With the rise of remote and hybrid working, team time together is increasingly valuable. The traditional offsite is being reinvented but there are still challenges with ensuring they are effective. In this article, I share some research and break down three different types of offsite activities so that you can ensure your gathering gets results.
I organised my first offsite about 16 years ago while leading a team in my previous role. The Eurostar was relatively new with reasonably priced tickets. I thought it would be fun to hop over to Paris for the day to spend some time out of the office together.
I structured the day so we could go to The Louvre and have lunch in a popular brasserie. A few team members grumbled about the early start. My manager asked me to schedule a meeting with a like-minded organisation to justify the trip. We planned to use the train journey to “discuss work”.
Looking back, and with what I know now, I realise my mistakes! There was no clear purpose and I tried to tick too many boxes. I didn’t achieve any of the results I expected.
Now 16 years later, offsites (also referred to as ‘away days’ or retreats) are still going strong, but they feel different in this new era of work. We recently held a roundtable discussion for clients, partners and close contacts and it’s clear we’re still grappling with some key questions:
- How do you measure the ROI of offsites?
- How can you manage follow-up and keep momentum?
- How do you justify time away from client work/billable hours?
- How do you get the right mix of activities and balance between “fun” and business?
In this article, I’ll share three categories that offsite activities can fall into, so you can design the right structure for your team needs.
First, some research.
Offsites are trending
The rise in remote working is driving a reinvention of the team offsite, and they are fast becoming an essential ritual for distributed teams to build their working relationships. Work can quickly feel transactional when teams main interactions are online and many of those conversations are task-focused. Building connection and cohesion requires colleagues to be intentional and consistent in getting to know their teammates. Focused in-person time together can support this. These events are becoming so popular that a new service offering is emerging from companies who specialise in organising offsites specifically for remote teams – everything from location to travel and the offsite agenda.
Even for hybrid teams that spend part of their week together, offsites feel different to regular meetings they might have on their “office days”. These separate events are more immersive and take teams away from their everyday routine so that they can think and interact differently.
What research shows
There is data to demonstrate that these events matter:
- Recent research from Atlassian showed that “intentional togetherness” increased cohesion. This cohesion peaks one month after the offsite and slowly declines, returning to pre-offsite levels after approximately four months.
- Joint research from Microsoft and Harvard Business Review explored the impact of business travel on performance and success. It showed that 88% of people believe that “in-person interactions such as meetings, offsites and workshops are critical for ensuring positive long-term relationships between employees and coworkers”.
- An academic study on “temporary colocation” showed that these focused events (including conferences) increase the probability that attendees will initiate new collaborations and continue existing ones.
Sometimes travel isn’t even necessary. With offices being used less, companies are also opting for “on-sites”, using existing space to save venue hire fees. These can be just as powerful when designed well.
Even if you can save on travel and venue hire, taking people away from core business for any time still has a cost. Even in this new era of work, have we solved the old challenge of ensuring our offsites have a true return on investment?
Offsites then
Previously, offsites were often seen as an exclusive practice for top management. Maybe the expense was more justifiable to send the most senior people in an organisation off to a swish location to spend multiple days “strategising” and having key conversations about the future of a business. But even then, success wasn’t always guaranteed.
Type “effective offsites” into Google, and the first article that often pops up is the comprehensive “Off-Sites That Work” by Bob Frisch and Logan Chandler (Harvard Business Review, 2006). The piece outlined how many of these events lacked rigourous planning and design. As a result, organisers struggled with focus and structure and failed to get results. An article by Andrew Hill in the FT ten years later took a light-hearted look at the “absurd yet useful ritual” of strategy away days, illustrating the challenge of turning the discussion into practical actions.
Offsites have also been the focus of several academic papers aiming to study what makes them successful, to replicate these elements across the business world. “Off to Plan or Out to Lunch? Relationships between design characteristics and outcomes of strategy workshops” (2016) further demonstrated the need to be intentional about the structure and outline to ensure they achieve real results.
Offsites now
The recent democratisation of offsites hasn’t solved these challenges completely. A 2022 study by Opinium in collaboration with events experience agency The Park, revealed that companies in the UK are wasting £100m per year – approximately 50% of the total spend – on corporate away days.
