The best way to create a theme for your team retreat
The best way to create a theme for your team retreat
Riley Leight· 2/27/2023
A theme is crucial for communicating the goals of an event. It acts as a north star for the topics you discuss, the content you plan, and the central idea you want attendees to walk away with. The best way to create a retreat theme is to select a specific yet broad concept that represents your goals, like: “leadership in times of change” or “creating an inclusive culture.” That way, you can clearly communicate what your event will be about while giving yourself enough freedom to cover a variety of important topics under the umbrella of your theme.
Choosing a theme for your company offsite or team retreat should be an exciting and potentially collaborative process. There is no “right” or “wrong” theme to choose, but it is important to be thoughtful about how you approach this decision. After all, it sets the tone for just about every other part of your event.
Why your event theme matters
Consider the last time you attended a company event. It may have been a coworking trip to your organization’s HQ, a team retreat to a fun location, or a conference you attended with colleagues. What’s most memorable to you about it? What experiences made the biggest impact on you?
When we ask customers that question, their answer is rarely the materials they read or presentations they watched. It’s much more likely that they’ll say the social and collaborative experiences they had with teammates are what left the biggest impression on them.
That means if you want the goals of your event to be effectively communicated and achieved, you need to make sure they’ve meaningfully incorporated across a variety of content and activities, not just your opening presentation. That’s why themes can be so valuable.
How to create your retreat theme
So, we know a theme is important. But how do we get closer to actually creating one that will work for our team? Before you start narrowing in on your theme, you’ll want to take a few factors into consideration.
Factors to consider when choosing a theme
Company goals: It’s always a great idea to consider your company's goals and team’s objectives when choosing a theme. That doesn’t mean your theme should be “increase revenue” or “improve sales conversions,” but rather that you should find creative ways to support those goals through a theme. Perhaps to increase revenue you’ve decided to tap into a new industry with different needs, and the theme of your event can be “Getting to know our customers.”
Company culture: The theme you choose will be most effective if it aligns with your company culture and values. If you don’t have a clear sense of your culture, an event can be a great time to figure that out. Defining our culture—that’s a great theme in itself. But if you already have a better sense of your identity as a company and team, use that as a well of inspiration.
Feedback: It’s always a good idea to get input from your employees and take their preferences into consideration. That doesn’t necessarily mean you need to directly ask “what should our theme be?” Though that can work, your best bet might be to get curious about what kind of challenges folks are facing and look for meaningful similarities across teams. Perhaps processes are breaking down and you need to take the time at your event to focus on building strong connections between leaders as a foundation for better processes. You might also have valuable external feedback that helps guide your decision.
Popular theme ideas
It can be helpful to start with a broader idea and hone in on something specific as you get clearer on your vision, so here are a few popular areas to start with.
Leadership and Innovation
Company Culture and Values
Communication and Collaboration
Social Responsibility and Inclusion
Team Building and Relationships
Wellbeing and Work-Life Balance
Professional Development and Personal Growth
With all of this in mind, let’s start exploring how we might start creating our theme. In the next section, we’ll create three sample event themes using one of these ideas and taking into consideration the four factors outlined earlier.
Team retreat theme examples
These sample events and themes are based on the kinds of decision making processes we have helped customers go through when choosing a theme.
Example event 1: Leadership retreat for a large electronics company
Factors: After a recent strategy session, executives set a company goal to create a clearer long-term mission to help inspire their team.
Ideas: Emphasize the importance of leadership and innovation throughout the company by focusing on big picture thinking.
Theme: Becoming a vision-driven organization.
Example event 2: Quarterly offsite for a small tech startup
Factors: A core part of the company culture is focusing on employee’s physical and mental health. However, stress has started to rise at the organization.
Ideas: The team wants to collaborate on an action plan to improve their approach to wellbeing and work-life balance.
Theme: Creating a culture of wellness.
Example event 3: Annual team retreat for a mid-size software company
Factors: Internal and external feedback has shown that teams feel detached from customer needs. Decisions aren’t being made with the end user in mind.
