Milky Tea 'Mini Fest' 2024

On 23rd September, we took off to the Lake District for Milky Tea ‘Mini Fest’; a 3-day retreat designed to connect, empower, and promote the wellbeing of our teams.

Why we created milky tea ‘MINI FEST’

Since the pandemic, we’ve shifted to being a hybrid & remote work studio. It’s undoubtedly made us a much more dynamic and diverse team - from all over the UK and Europe.

There’s only been one downside to this. Less face-to-face interaction. We’re a team that thrives when collaborating, and we’ve become great at doing this remotely.

Working on separate projects, however, can lead to some staff members rarely getting the opportunity to connect at work.

We knew we wanted to do something to combat this, but we didn’t want to only save it for those times when we celebrate our work or Christmas.

So we created Mini Fest; a retreat to forge genuine connections, empower our team to be confident in communication, and foster better mental and physical wellbeing.

Skill and knowledge sharing

Over three days, we engaged in productive teambuilding workshops and welcomed some brilliant external coaches. All of these focused on finding new ways to better ourselves and our workspaces.

Matt Fowler from Incredible Thinkers joined us on the first evening for a workshop on the unique details that make high-performing teams tick.

The next day we were joined by Chris Hardy who helped us engage in an open discussion to assess the things we need to stop, start, and continue doing as a team while also encouraging us to apply Kim Scott’s Radical Candor model to our everyday thinking.

Rob, Charlotte, Jennifer, and Jonathan from Milky Tea hosted their own talks, sharing skills specific to their disciplines with the wider team.

PHYSICAL & MeNTAL WELLBEING

‘Mini Fest’ was also an opportunity to focus on our physical and mental wellbeing.

Much of our external talks and team workshops featured elements of this. Some covered managing stress through physical activity, and so we decided to put their learnings into action!

Our teams braved the tumultuous British weather to explore Greystoke Castle and the Aira Force Waterfall - a host of us even took early morning Pilates classes!

tEAM BUILDING, ACTIVITIES, AND lots of DOWNTIME!

No retreat would be complete without some fun team-building activities, right?

We let off steam with archery and axe-throwing (courtesy of Michael Coates Clay Shooting), gaming, and some high-stakes snooker tournaments - to name a few!

We also benefitted from plenty of downtime and socialising - with many of us taking the opportunity to connect with team members we hadn’t met in person before.