Corporate Retreat Best Practices

When a management team, staff, board of directors, or executive team holds a corporate retreat or offsite business meeting, the investment of time is significant. The question is how to make the most of this limited and extremely valuable time.

Here are seven suggestions based on Meeting Facilitators International's experience as facilitators at several hundred corporate, staff, and board retreats as retreat facilitators.

1. The right people...

If you don't have the right people, then the whole thing will fall apart either during the retreat or, even worse, when you get back to the office. Typically you will want to have an intact management team present at your retreat. If there are other key staff members within the organization with an in-depth knowledge of the issues at hand, or who will be responsible for executing the strategy, consider adding them as well. You may wish to add them for only part of the agenda, or you may wish to get their input either before or after the retreat. Never use a corporate retreat to "reward" someone; this is a time for serious business and should only include the people needed to get the work done.

2. The right agenda...

Agendas that are unfocused, overloaded, and don't have specific outcomes stated are an invitation to failure. These agendas try to cover too much in too little time, with the end result being that nothing gets done properly. The lack of focus makes it all too easy for discussions to get "off-track." Before designing a corporate retreat agenda, be very clear about the following:

• "What has to happen for us to consider this session a success?"
• "What specific issues do we want to deal with?"
• "What tangible things do we want in our hands at the end of each discussion?"
• "What is not on the table?"
• "If we don't have enough time to cover everything, which things on our list can wait for a future session?"

3. The right process...

In far too many meetings we see a host of incompatible activities jumbled together. How often have you seen the following.

• People involved in action planning or problem solving in the middle of a brainstorming session.
• Brainstormed lists of ideas that aren't priority ranked or vetted. (Are all 45 of these ideas really equal?
• Decision making based on some unwieldy matrix that nobody really understands or believe in
• Action planning that doesn't capture all of the essential ingredients (who will do what by when.)
• People jumping to conclusions without adequately considering alternatives
• Cryptic notes on flip charts that make no sense to anyone afterwards
• Facilitators suggesting icebreakers or other activities inappropriate for executive level participants

You can avoid all of this by having the right proces, a process that breaks down into a series of activities all of the things that need to be done to achieve your objectives for the meeting, with these activities designed by someone who works exclusively with senior executives.

4. The right pre-work...

We find pre-work to be of tremendous assistance in getting the most out of people's time. We also find that how the pre-work task is defined will have a major effect as to how valuable it is. Asking someone to read a book or article is far more effective if they are also asked to think about what part of it gave them hope or made them worry. Asking them to think about how the author's observations and prescriptions relate to their company will prepare people for a discussion at the corporate retreat of how to apply what they have learned.

Pre-work that involves brainstorming can be particularly effective if the results are collected in advance by phone and tabulated for discussion at the meeting. Having one person collect the results provides a far more usable list than the ones that we typically see if people are asked to "email" their thoughts. The brainstormed list at the meeting can then be used for discussion and priority ranking.

5. Action planning...

Sometimes clients provide us with the notes from a previous year's retreats. It is amazing to see what is (or rather is not) documented in the action plans. In our opinion, an action plan has to describe who does what by when. Ideally the action is described by the person who is going to be carrying it out. This will always be someone in the room. Finally, the action item has to be "checkable" -- that is, it has to be described in such a way that it would be easy for anyone present to "check it off" their "to-do" list and anyone who was affected would know it was done.

A checkable action item that describes who does what by when would be the following:

•  John Smith to prepare a business case for developing a "retail" version of our OEM product -- due Oct 2004

6. Follow-up

Without some form of scheduled follow-up, we find that in spite of the best intentions many action items do not get completed. We encourage clients to define during the corporate retreat the date, time, and location of a follow-up session. This meeting may be specific to the off-site or it may be a simple agreement to put the executive retreat's action items into a regularly scheduled management meeting. (We should note that we also actively encourage people in the retreat to not make commitments around things that are not priorities. It is far better to have a team committed to one or two actions that it successfully completes than it is to have a list of thirty things that never get done.)

7. A comprehensive meeting report

It is amazing the amount of territory that a team can cover during a retreat. Making sure that a comprehensive meeting report is prepared and distributed to all participants afterwards will reinforce the decisions made, and help track on action items committed to. In our practice we have largely abandoned the use of flip charts in favor of a data projector hooked up to a lap top computer. This way we can create much of the meeting report during the session for everyone to see what is being documented with respect to conclusions, and action items.

Finally a neutral outside facilitator can help you keep the group focused and on task and help you with all of the above. If you would like to discuss how we might help at your next corporate retreat, please Contact Us