At 8 a.m. on 11 September the team gathered downstairs at No. 58 Heshun Road in Suzhou Industrial Park. People who normally each run their own patch of the office got on the same coach — destination: the Shengsi Islands, Zhoushan, Zhejiang. Three days and two nights; no production scheduling, no reports, no meetings.
Office work has one defining feature: every conversation is filtered through something. A screen, a document, a process step, a customer email. Sales talks lead time with engineering, purchasing talks payment with finance, quality talks sign-off with production. After a year there has been a great deal of talking, and not necessarily much knowing.
The point of a team-building trip is not to take people somewhere to play. It is to pull them off their workstations and put them in an environment with no functional boundaries. We chose an island because it is exactly the right distance away — a coach ride plus a sea crossing, and half the working mindset is gone before arrival.
Before leaving, several colleagues left the same line in customer groups: "We are away on a team trip — messages are fine, we may not be able to work on things, but messages will be handled." That sentence is probably the most honest footnote to the whole trip: not fully offline, just one gear slower.
What we did over three days was simple: cross to the island, walk the coastline, paddle and watch the sea; in the evening wait for a sunset and watch it from beginning to end; at night sit around one table and eat seafood that had just come off the boats. No ice-breakers in a meeting room, no scored outdoor challenges.
What actually brings people closer tends to be the unplanned moments: hunting for the right angle on the rocks together, finishing one plate of seafood together, laughing at a colleague whose hair the wind had rearranged. None of that goes into a KPI, but it pays off in the next cross-department coordination — you remember the person on the other side, not just a node in the process.
September is the handover between two rhythms: first-half projects closing out, fourth-quarter orders going into the schedule. On the second day back in Suzhou the desks were the same and the inbox was the same, but some things genuinely cost less to move — matters that used to need three emails and a cc now get settled in two sentences at someone's desk.
That is why we have kept doing this. Moganshan in 2023, Anji in 2024, Qiandao Lake in 2025, Shengsi this year. The format changes annually; the purpose does not: let a group of people who do their work well also get to know each other properly.
Set the work down for a while and head for the islands of the East China Sea. Leave the screens and the spreadsheets behind and hand the KPI to the sea wind. Walk the shore, keep each other company, rest properly, and set off again with the energy restored.
Thanks to the admin and HR colleagues who put the itinerary, accommodation and transport in place item by item, and to everyone who carried luggage on the coach or welcomed a newer colleague at the table. Rest is for walking further. Fourth quarter, back to work.
