QRY Hosts More Regular Online Socials with Less Admin Workload Thanks to Virtual Social Calendar

Avery Kiesling-Gough is the Head of People & Culture of QRY, an online marketing agency.

Her role involves managing team morale, motivation, and camaraderie, in part by ensuring that there are plenty of interesting social events on her work-from-home coworkers' calendars.

When the team gets together via video call for some dedicated get-to-know-you time, it is typically Avery who plans and sometimes even hosts these hangouts. She can attest firsthand how much work goes into facilitating great experiences for employees.

"We like to create a diverse lineup and a lot of variety in the options for events, and I don't have to do all that each time."

teambuilding.com's catalog of 70+ events is a major win, since it means the QRY crew can do something fresh and different together every hangout without the need for the culture team to constantly brainstorm ideas and design events from the ground up.

"It's nice to rely on your team to schedule things and get it planned and then not have to worry about anything and just show up. And also that's nice for me to then be a participant as well, instead of having to facilitate every social."

Over the past two and a half years, QRY has booked numerous individual events with teambuilding.com, all of which have been simple to implement and have gotten great responses from employees.

When Avery found out that teambuilding.com was launching a Virtual Social Calendar series that could make the process even easier, she was all-in for QRY piloting the program.

Virtual Social Calendar is a new offering in the online team building space. While many team socials are one-time, in-depth bonding sessions, Social Calendar is an ongoing series designed to steadily grow connections and community through short, frequent experiences.

While one-off events often require a separate booking for each commitment, Virtual Social Calendar's streamlined process means one agreement for a year's worth of experiences. Each participating company is assigned a dedicated teambuilding.com support team that selects, prepares, and runs experiences tailored to their group.

"Before, I would go in and book or email you and say, can we sign up for these events on these dates that work? That was a lot more manual, which was fine, but it was definitely easier to just go through it this way….the less admin and logistics I have to do, that's for the best!"

For Avery, one of the standout features of Virtual Social Calendar was the consistency of hosts. As much as possible, the same teambuilding.com hosts run Virtual Social Calendar events, allowing employees to develop rapport and sometimes even inside jokes with their facilitators.

"[The hosts] remembered stuff about the team and the team knew them so that was really great…. I could really tell a difference in the introduction, not having to start from scratch each week. We could jump right into things and I really enjoyed that."

Her employees echoed that sentiment:

"I enjoy our Happy Hours with Teambuilding!! The hosts are great, and I've actually really enjoyed having them more consistently—it makes [the events] a little less awkward, especially since we are getting some of the same hosts over and over again, so it's been fun to see them every week."

After the first events, Avery could clearly see the satisfaction among her staff. The 45-minute format of Virtual Social Calendar made it easy for the company to host events as often as every week, which meant that many more opportunities for employees to have social time with their peers.

"The team loves it for the morale, and for being able to see different departments and different people."

She also relayed high praise from her coworkers who participated:

"We interact with clients so much, that it's really fun to see everyone's non client facing side and connect on another level! And QRY investing in events like this signals to me just how important building the culture and sense of community is to the organization as a whole — it makes me feel valued and I'm grateful for the opportunity to hang out with people I really like."

"Having these events more consistently boosts overall morale and gives me a chance to chat with people on other pods that I don't get to talk to very often. It's fun to connect with people outside of our day-to-day! It also feels like a nice replacement since we don't all live near each other and go into the office daily, which is how these Happy Hours would naturally occur."

"The team building events are a lot of fun. It is so nice to bond with the team and play games that are non-work-related topics. I think having these events helps us grow closer and support each other better on client calls."