Planning an offsite or retreat with your team? 

A team offsite or retreat can be invaluable time and space to align on strategies, build skills, and strengthen connections among team members. 

Here are 10 tips to help you maximize your valuable time together: 

1. Set clear, focused objectives in advance. Setting clear objectives and crafting an agenda that’s not overly stuffed with too many scattered topics will help ensure that your time spent is productive and also spacious enough for conversations to unfold. Trying to cram in too many topics can shortchange depth.

2. Prep and follow-up time are crucial. Expectations for how much can be accomplished during a single retreat are often unrealistically high, especially for wide-ranging strategic planning retreats. The planning time before the retreat and the follow-up action items following it are just as important as the retreat itself. 

3. Use a facilitator. A skilled facilitator can help guide discussions, keep the group on track, ensure that decisions are made, and action steps are recorded. Having a facilitator in the room also means that the person who usually leads meetings can participate instead of guiding the group. A great facilitator will listen to your intended outcomes and work with you to design experiences and pick topics that will be fruitful for the amount of time you have allocated.

4. Make it experiential and engaging. Retreats are most productive when they are experiential, engaging, and somewhat provocative in order to stimulate fresh thinking. 

5. Incorporate feedback. It can also be helpful to gather stakeholder feedback before the retreat around a few specific questions. Then, at the retreat, you can review the data and hear from the voices in the room. 

6. Have a notetaker. On the day of the retreat it helps to have a notetaker in addition to a facilitator as these are two very different functions.

8. Optimize your hybrid retreat. If you are hosting a hybrid session, it helps to have someone in the room monitoring the chat and bringing the people on Zoom into the conversation. This allows your facilitator to stay present with those in the room but also puts consistent attention on virtual participants.

9. Plan for breaks. Take a quick break every hour and a half at least. Even a stretch break can help.

10. Don't overdo it. Most people's attention spans are fatigued with even a half-day retreat. Planning a retreat from 9:00 - 2:00 with a lunch break is plenty of time before people are “cooked” mentally, physically, and emotionally. If you are still doing retreat activities from 3:00-5:00 make sure they are fun, interactive and in a different setting than in the morning to mix things up.

September, October, and November are prime months for team retreats. I’m now scheduling into late summer and the fall. Dates are filling quickly. 

If you’d like help planning a powerful and productive retreat experience, sign up for a free discovery call. 

Discovery Call Link: https://calendly.com/stephanie-freeth/discovery-call