This is a unique time to consider bringing your team together for a retreat. Hitting pause and deciding to invest, deliberately, in the growth, repair and development of your team and leaders is a smart choice in seasons like this. If it's time for a strategic time-out to reconnect and reimagine, an in-person team retreat is an incredible way to help your group make massive advancements.
Four ways to look
- Look ahead. Retreats can help re-focus your strategy and vision. Come together to kindle a new imagination for what's possible. Create space to dream and look ahead.
- Look back. An offsite can offer a way to take stock of where you've been, the ups and downs, the wins and failures. Celebrate and acknowledge the paths you've walked to get to where you are.
- Look around you. Inspiration is out there: in nature, in other companies, in each other's beach reads. You never know what analogies and stories will spark that game-changing new initiative.
- Look around the room. Building connection and relationship between colleagues is a massive investment in your long-term culture. The friendships and shared narratives that develop are unparalleled boons to health at work.
Team-building, inspiration gathering, reality-checking and future-casting are all hallmarks of a great retreat experience.
What makes a retreat work
- It's yours. A good retreat tunes right in to your culture's reality and speaks your language. It should feel like your company, not somebody else's, and that comes from designing it together.
- It's down to earth. Some facilitation can get really cringey. Really corporate. Really awkward. Trust exercises that don't land, concepts that are too much of a stretch, agendas that leave people deeply uncomfortable. A more authentic, grounded path works better.
- It's an experience. Beyond the agenda: venue, setting, food, activities and overall flow. The holistic, human intangibles are what make a gathering meaningful and memorable, so don't leave them as an afterthought.
- It gets somewhere. The progress made during an offsite is often stunning. "We didn't think we'd accomplish so much," is a common refrain, or "We got more done during these few days than we could have on our own in 6 months."
The methods we lean on
- Participatory dialogue. The work of Art of Hosting, such as World Cafe, Circle and Open Space Technology, all help create moments of decentralized, authentic dialogue.
- Design methods. From design sprints to design thinking, human-centered design and UX, the empathy-driven practice of listening is at the heart of good facilitation.
- Remote and virtual sessions. Digital facilitation is a powerful option when we can't gather in person. Tools like Mentimeter and Miro help document the conversation, while real-time illustrators draw our real stories.