How to Plan a Corporate Retreat: The Details

Corporate retreats are often intended for the purposes of general relaxation, team-building, and brainstorming of new ideas. Members can relax, share experiences encountered throughout the work period, and get to know each other personally, all in a relaxed, tension-free atmosphere. This is also the place where the junior employees can find a chance to interact freely with their superiors.

In most cases, when planning a corporate retreat, a small group is allocated the task of coming up with topics, methods, ideas, and activities that could potentially lead to a successful organizational retreat. The activities that see the light of day are ones that your group agrees on. However, outside of the new ideas, there are some activities that appear on nearly every corporate retreat. These are the details that you need to plan for every retreat. So what are they?

Dinner Presentations

You didn’t think you were just going to have a regular dinner every night, did you? Dinner is a healthy time when the day is just coming to an end, everyone has had a series of experiences throughout the day, and is all set to relax. This is the perfect opportunity for people to use this quality time to share and talk in the form of short presentations.

The casual, no-rush atmosphere created by a good dinner makes for the perfect time for general and self-disclosure. Get to know the people that don’t tend to talk about themselves in conversation by making it into a presentation!

Games

You can’t plan a corporate retreat without games! Games are the perfect team-building tool. There are a whole lot of them that can be played at all different times and all different places during a company retreat.

You could plan for four or five different games to be played by different groups. Sometimes, you see games that people have invented that are no men/women games or men vs. women games. Don’t play these! Your corporate retreat is about everyone getting to know each other. Let people play together without isolating their built connections by gender.

Some dice and cards are great as both indoor and outdoor games. If you bring the game along, it will naturally get played. No need to push people to play. They will have the most fun if they start and continue playing naturally.

Simulations

Corporate retreats are often used to prepare people for the coming year or work period. Other than to relax their minds and cement relations between them, at corporate retreats your employees are normally trained on certain relational and essential skills.

In simulations, you’ll typically give lessons and ask participants to act them out. That’s how adults learn!

These learned skills could involve training people to get better in their time management, delegation of duties, problem-solving, and situational leadership. Retreats are one of the best times to offer training in such skills as there is more space and time free from distraction than any other time of year. Without work to distract them, people can learn way better.

There are many more details and activities you can plan for a corporate retreat, but these are the ones that are always going to appear. Plan this out and make your next corporate retreat the best it can be! What do you want to do next time? Where do you want to go?

If you have questions or would like more information, I’d be happy to help. Please leave a comment below, and my team will get in touch with you!

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Cameron Herold grew up in a small town in Northern Canada. When his father, an entrepreneur, figured out that Cameron wasn’t going to fit into what they were teaching in school—because of his severe ADD—he taught him to hate working traditional ‘jobs’ and to love creating companies that employed others.

By 18, Cameron already had 14 different little businesses and he knew he loved money, entrepreneuring and business. And by 20 years old, he owned a franchise business painting houses and had twelve employees. He spent his twenties and early 30’s heading up 3 large businesses and coaching over 120 entrepreneurs. He was also the COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, and during his 6.5 years he took the company from 2 million to 106 million. 

Knowing that every CEO needs a strong COO then led Cameron to start the COO Alliance in 2016. He noticed that there were no peer groups for one of the most crucial roles in the company—the Chief Operating Officer/2nd in command.