When MURAL’s Head of Culture and Collaboration was asked to organise a virtual celebration for the entire company during a worldwide lockdown, she used Zoom and MURAL’s own visual collaboration platform for an engaging online world tour. With the help of volunteer pilots, flight attendants and virtual passports, about 250 remote employees took a 3-hour trip and “travelled” from snowy mountains to tropical beaches, and then on to outer space. Along the way, employees from different teams mingled in a speed-dating activity, escape rooms and a special performance by the MURAL Band covering “Everlong” by the Foo Fighters. Half a year later, Laïla pushed the boundaries of online events once again by executing a 3-day virtual retreat for over 400 employees spread across global time zones from the Philippines to California. Both virtual retreats were a one-of-a-kind event that successfully introduced new (remote) team members to one another, brought them closer together, and inspired our imaginations on what is possible with digital platforms.
Head of Culture & Collaboration at Mural.Adapting to thrive: Designing unforgettable virtual retreats
Laïla von Alvensleben is the Head of Culture and Collaboration at MURAL, a digital workspace for guided visual collaboration. She manages a distributed team of 700+ people across 27 countries and multiple time zones and is a champion for the remote-first and hybrid-remote approach to team collaboration, empowering MURAL’s rapidly growing team to successfully work from anywhere.
Laïla’s background is in UX design, having worked on digital product design at Hanno and educational workshops at Hyper Island. She helped create the Remote Starter Kit and is a member of the Remote Work Association, a network that organizes online events to promote location-independent jobs. She has spoken at key industry events including NEXT in Hamburg, The Remote Career Summit 2020, itoday Summit, Running Remote 2020 and Ravensbourne University in London. She is based in Switzerland and is fluent in English, Italian, French and Spanish.
