How to create an agenda for your company retreat
How to create an agenda for your company retreat
BoomPop Team · 10/17/2022
Hosting a company offsite with an intentionally designed agenda can cultivate meaningful connections and spark valuable collaboration across your team.
The way we work has changed drastically in the past few years. But it’s helped people realize the importance of in-person connection. Nearly ¾ of remote workers say they miss socializing with their coworkers—nothing beats spontaneous water cooler chats, after all. Additionally, researchers have determined that remote work decreases collaboration across teams by 25%. So, how do you remedy this? One stellar option is to host a company offsite or retreat to build morale, strengthen workplace culture, and cultivate stronger connections.
These events can offer far more than a new backdrop for the same old workday; with a strategic vision and mindset, your next offsite can become a valuable and memorable experience for your team.
Not sure where to start with creating that vision? Here are a few tactics to put you on the right track!
Identify goals for your team event
It’s important for leaders to pin down why they’re hosting a team offsite. More and more companies are beginning to see team building as an investment, and there are certainly plenty of great reasons to host an offsite—but is the ideal outcome of your event to provide space for innovation and decision-making, an opportunity to have fun, or something else?
Next up are a few questions to review at the leadership level to cultivate the foundation for those company offsite goals:
Questions to ask to guide company offsite goal planning
What are the biggest challenges facing our organization right now?
Host more strategic planning sessions at an executive retreat if competition in your space is the greatest challenge. If employee engagement and morale are low, focus on fun team building, plus wining and dining to show appreciation. If your team hasn’t met before because they’re fully remote, offer a mix of coworking sessions and team building so they can build personal and professional relationships that are hard to cultivate on Zoom.
What has our team been asking for?
Many successful organizations distribute periodic employee pulse surveys to listen to their team’s struggles, successes, and motivations. This may help identify areas where your team needs support. Then, you can create your company offsite agenda with that in mind.
Plus, you should do surveys after every event to determine how to improve (and see what people loved). So, if you have those at your fingertips, that’s a great place to start deciding what provides value for your team and what doesn’t!
What are our budget and timeline?
Budget and timeline for planning often dictate goals. It will help you determine how much you can invest in team building and offsite dinners and how much time you may want to spend coworking at the venue. If you’re putting this together quickly, some dinner spots or activities may be off-limits. Planning early is key!
What’s important is to identify objectives from the answers to these questions, discuss them with your team to ensure everyone’s on the same page, and then begin to shape your agenda around them. Sorting out your goals beforehand will make your planning choices easier every step of the way.
Prioritize a balanced agenda
Once you’ve set clear goals with your team, you can start building an agenda. That can include coworking time, team activities, social events, workshops, and more—all depending on what the ultimate vision for your event is.
That said, it’s important not to get tunnel vision when it comes to how you fill your agenda. Though you might have a very specific goal, creating some level of variation is essential to keeping things engaging and dynamic. A successful company offsite should have at least some combination of business and fun, even if more heavily weighted one way or the other.
Organizers should also avoid the instinct to overstuff an event with back-to-back activities or working sessions. Remember that these events can be tiring for your team, so plan in shorter blocks of time, allow for breaks between major activities, and offer choices for more or less participation when you can. Team offsites should leave your staff feeling recharged, not exhausted.
Customize your offsite to fit your team’s needs
One of the easiest ways to shape your agenda in a way that works for your team is to simply ask what they’re interested in doing!
Travel, new environments, and meeting people in person for the first time can be stressful, so trying your best to make the experience as seamless and easy as possible is important.
Here are a few questions that may assist in making your company offsite memorable, comfortable, and productive for your team:
In your opinion, where are the greatest roadblocks in your department? How about for the organization as a whole?
What is your preferred destination? (Offer a checklist with locales under consideration)
Which activities would you be interested in? (Offer a checklist with activities under consideration)
Would you be interested in presenting or leading any sessions? If so, what comes to mind? (Ideal for strategic meetings)
Rank in priority order what you’re most interested in doing at a company offsite. (Drag and drop options including coworking, offsite activities, onsite team building, etc.)
Especially with many companies today having at least partly remote teams, it’s important to consider the different challenges that may arise from hosting an in-person company offsite. Surveys will help you identify and overcome those challenges before they pose any conflicts.
Downloadable templates to inspire your company offsite agenda design
Planning and coordinating a company offsite and setting your agenda can be complex. To help, we’ve outlined a few great examples with distinct goals to get you started with your brainstorming. Simply create a copy of this Google Sheet to your own drive and start designing your next company offsite agenda!
You want to make sure you create both a bird’s eye view for management to review and a detailed daily breakdown with more detail that you can repurpose to share with the team in preparation for the retreat.
Need more help? We’ve got you covered.
If you’re still unsure of where to start, BoomPop’s expert team offers customized offsite planning to make the process simpler from start to finish.
Featured resources
8 Steps for Planning Your Company Retreat
A resource for new organizers on creating fun, productive, and successful corporate events.