In addition, there can be a real cynicism from employees, especially when offsites they are perceived as “teambuilding” events. According to YouGov, 60% of Britons find teambuilding exercises cringeworthy. In contradiction to this, and adding to the planning confusion, the data from the Opinium study also showed that if employees could choose how they would spend away days, 40% want them to be fun and 39% want them to be for team bonding as opposed to the more business-focused goals of reaching alignment (8%), company strategy/goals (16%) and company values (17%).
So although offsites can be impactful, they don’t always hit the mark. We need to ensure we a) don’t waste resources and b) frustrate employees. Anyone tasked with designing and organising an offsite has to find the right balance between keeping everyone happy and ensuring good results.
Three categories of offsite activities
The first step to a successful offsite is well-defined objectives. The second step is planning the right activities to meet them. Based on our experience at Bracket, offsite activities can fall into three broad categories:
- Socialising together
- Learning together
- Creating together
While there can be overlap, without clear goals you risk selecting the wrong type of activity or trying to do too much and getting poor results.
Let’s look at each category in turn.
1. Socialising together
Sometimes the most compelling reason for team time together, in an increasingly remote working world, is simply the need to get to know each other – socialising without any specific agenda. It could also be to celebrate an achievement or serve as a reward or thank you for a period of hard work.
The aim is that by engaging in a non-work-related activity together, the team will build connections and trust that will spill over into their working relationships. In their purest form, these activities are intended to encourage fun and laughter together. It might be an art or cooking workshop, a sports-based activity such as bowling or a game such as an escape room. It can be entirely team-led or a specialist facilitator or company can run the activity. These are often – but not always – classified as traditional team building or bonding.
One planning aspect is to ensure these activities are inclusive (for example, if they include physical activity, alcohol or are run outside of core work hours), and that they are not negatively perceived as “forced fun”. So any organiser must consider the needs of everyone on the team, and ensure team members can opt out without being penalised. These kinds of activities also come under the most scrutiny for justifying expenditure against business results. For this reason, they often form supporting or supplementary activities for longer offsites.
When they are organised effectively, the impact of these activities for socialising together is usually immediate – people feel the benefits whilst they are engaging in the experience and the primary goal is to create positive feelings in the team. The team may also make connections that lead to new conversations and collaborations, but unless the activity is designed specifically for that, any outcomes like this will be by chance.
So in summary, activities for socialising together at an offsite:
- Primary goal = team bonding, connection
- Time to impact = immediate
- Challenges = inclusivity, justifying to business
- What to measure = connection, engagement
- Type of facilitator = activity-led
2. Learning together
There is undoubtedly value in a team acquiring skills and exploring a new topic area facing their discipline or industry together (e.g. the impact of AI). Learning about a new challenge or opportunity at the same time means a team can start to build a common language, consider their unique approach, and bring everyone’s knowledge up to the same level. Although you can run training any time throughout the year, you might use an offsite as an opportunity when everyone will be together.
The primary outcome of activities for learning together is for the team to upskill and then apply those new skills to their work. An external subject matter expert or trainer is often needed to provide content, guidance or at least some thought-starters. While this expert may have facilitation skills, the value is in their deep content knowledge. Depending on your goals, you can focus a whole offsite on this, but it could also be a portion of it, such as inviting a guest speaker to deliver a keynote session.
When considering the schedule for including an activity for learning together, review your expectations and business goals. Is the main aim for your team to be inspired, in which case a shorter guest speaker slot would be a suitable format? Or do you need your team to create clear actions for how they will apply and take their learning forward together, in which case you will need a longer workshop with more facilitation? Either is fine, but be careful not to pack too many guest speaker slots into your offsite without having adequate time for team discussions, as that’s the true value of being together.
In summary, activities for learning together:
- Primary goal = upskilling, new knowledge
- Time to impact = immediate for new knowledge, longer for change to take effect in the business
- Challenges = selecting the right format for your business goals
- What to measure = team confidence or competence in a new subject area
- Type of facilitator = expert, content-led
3. Creating together
A team may need to work through a specific challenge, a gnarly issue or a new opportunity, that they’re not able to give attention to in their day-to-day. Strategy, visioning, planning, product development or culture design fall into this type of activity, often requiring some collaborative problem-solving. The primary aim is for some change to happen in the business.
