My First SiteGround Team Festival

This June marked the 5th SiteGround Team Festival, but for me it was the first one. Even though I joined the company more than two years ago, it was right after the pandemic hit and the world just stopped, so it took a while, but the wait was so worth it. My bar of expectations was already set pretty high, as I had heard legends about the past SiteGround Festivals (in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019), even before I joined the team. Indeed, it turned out to be so much more than a team building event, more than a festival – an experience. An epic one.

🏰 A tour of the festival’s location

Our Team Festival was located in the surroundings of a beautiful residence, built in the early 80s. The area around it has large lawns, forests, diversity of plants and animals species, even its own lake! The building itself was quite interesting as well, and everyone had a chance to sign up for a tour inside the place. Here are the top 3 things that stuck in my memory about the backstory of the residence. The building was constructed way back in the 1980s as one of the residences of the social political party leader at the time. All the materials used for building it were produced locally, that was part of the whole idea around the construction. Huge and impressive chandeliers were hanging from the ceilings in every room, hallway, and bedroom. 

The place where it was built was also not chosen at random – they had scientists inspect the air, wind and soil quality carefully before deciding on the construction site. Because of the unique location, surrounded by mountains and wind currents, the air in this exact place is supposed to be one of the cleanest and freshest ones by miles.

🎪 A glimpse of the workshops and activities

Traditionally, our team gathering is a whole festival, it spans two-days of activities and workshops, mostly led by our own colleagues. Our events team does an internal call for workshop suggestions months before the festival, and that’s how the program shapes itself naturally following the interests of the SiteGround people. From compost-making, and birdhouse workshops, to coffee & beer brewing, and screen printing of T-shirts & tote bags – we had it all! Five hundred SiteGrounders could all choose between 10 different workshops, taking up between a few hours and a whole day! The list goes on and on with multiple sports activities from the early morning to the afternoon, again, led by our own professional team instructors – yoga, pilates, workouts, football, volleyball, and table tennis tournaments. Also paintball, slacklining, archery…you name it, we had it.

The diverse range of workshops and sports activities was indeed impressive, one would wonder where we got the power for the fun festival part starting in the evening – because the best was saved for last.

🎸 Let me…entertain you

The evening started out with a whole new portion of entertainment, this time – on the full-blown 30-meter SiteGround music stage. It all began with a stand-up comedy show to warm up the stage for what was about to happen that night:

The return on stage of our in-house band – New Technical Issues that consists entirely of SiteGround employees, proven to be talented not only in fixing technical issues. The team cheered them on and enjoyed their performance so much that they had a hard time leaving the stage, as we wouldn’t let them. Next time they promised to think about a third round of encore! And that was just the beginning!

At SiteGround we work hard every day, and we always put our whole heart and mind into what we do. When we party, we keep that same high bar. That’s why the headliners on the SiteGround Team Festival 2023 were … RUDIMENTAL themselves!

Thanks to them, our team festival cheer echoed around the surrounding woods until late that night – dancing, singing, jumping, shouting. The experience is hard to put into words!

I can’t imagine what organizing such an epic two-day event might look like, but the SiteGround team definitely pulled it off – because, again, we are organizing it ourselves. Apparently, 6 months in the making, only about 5 people in the core organizing team, over 100 outside professionals to help with the campsite site up, music stage, and healthy food catering on the spot, just so that 500 SiteGround team members and guests can rest and nurture their spirit and senses together for two days, for the fifth year now. 

What’s the one thing that I learned from my first SiteGround Team Festival? SiteGrounders are never bored, and never boring.