6 Ways to Have an Effective Annual Company Retreat

With Squeezed budgets, retreats are a problem. You can either skip them altogether, or make them useful.

If you are a CEO or a functional or departmental head, summer is often the time when you are planning to take your employees out on an annual retreat. Based on how you approach and plan it out, it could either be just a tick-box activity that is later forgotten OR an event that lights the spark in your team and helps you achieve your planned growth in the coming year. That’s right.

Retreats can be massively profitable investments if you are intentional about them.

So what makes the difference?

I can offer a few tips from my almost 15 years of experience facilitating company retreats, so if you want to make your annual retreat count, grab a pen and get to the drawing board so that you can think through some of the pointers I’m sharing here.

Let's go.

1. Be clear about why you’re doing the retreat.

It sounds cliched, but if you cannot define the objective of your retreat in one sentence, then you’re not clear about it. If you want your retreat to be meaningful, be clear on why it's needed.

Here are a few tips for deciding your purpose:

?? Look at the business objectives or the key objectives of your function. How can a retreat help you achieve them?

?? Imagine not having a retreat or having a really bad one. What would be lost as a result? What would your team miss out on?

Here are a few common motives for a retreat:

• Having strategic discussions and making critical business decisions
• Celebrating success and rewarding everyone for their hard work
• Addressing some long-standing issues within the team
• Deepening relationships within your team and bringing people closer to each other
• Announcing plans & creating buy-in for the future

Can you outline your retreat’s goal? Tick any of the above ??? common objectives that apply to you, and identify their overall business relevance. That will help!

This is how a highly successful country head of an Agri-products company defined the objective of his upcoming 200-person extended leadership team retreat in one of my meetings:

"After this retreat, I want my leadership team to be fired up to meet our ambitious sales target, and to be willing to not let external factors like exchange rates, weather, etc. come in the way of achieving their goals. I want them to be motivated to perform in spite of business uncertainty"

Basically, he just outlined the kinds of behaviors he wanted his key players to demonstrate, which were critical to his company’s objectives.

Now, isn't that specific?

2. Don’t just schedule, Simulate!

Once you have your objective for the retreat sorted out, decide how you will achieve it.

The linear way of planning a retreat is to make your retreat a simple sequence of events. E.g. Arrival at offsite, then, dinner-sightseeing-business session-talent show-farewell.

A better method is to create a simulated experience. This is one in which every event has a purpose that is tied to the overall purpose of the retreat, and where activities are correlated into some type of a grand simulation where participants have to think, decide and act in groups throughout the event.

Such activities significantly improve the level of engagement, excitement, and sense of competition. They also make everyone's performance visible, thus challenging people to show up and perform instead of being passive audiences.

?? Take the example of the agri-product country head I shared above. They did a life-sized territory-capturing sales game. Each team had to figure out the best strategy to win against the 20 or so other teams. It went on for a whole two days ??. The end result was the whole sales team owning the ‘winners don’t make excuses’ mindset, and outlining how they needed to fill in their performance gaps to achieve the ambitious growth target.

3. Convert your pain points into opportunities.

Retreats can be a great way to discuss and unpack some of your organization’s long-standing organizational challenges or pain points. What keeps you up at night? Is it that particular geographical region your business hasn’t been able to penetrate? Are you concerned about your company’s carbon footprint? Do you want your team to think creatively more often?

Whatever that is, convert it into a challenge or competition during the retreat for your employees to solve.

4. Prioritize breaking the comfort zone over luxury

I’ve seen countless events with lavish expenditure on just the event décor and music, where employees are barely sitting through and passing the time. On the other hand, I’ve seen simple activities where people are totally ignited and challenged and where the discussions at the end are highly fruitful.

Here's the misconception. We think that luxury = fun. Wrong! There are 3 types of fun:

1. Easy Fun: Like watching a movie, singing songs, staying at a 5-star facility, etc.
2. Difficult fun: Engaging in a mentally taxing task like solving a problem.
3. Hard Fun: Completing an extremely challenging experience that stretches you, and feeling incredibly accomplished thinking about it later. E.g. climbing a mountain, achieving something impossible, etc.

The third one is where you really break out of your mold and get a sense of freedom. Hard fun builds up the camaraderie that sustains an organizational culture, just like in the Seal Teams, military, football teams, etc.

My advice: have some easy fun, but also build in some difficult and hard fun. Too much luxury and comfort takes the fun out and replaces it with boredom and a feeling of entitlement in employees.

5. Infuse/strengthen “teamness”

Regardless of how strong your team culture is, trust me, there are unresolved people-to-people issues in your team.

Here’s a link to a post I wrote based on how teams overestimate their level of team work. The results in this post will astonish you!

You might have some ego-clashes in your team, some undercurrents of politics or grapevine, there might be mistrust between certain departments, and so on.

Get those issues out!

Don’t let them simmer. You might have some high-potentials who are too modest and shy to come out, and others who are dominating a little too much. Bring out the hidden talent.

Shuffle people into groups and engage them in activities where they HAVE TO WORK TOGETHER. Then review those activities to bring up long standing issues.

6. Use the retreat to reinforce the organizational culture.

Bring out your core values in play. Identify people who have demonstrated them. Reinforce the sense of purpose in your organization. Take the opportunity to not only revive the spirit and passion behind your company and its products/services but also to have candid conversations on the kind of culture that you need in your team, to make your vision a reality.

There is so much more you can do with your retreat than just staying at 5-star hotels and having a music gala and bonfire, with branded giveaways. You can do all that if it means showing your employees that you care. But, if you want to be effective with your role as CEO/CHRO/Functional Lead, please be intentional about planning your annual retreat. Let it not be just an expense for the record, but a success story off the record as well.