Spending time together will always be an important part of Charlie’s culture — it’s one of the reasons why we’ve decided against becoming a fully-remote company. We want everyone to feel a sense of 🫂Belonging here and our company-wide meetups are a big part of that. It’s also clear that for some of us, too many meetups eat into our time and can come into conflict with feelings of 💪Ownership and 🔀Structured flexibility. So as the team grows and we settle into a new way of working, we’ll need to work hard to find the right balance between all three! At the moment, there are three different categories of meetups:

<aside> 📌 Fixed in-person meetups

There will be roughly six fixed meetups every year: two company-wide ones, three function meetups, and an optional Charlie Connect Day.

• The company-wide meetups will take place twice a year. These are our Year so Far and Year in Review meetups.
  • All dates will be decided at least 12 months in advance, and we’ll try our best to make sure they don’t fall during school holidays!
  • As we’re such a large team now, fixed company meetups will likely take place outside of the office — they’ll be somewhere in London that’s easily accessible and can accommodate us all
  • We don't want to eat into anyone's personal time, so these meetups will always take place on a weekday morning, and will have plenty of breaks for those who will still need to take care of BAU bits
  • Everyone in Charlie is expected to attend these — they’re a great opportunity for us to reflect on where we are and where we're going. Hearing different Charlinis share exciting things that are going on in the business is a great learning experience and we want everyone to have a say!
• We’d also like to encourage each function to have at least one fixed meetup a quarter. These will be organised by your function on a more ad-hoc basis — Charlie will fund these for your function

You can miss one fixed meetup per year if you're ill, on holiday or working remotely from outside of the UK.

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<aside> ✌️ Flexible in-person meetups

We intend to have more than four opportunities a year where everyone can get together, so we’ll have a variety of optional meetups throughout the year — some larger and some smaller/ad-hoc.

• Our larger flexible meetups include a Summer Party, Christmas party and away weekends. We’ll give everyone at least 6 months notice as to when these will take place. For as long as we can feasibly continue to do away weekends, they’ll be optional. We’ll aim to have 1 away weekend a year, depending on timings and what’s possible.
• Examples of our current smaller and ad-hoc meetups include, quarterly coffee mornings, monthly pub visits and board game night. </aside>

<aside> 💻 Remote meetups

It’s important we all have opportunities to bond with each other, whether we prefer working remotely or being in the office, so we’ll continue to find moments for us to do so.

• Remote meetups will always be optional, but we’d like to encourage everyone to get involved if and when they can - we’d hate for there to be a divide between more remote and more in-office Charlinis!
• We currently have our monthly virtual coffee chats, Lunch & Learns (known as Charlie Labs and Charlie Playground) and Book Club, but we’re always up for trying out new ideas around remote meetups </aside>