Thetus Takes on Pacific City for the 2012 Offsite

Every year our company goes on a retreat together, somewhere different each time but always within a couple of hours from our office in downtown Portland. In the past we’ve gone up to Mt. Hood, out to the vineyards, and this year we went to the coastal town of Pacific City and stayed in the Shorepine homes (we highly recommend these places). Spending a day and a half outside of the office allows us to step back, out of any tunnel vision and refocus on the big picture.

A Thetus offsite is all about group activities; we make a mishmash of teams by putting together people with differing responsibilities at the company (like a semantic modeler and a marketing person). These group meetings allow us to break away from our normal teams and collaborate with coworkers that we don’t interact with on a daily basis. We’ve found this helps employees see the whole process of product creation and look at our company and product from a different perspective. The offsite is a time for employees to share their ideas, from a new meeting system to the need for a hammock room in the office. It’s also a time to learn more about your coworkers. We focus on being a team and we want everyone to be an active player, nobody gets benched at Thetus. We find our offsites are the perfect forum to nurture collaborations, brew ideas and create infectious enthusiasm and that’s exactly what they do.

But most of all, the offsites are fun. Thetus prides itself on having a team with a less than normal background and once outside the office walls, some people tend to let loose a little more. When you mix these factors with a couple of local IPAs from the Pelican Brewery some interesting things can come out. Take a look at our Offsite 2012 photo album on our Facebook page to see our take on a 2025 User Interface – made strictly out of popsicle sticks of course …