5 mistakes to avoid when planning a team offsite or retreat

Planning

Aug 19

Planning

5 mistakes to avoid when planning a team offsite or retreat

BoomPop Team · 8/19/2022

When planning a team offsite, it’s important to make sure the event will have a lasting impact.

Raise your hand if the idea of doing trust falls with your coworkers at a company retreat sounds exciting. Gone are the days of these kinds of activities, but that doesn’t mean that managers aren’t making mistakes when planning offsites.

Let’s face it: 71% of employees already feel that meetings are unproductive and efficient. The last thing you want to do is to make them travel to an ineffective team offsite. Connecting at a company retreat can actually help your team culture and create opportunities for new ways of thinking.

Here are 5 mistakes to avoid when planning your next company or team offsite.

No clear objectives

Your team’s time is valuable, which is why a team offsite without clear objectives is one of the biggest mistakes you can make. Setting objectives for an off site is not as simple as putting together an agenda. Your objectives should identify ideal outcomes of the meeting and which specific problems you want to solve.

What do you want the attendees to understand and ultimately act on? How do you want them to feel after the offsite? What are the steps you want them to take after the offsite?

Prepare your team for the discussions with the following statement: “I’d be really happy if we [fill in objectives here] by the end of our offsite.”

Not planning with attendees in mind

Have you ever been in a meeting with too many people who are only tangentially related to the topics or projects? The odds are the meeting wasn’t productive and it was a waste of time for some of those people. When planning an offsite, you need to make sure to plan in a way that ensures everyone will get value from the event, and ideally contribute to it as well. If your offsite is limited to just a leadership team, your goals and expectations should look vastly different than if your entire company is attending. Be mindful of these differences and make sure the content of the event is relevant for attendees.

Leaving the agenda until last minute

There’s nothing worse than going into a meeting without knowing what’s on the agenda. When it comes to team offsites, developing the agenda ahead of time is critical in order to make sure it’s mapped to objectives. It’s also crucial to get feedback on your plans from stakeholders and communicate it to the attendees ahead of time so they feel prepared coming into the offsite.

Your agenda should also include the types of activity for each topic of discussion, the amount of time you’re designating to each topic, and if there’s any preparation that needs to be done beforehand.

Jam-packed agenda

Speaking of the agenda, it can be tempting to fill it to the brim to make the most of your time together as a team. Unfortunately, this can actually be detrimental to your goals. It’s also important to manage energy levels to keep everyone engaged throughout the day, which is why building in breaks to the agenda is critical. Those breaks can be a combination of full breaks (where people are free to step away from the group to rest) and opportunities to interact with each other (fun group activities, snacks, etc).

Remember that the purpose of having a team offsite versus planning an in-office meeting is to connect without the distraction of another meeting looming around the corner. You don’t want things to feel rushed, which is why it’s also important to have clear objectives for the offsite and each topic.

No follow-up action plan

The offsite ended on a positive note and your team feels accomplished. There were a lot of great discussions, people got to know each other better, and strategies were developed. But then you return to work on Monday and the day-to-day rush of the business takes over, plans get put on the back burner, and there is no actual follow-through.

The last objective for the offsite should be to create a governance plan for the team with clear next steps so that you can make the most of the time you spent together.