How to Organize an Incredible Corporate Retreat
If you want to increase employee engagement, get everyone refocused and reenergized while increasing team collaboration, a corporate retreat may be a great choice.
Corporate retreats give you the chance to clarify your company’s goals and missions, employee roles, and your company culture while offering a team bonding experience outside of the office. Retreats can also improve morale and motivate your entire staff, making them a worthwhile investment.
Planning, organizing, and hosting a great corporate retreat can be rewarding, but it can also be stressful. In order to help you plan the retreat that your business needs (and that your employees deserve!), we’ve broken down the process of how to organize a corporate retreat and tips and tools that can help you along the way.
How to Organize a Corporate Retreat Your Team Will Love
Company retreats should strike that perfect balance of work and fun, and shouldn’t feel like a typical office meeting that just happens to be in a new location.
This means that a little more thought needs to go into planning the retreat, and that you’ll need to take 3 key factors into consideration when you start planning. Let’s look at each one.
Think About Your Company’s Goals
Before you start actually getting into the details about your retreat, ask yourself what corporate wants the retreat to accomplish and what they want your team to get out of it.
Is the goal to forge connections between a predominantly remote team spread across multiple countries? In this case, having more time for team introductions and bonding activities will be crucial, and you’ll want to plan for the retreat to last at least 2-3 days.
If, however, you just want to give your team some fun time away from the office for casual team building, then a quick day or two should suffice.
Factor in the Time of Year
Time of year is crucial for retreats, and will take a little extra research if you’re going outside your immediate area. The last thing you want to do is plan a ski event when there’s a chance the snow will be melting, or a trip to Florida right in the prime of hurricane season.
You’ll also want to avoid asking people to travel when they’re most likely to be responsible for childcare (there’s no school in the summer, for example), or during a major holiday like Christmas when most of your staff wouldn’t be willing to come.
Give People Plenty of Heads Up
A retreat doesn’t just require planning on your end; anything outside of your staff’s normal routine requires that you give them a heads up far in advance, especially if travel or unusual hours are involved.
You need to give your staff time to find childcare, hire pet sitters, and plan transportation to and from the retreat accordingly. This takes time, so try to give people information a minimum of three months in advance. If possible, create an agenda for your staff and give it to them as early as possible so they can know what to expect.
6 Steps to Follow When Planning Your Corporate Retreat
As you’re planning your corporate retreat, you’ll want to think about what it is exactly your team wants to do. It can be challenging to pick something that makes everyone happy, but sitting in a remote hotel to listen to lectures in an area where there’s nothing to do won’t have your team jumping for joy.
As you’re planning, be mindful of the size of the office you’re planning for. Trying to book a venue, lodging, or a caterer for 20 employees will be a lot easier than trying to do the same for 500 employees.
Let’s take a look at the 6 different steps you need to take when planning and a few tools that can help.
1. Book the Retreat Venue
The retreat venue can be almost anything that you want; you can rent out a huge conference space in a large resort, or opt for a day at a local national park.
When considering venues, think about what your team would be interested in, what works with your budget, and what you think works well with the purpose of the retreat. Would your team be interested in doing something outdoors in the mountain, or go somewhere tropical to enjoy the downtime?
If anyone on your staff has physical restrictions, keep those in mind when choosing a venue. Make sure that it’s fully accessible, and if you’re unsure, you can always send out a survey asking team members to anonymously request special accommodations they may need.
Tools like Venue Report can help here, giving you information on plenty of great venues that suit your specific needs in the general region of your choice.
2. Book Lodging
In some cases, lodging won’t be needed, especially if the retreat is local. In others, you’ll need to book lodging, but it will be the same as the event venue.
In many cases, though, you’ll need to book accommodations separately, and you’ll want to find somewhere that’s close enough to your venue that it’s easy for your staff to get back and forth.
When looking at lodging, get in touch with the hotel or resort directly. It’s often possible to negotiate room blocks, which would allow your team to get a discount for booking multiple rooms at once.
Venue Report is valuable again here, too; you can look up room blocks that align with your specific budget, and then pairs you up with venues in the range, too.