The team have the content knowledge and expertise but to ensure a productive discussion, they need a structure that enables them to bring together their perspectives, brainstorm and make progress.
For activities focused on creating together, the facilitator is focused on the process – keeping an eye on dynamics to help the team move towards the intended outcome. They may have knowledge in a particular methodology, framework or technique they can use to support the discussion. But generally, their role is not to contribute to the conversation itself.
The results of these activities may not be immediate, especially as there can be various barriers between generating new ideas and implementing them. But, they could impact the business significantly in the medium to long term, if they are run effectively and well thought-through.
One of the biggest challenges here is ensuring effective follow-up. Consider this right from the start of the planning stage when you clarify the objectives of your offsite. It requires identifying all the areas for the team to explore and designing the right agenda to ensure time and energy are well-spent.
- Primary goal = work-focused discussion, collaboration, move forward on a challenge or opportunity
- Time to impact = long-term but potential for change in the business (although the team may immediately feel clarity and alignment etc)
- Challenges = maintaining a productive discussion, ensuring follow-up
- What to measure = quality of workshop outputs, clear actions and outcomes, implementation
- Type of facilitator = process-led
Balance and by-products
An activity with a primary aim of either socialising, learning or creating together doesn’t exclude one of the other two from happening. But this will be a by-product if you haven’t designed specifically for it.
For example, an activity focused on creating together can still help to build cohesion and feel fun to participants. Similarly, you may have some actions emerge as a team during an activity focused on socialising together, but that likely wasn’t your main intention. Likewise, depending on how you run it, an activity to learn together may also help a team become more connected or produce new ideas that will impact the business.
You may need to focus your offsite on one of the three categories of activities (e.g. it’s not unusual to have multi-day strategy sessions). However, a longer offsite may also enable you to contain elements of all three. Either way, make sure to identify any priorities or expectations to ensure you get the balance of activities right.
Final tips for planning an impactful offsite
Your team may need different types of offsites at different times, depending on what is currently happening for you. Perhaps you need to connect after a period of change and upheaval in the business, in which case socialising together will be your primary aim. You may want your team to develop knowledge in a new area that presents a future opportunity or challenge and so your offsite will be about learning together. Or maybe you need an offsite for creating together – dedicated time to work through a project or plan or build new ideas. Once you have clarified this, you can select the right type of activity.
In summary:
- Be clear on the reason(s) for your offsite: The moment you decide to run an offsite, start to brainstorm the outcomes you want to achieve. Consider how much time you’ll have together as a team and what is realistic to cover. Map those desired outcomes against the different categories – socialising, learning or creating – so you know what activities you’ll need to include.
- Have clear measures of success: After clarifying your objectives, decide how you will measure them. Assess these before and after your offsite through surveys and diagnostics. This will help you to demonstrate the value and learn what to improve next time. Remember, depending on the type of activities you run the results may not always be immediate. So make a note to track progress over time.
- Zoom out to the macro and zoom into the micro: Once you have designed your overall structure, look holistically across your offsite agenda to check you have the right balance of activities based on what you’ve identified as important. Then zoom in to each specific activity and ensure the outcomes are clear at that level too.
- Choose your facilitator(s) thoughtfully: Do you need an activity-based facilitator, a subject matter expert, or a process facilitator? Depending on your offsite and your resources, you may find one facilitator to support you across the whole event. Or you many need different facilitators to support different activities.
Offsites are valuable events, especially for remote or hybrid teams, yet they can be expensive. You can make the most of your time, energy and money investment by planning them with intention.
If you’d like to run an offsite to help shift your team culture, collaboration and performance upwards, check out our Team Reset. We start with a diagnostic and 1-1 interviews to identify where you are with your culture and what we should address during your time together. Then, after the session, you’ll get a comprehensive 3-month action plan to keep momentum going. Check it out here.
Sign up if you’d like to get notified of new posts and receive monthly team culture tips and insights.