The Shift Towards Company Retreats and the Novelty of Well-being Focus

Building the creativity factor in the workspace

Gone are the days when people didn’t have an opportunity to build relationships outside the workplace. Since many companies have decided to take on the fully remote model, there has been an element of socialization and connection. It’s widely known that face-to-face interaction increases trust amongst teams and enables an environment of openness and?transparency.

The importance of building confidence amongst people within a company comes back to an indication that if one trusts another party, they’re more likely to cooperate and present consequential positive behaviors. So, for instance, employee reaction to positive or negative feedback will be affected by the level of trust between a team lead and a team member.

Most organizational psychology research has indicated that creating an employee-centric climate can lead to higher engagement, performance, and increased commitment to their work. As employees have proved to be more productive in high-trust organizations, it’s in our best interest to invest in employee wellbeing and ensure that they trust the people they’re working with. Overall we’ve observed that our company retreats, in addition to how we value one another and work as a team, have formed part of intrinsic motivators, which have been known to increase employee retention levels (Harter et al., 2003; Zak, 2017).

Focusing on simple steps such as initial interactions can aid the organization in building trust from the beginning.

We’ve observed over the past couple of weeks that, in addition to witnessing an immense smile on our employees’ faces after being surprised with a Disney trip on the last day of our retreat, was also the vast amount of innovative ideas that seemed to flourish from each person, even when they were sitting beside another or several people from a different department - Sales and Tech, Marketing and HR, Creatives with the CEO - it didn’t matter where anybody was, each person learned at least one thing from the other.

How we’re building a healthy remote culture

At this point, we’ve established values aligned with the people working in Emperia ,?and we’re always willing to expand on those values as long as they prioritize the creativity and the people focus we’ve placed on them. We’ve discovered that talented people make each other more effective and that it’s also exhilarating and inspiring to have fun together on these retreats, which creates a?strong bond. All of these factors enmesh together to boost the creativity that perhaps may lack in a typical day-to-day office environment where certain people find it difficult to be inspired. It’s the moments of excitement and engaging conversation where the most riveting ideas might arise from a person who isn’t necessarily in the creative team.

It also creates a brilliant opportunity to continuously provide feedback (up, down, and across the company), face-to-face one-to-ones, and discussion of growth opportunities in a completely different setting than everyone is accustomed to.

But all of these things wouldn’t work without praise and acknowledgment. We genuinely believe that each person who works with us is unique, and we respect each difference and honor every piece of the puzzle they add to their work. This means that we encourage praise towards one another, which helps to strengthen relations and also improves work satisfaction and motivation. The rewarding process is a vital element that always affects us as human beings. We’re always encouraged when we’re praised and thanked for what we’ve done correctly, so partaking in this during a retreat, in particular, face-to-face, while everyone is in a beautiful environment and is making and building on those strong bonds adds to it in a way in which we’ve never witnessed before. The emotional connection that forms amongst teams forms a fantastic culture that doesn’t feel like a job yet feels like home - and that’s why Emperia works.

Written by Patricia Delahunty , HR Co-ordinator at Emperia.