Not everything we do in Team Week is totally serious - you have to have some fun in there as well.
After our Strategy Day on the Tuesday of the 2024 Team Week, we still had a couple of days together before people headed home on the Friday of the week (or the weekend). So we thought we'd better make the most of it!
On the Wednesday, we had a "normal working day" - of sorts. The big difference was we were all in one place, and we got to work in the same room as each other. So we took advantage of our co-working space via Spacecubed to book out meeting rooms at Flux, Fern and Riff, and to make the most of that opportunity.
We did come together for lunch on the Wednesday to have lunch, and to celebrate the official launch of the new web site - with a big thank you to Bri, Gordon and Rach who have all put in a lot of time and effort behind the scenes - as well as with some special help from Alix Hearnshaw who helped us tweak and implement the branding. I might also have gotten a little emotional at lunch when I gave a speech to the team - thanking them for the privilege of being the CEO for twenty years!
Wednesday went quickly, and led us to our Shenanigans Day on Thursday - something I was keeping as a surprise for the team.
We all met at the Northbridge Cultural Centre for "The Gaia Great GLAM Hunt 2024" - a scavenger "race" that I set up for the team in secret, which would see them visit the State Records Office of Western Australia, the State Library of Western Australia, the Western Australian Museum and the Art Gallery of Western Australia. We are very fortunate in Perth to have all these Galleries, Libraries, Archives and Museums (GLAM) organisations in close proximity - certainly when it means we can run such an event for our team.
The Gaia Great GLAM Hunt 2024 saw six teams split up and, armed with a series of questions and $50, get around those organisations and make the most of a few hours spent really enjoying the collections, rather than sitting behind their computers working on the underlying databases that power those organisations (like we currently do for State Records Office WA). The questions were specifically designed to make sure that the teams got to really dive into the collections and see what they were about - ranging from finding their favourite exhibit in the Art Gallery to querying Retromaps for the closest stables, identifying different media formats held in the Library to finding out more about food webs in the Museum.
We had a quick lunch at Picabar to fuel up and then we jumped on a bus to head to our afternoon location - the Herdsman Lake Discovery Centre.
The Discovery Centre is a big part of why Gaia Resources exists - I used to go here as a child with my father and sit upstairs watching swamp harriers soar across the lake, or see Spoonbills wading through the shallows, or the migratory birds. Way back in the 1980s we even were involved in some freshwater fish research from our farm down in Northcliffe, Western Australia, and the Discovery Centre team were the ones who connected us to that project. I have many fond memories of looking in the little aquaria and seeing the exhibits in the centre back then, and on this day, some 40 years later, I got to relive it again with the team.
The Discovery Centre offers a lot of different programs to schools, and so I decided we'd jump into one of those programs and do some of those activities - a guided bird walk, some leaf litter sifting, and some aquatic invertebrate sampling. We got to be kids again for the day, but we were also being reminded how important this sort of work is - the records and information captured from these sorts of activities are delivered to citizen science projects (and of course, we also discussed how this information is used and can be used - and will keep in touch with the Discovery Centre team to provide more advice on that).
While it was a rainy afternoon, it was part of the charm of the event - getting to keep warm with quite a few coffees and hot chocolates from the Discovery Centre "coffee window" (worth a visit, folks, and you support the Centre by doing so) kept our spirits up while we learned more about this amazing natural environment right in the middle of a capital city. I think a few of our local staff are going to be back there again - some of them might even bring their kids, but I got the distinct impression you'll be hard pressed to stop the adults from having another go!
After a short bus ride back into the central Perth city, we went on to have a few after work drinks and have some chats about how good the week had been - that was really nice for me to see so many happy (and slightly tired!) faces from the team as they unwound a bit.
Unlike our strategy day, the Shenanigans day had a different focus - to help our team to find the wonder in the work we do again, and to realise why it's so important that we work on all that technology behind the scenes. From searching the Archival Management Systems we deliver to talking about the best place to upload photographs for species identification, these activities really helped us to connect into our mission statement - to responsibly deliver sustainable technology solutions to make the world a better place.
We had a blast at team week in 2024, and I can't wait to do it again - but in the meantime if you want to know more about what we did, drop me a line, or start a conversation with us on our social media channels.
Piers