Ideas: Leaders want to improve communication and collaboration between customer-facing and internal teams to help improve proximity to customers.
Theme: The importance of customer obsession.
How your offsite theme defines your content and topics
Once you understand your theme, you can move on to building a strategy for how it will influence the topics you discuss and the content you plan around them.
This is the step where the value of your theme lives and dies. A theme that doesn’t impact what you do at an event doesn’t serve much purpose—which only wastes your time, and ultimately confuses your attendees. Your theme should be consciously reflected across all of your major content and build upon itself in memorable, insightful ways.
To see how this can work, we’ll refer back to the three themes discussed earlier and break down some topics and associated content you can generate around them. Once you’ve taken a look at our examples, use the Themes and Topics Template to create your own.
Topics for Theme 1: Becoming a vision-driven organization
Crafting a Clear Vision
Create a clear and compelling vision for your company that inspires and motivates every member of your team.
Defining Your Core Values
Define your company's core values and align them with your vision to create a strong foundation for continual growth and success.
Developing a Roadmap
Thoughtfully develop a roadmap that outlines the steps needed to achieve your vision and helps you stay aligned across teams.
Communicating Your Vision
Strategize ways to effectively communicate your vision to employees, customers, investors, and other stakeholders.
Overcoming Obstacles
Develop clear solutions to help you overcome obstacles and challenges that arise on the path to achieving your vision.
Tracking Progress
Decide how to track and measure progress towards your vision and make adjustments as needed to stay on course.
Celebrating Success
Create clear milestones for when and how you’ll celebrate successes along the way to achieving your vision, thus keeping your time motivated to push forward.
Topics for Theme 2: Creating a culture of wellness
Importance of Wellness
Why creating a culture of wellness is important for organizations in general, and for your organization specifically. What problems will it help you solve?
Mental Health and Stress Management
How to support and promote mental health and stress management in the workplace.
Work-Life Balance
How to support work-life balance for employees and create policies that prioritize personal well-being.
Ergonomics and Workplace Safety
How to promote ergonomic and safe workplace practices to prevent injury and improve overall wellness.
Mindfulness and Meditation
How to incorporate mindfulness and meditation practices into the workplace to promote relaxation and reduce stress.
Health and Wellness Benefits
An overview of your health and wellness benefits to employees as part of a comprehensive wellness program, plus generating ideas for new programs.
Measuring the Impact of Wellness Programs
How to measure the impact of wellness programs and initiatives to show ROI and make improvements.
Topics for Theme 3: The importance of customer obsession
Becoming a Feedback-Driven Organization
How to collect customer feedback, analyze it, and use it to improve your products or services.
Building a Customer-Centric Culture
How to create a company culture that puts the customer at the center of everything you do, from your product and sales cycle to your company values.
Measuring Customer Satisfaction
How to track and measure customer satisfaction and use that data to make improvements to your products or services.
Providing Exceptional Customer Service
Train and empower employees to provide exceptional customer service that goes above and beyond.
Building Customer Trust
Discuss how to build trust with customers through transparency, honesty, and ethical business practices.
The Role of Marketing in Customer Obsession
Develop marketing strategies to build relationships with customers and create a strong brand that resonates with them.
Creating a Seamless Customer Experience
Create a seamless and consistent customer experience across all touchpoints, from your digital marketing channels and sales funnels to your in person events.
Get started
By choosing a meaningful theme and taking actionable steps to incorporate it throughout your team retreat, you can help your attendees grow and make the most of your time together.
To get started, consider conducting a customer feedback survey or hosting a team building exercise to gather insights and identify areas for improvement. You can also schedule a brainstorming session to map out your company's long-term goals and create a roadmap for achieving them. By taking these steps, you can gather the insights you need to craft themes that connect with what’s top of mind at your organization.
Get help planning your next great event
If you’re not sure how to turn your vision into a reality, our event experts can help. Explore more of our resources, use our Themes and Topics Template, or get in touch with our team today.
Featured resources
8 Steps for Planning Your Company Retreat
A resource for new organizers on creating fun, productive, and successful corporate events.
