We had our first annual corporate retreat this month and our theme was teamwork. Most of you have probably heard the term “corporate retreat” but do you know what it means or the goal behind it? We had spent the good part of 2014 discussing ideas that would make our first corporate retreat a success. Where should we host the event? Who should be involved? What will be our mission? We finally had a plan in place and the planning was underway.

Our first step in our planning process was to find a company that could facilitate the retreat to ensure that we would gain value out of the experience. The company that we choose was Bonsai which is out of the Missouri area. We worked with Loriana (Tisher) Sekarski to come up with a game plan on how we would make this a success for all involved.

4 Tips to Planning a Successful Company Retreat

1. Use tools that fit retreat goals.

We wanted to highlight everyone’s strengths coming into the retreat so we purchased a book that could do just that. It is called “Strengths Finder 2.0” by Tom Rath. In the book you will find an assessment that will help define your 5 Strengths based on how you take the assessment. The Strengths range from Deliberative, Restorative, Learner and everything in between. It is a great experience to dig deep on how or why someone handles a situation or project in a particular way. If you work with a team of different personalities (and most people do), I highly recommend purchasing the book and having each of them take the assessment.

2. Retreat to a higher level to problem-solve, prioritize and discover your direction.

Despite the name, a company retreat isn’t an escape from work but an opportunity to lean into it on a higher level.

During our retreat, we had a chance to dig into questions such as:

• What are the core values of Extra Help, Inc.?
• What are the company strengths and what needs most improvement?
• What are each other strengths and how do we use them each day?
• What are our individual goals for 2015?

 3. Find a good location and a theme.

Finding a good place to host the retreat was the easy part. Our central meeting location for all of our offices is typically in St. Louis so we chose that location for everyone to travel to for a weekend of fun! We also wanted to make sure that our theme was on target for our goals for the retreat. We tossed around a couple ideas and decided on the theme would be basketball which incorporates our “team” environment. We ordered basketball shaped stress balls, company color pom poms and asked everyone to dress up in their favorite basketball gear. We also had a theme song which was the Jock Jams CD that we all know and love!

 4. Connect, empower, and learn with the people around you.

We had team members from Alabama, Indiana, Missouri, Illinois come together for the retreat. It was a good opportunity for everyone to get to know each other. We started the retreat with a game of bingo. This gave everyone an opportunity to mingle around and learn more about each other. Some of the questions included: Who wants to live in Hawaii? Who studied abroad? Who hates the sound of Velcro? It was a good icebreaker to get the day going. Getting to know everyone in our other locations is extremely valuable for people who don’t see each other face to face regularly, who tend to interact less because of the nature of their jobs, and who are often heads-down, working away.

Corporate retreats are great way for companies to take the opportunity to focus on team building. Our goal that we focused on was to develop a plan to attain the goals by working SMART (Strategic, Measurable, Attainable, Relative Timely). The goals of your organization may be different and include items such as, succession planning or new product development. Whatever your goal may be it is always a great idea to set time aside away from the busy daily workflow to focus on what’s most important to your company.

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