha led the entire team through an OKR exercise to help each of us learn to apply OKR goal-setting principles to both work and life! 

Included at each company gathering is a town hall featuring a round of “ask the founders anything” and also departmental breakouts. It was determined from our earlier gathering in June  that our in-person meetings should be activities that “could not be done over zoom.” so, with whiteboards and sticky notes and a lot of cross-collaboration, each department was challenged to rethink, revision, and reimagine a better way moving forward!

This year, one of the most exciting new additions to our annual gathering was the introduction of our team-voted awards, the skudo awards! Nominated and voted on by the commonsku staff, we created awards that reflect each of our four commonsku values and recognized five colleagues:

• ​​Holly Atkins, Supplier Success Manager for “Community First.” 

• Erin Burley, Customer Success Manager for “Ten Steps Ahead.” 

• Haseeb Ahmad (Full-Stack Developer) and Musaa Sami (User Experience Designer) for “Fast-Forward.”

• Aly Anderson, Product Marketing Manager for “Delightful Work.”

And finally, no HQ would be complete without plenty of time for peer-to-peer fun, from basketball games to a commonsku talent show, a white elephant gift exchange, and even team karaoke! 

A big thanks to our people and culture team Martha Carscadden and Sam Bridges for coordinating and hosting an epic commonsku gathering and for always making “community first!”