Company Clubs at Full Scale: Basketball, Pickleball, and Eight Others Employees Run Themselves
In this article
Most of our team works from home, spread across cities and provinces all over the Philippines. That makes it easy to have a great working relationship with someone and never actually meet them in person. Company clubs are one of the ways we fix that.
Right now Full Scale supports ten of them: basketball, pickleball, running, free diving, esports, mountaineering, motocamping, music, an LGBTQ+ community called All Out, and a mental health group called Recharge.
Every one started because a group of employees wanted to do something together. We help by chipping in an annual budget for equipment, tournaments, and events.
None of this is a team-building exercise HR scheduled. It is closer to the opposite: people found each other around something they already loved, and we made it a little easier to keep doing it.
Basketball, pickleball, and the rest
Basketball is our biggest club, open to any skill level, and it plays other companies in inter-company tournaments. It is the one most people picture when they picture a company sports team.
Pickleball is newer and growing faster than basketball right now. It has already run two full company tournaments.
Running keeps people moving with challenges and small rewards for hitting milestones, which is a nicer way of saying it tricks people into consistency, myself very much included.
Free diving turns weekends into actual ocean expeditions, and employees regularly bring their families along.
Mountaineering takes the outdoor crowd up real trails to real summits.
Motocamping combines a road trip with a campsite, which is either the best or worst way to spend a weekend depending entirely on the weather.
Music performs at our company events, so if you have ever seen a Full Scale gathering with a live band, that was them.
All Out is our LGBTQ+ community, and Recharge is our mental health group. Both exist so employees have people around them who understand a part of their life that has nothing to do with work.
Esports proves the point about being remote
Esports deserves its own mention, because it solves a problem the other clubs cannot.
Basketball needs a court. Free diving needs an ocean. Both need people who happen to live near each other. Esports needs none of that. We have run company-wide tournaments where employees compete from wherever they happen to be, on their own schedule, without anyone booking a flight or a gym.
That is the one club where working from three different provinces is not a limitation at all. Everybody logs in from wherever they are, the bracket runs for weeks, and the group chat trash talk gets going the same as it would in person.
Why we bother
I think most of what makes a job good has nothing to do with the job itself. It is whether you have people around you, whether anyone would notice if you had a bad week, whether there is something to look forward to besides the next sprint.
Clubs are a small piece of that, and they are also one of the more honest ones, because nobody is required to join. People show up because they want to, which is a better signal about how somebody feels about working here than almost anything we could put in a survey.
If you want the full picture of how we run this company, we wrote it all down here.
Frequently asked questions
How many employee clubs does Full Scale have?
Ten, as of this writing: Basketball, Pickleball, Running, Free Diving, Esports, Mountaineering, Motocamping, Music, All Out (an LGBTQ+ community), and Recharge (a mental health group).
What is the biggest employee club at Full Scale?
Basketball, which plays other companies in inter-company tournaments and is open to any skill level.
Can employees in different cities join the same club?
Yes. Esports is the clearest example, since it runs entirely online and location never matters. Other clubs, like free diving and mountaineering, organize trips that pull members in from multiple provinces.
Does Full Scale help pay for these clubs?
Yes. Each accredited club gets an annual budget for equipment, tournaments, and events. Employees start the clubs and run them; we support them financially.
Ask what your team does together
Ask whoever staffs your offshore team what their employees do together outside of work. It is a small question with a real answer, one way or the other.
We have been building engineering teams in the Philippines since 2018, and things like this are part of why the same people are still on them years later. If you want to see what the model looks like end to end, schedule a call and we will walk through it.
