How We Built Meaningful Connections at Homecoming 2023

Our mission at Schema App is to build meaningful connections so that we are all understood.

Building meaningful connections and a strong company culture can be challenging as a fully remote team working across Canada. We host monthly team-building activities and conduct virtual co-working sessions, but the value of in-person interaction is often unparalleled as we continue to grow our team.

To bridge the distance gap, we hosted our first 2-day in-person team retreat at our new Schema App head office in Guelph, Ontario, Canada. The entire Schema App team gathered for two days of culture-building, strategic planning, training and celebration to mark the end of another quarter.

Here’s what we got up to during Homecoming 2023.

Breaking the ice & building team culture

Part of building meaningful connections is contextualizing places and things, and helping the rest of the team understand how they relate to various team members. With a good 70% of the Schema App team living outside of Guelph, we hosted a scavenger hunt across Guelph.

Building our very own Knowledge Graph

In the spirit of building meaningful connections, we also wanted team members to identify things they had in common. During the game, we learnt that some of us played multiple musical instruments while others found commonality in their **** for video games, sports and reading.

Within 10 minutes, we found commonality between various team members and built our very own live Schema App Knowledge Graph.

Living our Values 

Growth mindset, great people and getting results are the 3 core values we live and breathe at Schema App. It flows through our work, our actions, our culture and even more so at Homecoming 2023.

During Homecoming 2023, the entire Schema App team had the opportunity to exercise their creativity and ideate on what could do to reach 10X growth. With no wrong answers, we heard  team members from different functional groups share their perspectives based on the work they’ve been doing.

Award of Excellence

Every 6 months, we get to nominate and pick an exemplary team member for our Award of Excellence. This team member lives out our core values, has demonstrated outstanding service to the Schema App community and/or has made extraordinary contributions to the company beyond what is normally expected of their job.

The Award of Excellence went to Ana Petkovic, Manager of Customer Success! Ana ensures that our purpose thrives within our Customer Success team and with our customers. She lives our culture day by day, while also delivering awesome results. Congratulations Ana!

Developing our Team

Developing a great team involves more than just alignment on goals and priorities. On the second day of Homecoming, Brady Wilson – the cofounder of Juice Inc and our very own Kate Wilson, conducted an Oxygen ***** training session to help our team members understand their needs and how they can manage their energy to maximize performance.

This exercise was a great framework for the Schema App team to reflect on their needs and understand how they can best support their team members to maximize energy and performance. You can learn more about Oxygen ***** here.

In conclusion, Homecoming 2023 was a huge success. On top of all the workshops and activities, our team members were able to build meaningful connections through shared meals, board games, and conversations throughout the day. We cannot wait for our next reunion!

Gracia Chua is the Demand Generation Manager at Schema App. Schema App is an end-to-end Schema Markup solution that helps enterprise SEO teams create, deploy and manage Schema Markup to stand out in search.