Celebrating 19 Years of Talent

Quarterly retreats are a longstanding tradition at Viget. Since our founding, we’ve taken a day each quarter to step away and focus on us. We come together, reflect on progress, share new ideas, realign, and do something fun as a team. In the last year, we’ve curled, shot pool, and cheered on our local baseball teams.

For the summer and winter retreats, our three offices meet locally and follow the same format: thoughtful meeting, followed by fun. But in the fall and spring we come together as one big team, getting the whole company together in one place. I know we say it every year, but this year was better than ever.

Our spring events in particular have evolved significantly each year. We treat the daytime agenda like a mini-conference, and this year covered a mix of tech, design, and culture topics, including a deep dive into our Diversity & Inclusion survey. We treat the evening hours as Viget’s anniversary party, celebrating our shared success, honoring new hires and long-timers alike, toasting to career milestones, and sharing our admiration and gratitude for each other.

There are, of course, fun and games.

Accompanied by an abundance of laughter.

Most importantly, we build the bonds that help make Viget, and these events, feel like coming home.

So how do we do it each year? And how did we make sure this year was even better than last year? It takes a whole lot of heart, and a People Team that will knock your socks off. And while teamwork is essential, we really couldn’t do it without our resident Master of Ceremonies, Fun Guru, Chaos Coordinator, and Events Manager Khanh Stenberg.

Our events often have a loose theme, something to help tie together the all-hands meeting and the fun event that follows. This spring, we decided to focus on what brings us all together – our talents – and we had a blast making “talent” the overarching theme of Viget19.

Our evening was headlined by a talent show that featured singers, guitarists, storytellers, and a full-fledged band (with members from each of our offices!), as well as a storm of quirky 10-second talents.

As the evening continued we set up dueling pianos, and impromptu sing-a-longs ensued.

The celebration continued into the next day, when we welcomed outside experts to join us for brunch and inspire us with their skills and talents. We learned how to juggle.

And tried our hands at woodworking.

We even brought out our limited edition event tees and set up a merch table, inviting folks to snag some new (old) Viget garb after picking up their event tickets at Will Call.

We’ve been performing together since 1999, and this tour is just getting started. It was a blast celebrating Viget19 and, now that we’re caught up on sleep, we’re making plans for an epic celebration next year. Will we see you at Viget20?