If we are being completely honest, there was a time in my leadership development when I didn’t think it was necessary to get our remote team together. Despite the fact that many of us had never met in person, we were productive and efficient at work and formed solid interpersonal bonds.
Setting up an offsite requires a lot of work and takes us away from our regular client service duties, so it has always been difficult to justify gathering the team. Also, it costs more than keeping everyone at home.
Then, after the COVID laws were loosened globally, Disruption Advisors started assisting firms with the organization and facilitation of offsite for their decentralized teams (remote, hybrid, or just leadership groups located throughout the globe).
The results were outstanding, and our clients kept coming back to us and asking us to organize more offsite for their team each year. They could actually appreciate the value of their purchase.
My co-founder Amy Humble and I took the deliberate choice to give offsite top priority for our team after observing the glaring advantages they provided for our clients.
We are an entirely virtual team with members spread out across the nation, from Georgia to Colorado and from Washington to Virginia. The entire crew was invited, but not everyone could attend last week. Those who couldn’t come in person attended online whenever it was possible.
We went into the offsite with the goal of increasing inspiration, cooperation, connection, clarity, and alignment.
READ ALSO: Activities That Boost Your Mental Health.
In This, We Sought To:
Enjoy yourself, engage with others, and recognize achievements.
Identify what is working well and what should be kept up, as well as what requires attention and improvement.
Clarify and align the company’s goals, strategies, and roles.
Consider personal objectives and give people a chance to discuss areas where support is required.
Discuss corporate culture on purpose to comprehend what makes us special and how we might feel like a member of a greater whole.
Finding genuine opportunities for people to form relationships is crucial, as the list illustrates. It is advantageous to create room for us to simply be human in a virtual world because we are all humans first and employees second (or third or fourth) (and not wear our work hats for a bit).
We enjoyed bonding over enjoyable dinners. Because studies have shown that oxytocin levels are higher following only one food-sharing event, we put a lot of emphasis on using meals as a chance to foster relationships (one meal). As a result, social bonding and increased levels of cooperation are encouraged.
We Love Capitalizing On That Oxytocin.
We also planned events like cross-country skiing instruction and bowling, which might be at the launch point, where people would be pushed outside of their comfort zones. It was an opportunity for interaction and enjoyment while teaching valuable lessons about one another, working as a team, and the difficulties of being at the launch point of a S Curve.
It’s also crucial to have scheduled time to study and discuss company prospects and difficulties as a group. We concentrated on incorporating several session kinds into our work time and producing visuals, handouts, and activities that would complement various learning styles because we are aware that people learn and process information differently.
Overall, it was worthwhile! The time, effort, travel expenses, and financial costs were all worthwhile. We advanced the company’s operations. We talked about our goals for the business, what we need to do to get there, and what we should anticipate from one another over the coming three months.
We got along. Realizing that we want to do more than only work with our coworkers, we also want to grow with them, we established a shared language and set of memories.
Could this have all been accomplished through a series of online meetings? Maybe. And if for some reason having the majority of the team together in person wasn’t possible, we would have done everything we could to make it work virtually. Nonetheless, there is something distinctly powerful.
About leaving your regular environment—about traveling offline and in person.
August is the perfect time for us to get together again.
The last time you connected with someone via food was when?
How does leaving the office help you develop?
What would you do or talk about if you had a face-to-face meeting with your teammates?
