Why Bring Your Team Together? Powerful Reasons from Our Team's Offsite

Last week, the Disruption Advisors team convened in the mountains of Colorado for a team offsite—our term for a company retreat.

If we are being honest, there was a point in my leadership journey when I didn’t see the need to bring together our remote team. We were effective and efficient with our work and developed strong interpersonal relationships despite many of us never having met each other in person.

It always seemed hard to justify getting the team together because setting up an offsite is a lot of work and takes us out of our daily client service work. It’s also more expensive than just keeping everyone at home.

Then, following the easing of the COVID regulations worldwide, Disruption Advisors began supporting organizations as they planned and facilitated offsites for their decentralized teams (remote, hybrid, or just leadership groups located throughout the globe).

The impact was incredible, and our clients continued to return to us, asking us to facilitate multiple offsites each year for their team. They could truly see the value of their investment.

Seeing the clear benefits the offsites gave our clients, my co-founder, Amy Humble, and I made the strategic decision to prioritize offsites for our team.

A fully virtual team, we have teammates who live across the country, from Washington to Virginia, Georgia to Colorado. Not everyone could make it last week, but the entire team was invited, and those who couldn’t make it joined virtually whenever possible.

We approached the offsite, intending to create a greater sense of clarity, alignment, connection, collaboration, and inspiration.

Within this, we aimed to:

• Celebrate accomplishments, connect with one another, and have fun
• Determine what is going well that we should ensure is continued and what needs attention and improvement
• Gain clarity and alignment around company vision, strategies, and roles
• Reflect on individual goals and provide an opportunity to share where support is needed
• Intentionally discuss company culture to understand what makes us unique and how we can feel like a part of a bigger whole

As the list suggests, finding authentic ways for people to build relationships is very important. We are all people first, employees second (or third or fourth), and in a virtual world, it is beneficial to make space for us to simply be human (and not wear our work hats for a bit).

We had fun dinners geared solely toward bonding. We focus on using meals as a chance to build connections because research has shown that the levels of circulating oxytocin are higher after just a single food-sharing event (one meal). These higher oxytocin levels, in turn, promote social bonding and higher levels of cooperation.

We like to capitalize on that oxytocin.

We also scheduled activities where people would be outside their comfort zones, perhaps at the launch point, such as bowling and cross-country skiing lessons. It was a chance to connect and have fun while providing important takeaways about each other, being a team, and the challenges of being at the launch point of an S Curve.

Having structured time to learn and work through business challenges and opportunities as a group is also essential. Recognizing that people learn and process differently, we focused on infusing different types of sessions throughout our work time and creating visuals, handouts, and activities that would align with varying learning styles.

It was wildly successful, thanks to Amy Humble, Becky Hofkes, and Stephanie Brummel for their planning, facilitation, and logistical support.

In short, it was worth it! It was worth the money, the time, the flights, and the drives.

We moved the business forward. We discussed where we want and need to go as a company as well as what we can expect of one another over the next three months.

We bonded. We developed a common language and memories, realizing we don’t just want to work with our colleagues, but we want to grow with them as well.

Could we have done this all through a series of virtual meetings? Maybe. And if getting the majority of the team together in person wasn’t viable for one reason or another, we would’ve tried our best to make it work virtually. But, there is something uniquely impactful about getting out of your day-to-day setting –– about going off-site and in person.

I can’t wait for our next get-together in August.

When was the last time you bonded with someone over a meal?

How does getting off-site help you grow?

If you were to meet with your teammates in person, what would you spend your time doing or discussing?

Interested in having Disruption Advisors help facilitate an offsite for your team? Reach out to [email protected].