Our 2018 WeeTreat Workshop

As a gaggle of designers and word nerds, the BatesMeron team is really good at keeping its proverbial nose to the grindstone. Lately, we’ve almost been too good. With so much dedicated plugging away going on, we’ve been overdue to spend some QT with another aspect of what makes being part of the BMSD team so great: the team itself. So, in the spirit of camaraderie and a healthy dose of office-hour revelry, we traded in photoshop and our laptops for our 2018 WeeTreat.

A mini version of our annual BeeTreat workshops, this year’s WeeTreat was an afternoon filled with bee-themed crossword puzzles, planking contests and potato chip flavor quizzes. Activities like these could have only come from our good friends at Happy Work Spectacular Life, who we enlisted to ensure the afternoon went off without a hitch.

While group R&R was the order of the day, the proceedings were not without nuggets of wisdom—about ourselves, each other and as a team. We shared personal stories, handwritten notes capturing what we admire most about each other and intense amounts of eye contact. We also left with the knowledge that our design intern Adam is a beast at planking, having beaten frontrunner Todd with a plank time of more than three minutes. (If you don’t fully grasp how impressive this is, try it yourself sometime.)

The work we do may be priority No. 1 around here, but our culture is a close second. Most of the time, that means casual beers (or ciders) in the afternoons, sandwiches in Grant Park across the street at lunch and random pick-up games of Magna-darts (don’t ask), but from time to time some more formal TLC does the team good. And so does 20 different flavors of chips. In short, our WeeTreat was snack-fueled, plank-tastic, team-building success!