Workplace teams lose meaningful connections and sight of common goals all the time. Juggling hybrid schedules, remote team members, onsite meetings, and virtual confabs — it’s a wonder members get any face time at all. Schedule an offsite meeting for your department to prioritize a reorientation toward team building and connection. With the right setting and planning, you will emerge from your offsite rejuvenated and ready to innovate.
What Is an Offsite Meeting and What Is Its Purpose?
Offsite meetings are the embodiment of a “strategic break.” This time away aims to give your team a chance to connect and return to work with fresh eyes. Offsite meetings prioritize employee engagement where participants in team activities can revisit shared goals and refresh their plans.
Offsite vs Onsite Meetings: Content and Training Differences
Offsite meeting structure differs from your typical onsite meetings. An offsite meeting agenda should be geared towards strategic planning and big-picture team building. Onsite meetings, meanwhile, have a more detailed agenda focused on training or bringing teams up to speed on current events for your company.
The standout difference in offsite meetings is that they leave room for unstructured, non-work activities. But just because these activities don’t involve writing reports and meeting with customers doesn’t mean they’re not productive. The intentional space these meetings leave for fun and connection with coworkers is essential to strengthening peer interaction and ultimately creating a cohesive team culture.
Benefits of Having Meetings Offsite
The justifications for investing in offsite meetings are clear. A strategic break can provide many benefits for corporate teams, including:
- Refresh: Team members can take a breath and feel refreshed. Offsite meetings set them up to return to work with fresh eyes and ideas.
- Culture building: A workplace culture is essential to successful teams. As workplaces become dispersed thanks to hybrid and remote roles, establishing and maintaining a team culture can be more difficult. Offsites open a door to a stronger team culture and tightly-knit bonds.
- Collaboration: Offsite meetings can offer fresh opportunities for coworkers to collaborate in a new place with new insights. It can also make space for those who don’t often work together to build relationships and experiment with collaborating.
- Face time: Getting face time with your team members used to be a given. Now, some workers may go months or years without seeing or even meeting each other in person. Offsites can help lay the foundation for better working relationships on your team.
- Innovation: The work that comes from a change of scenery can be the definition of innovation. Mixing up collaboration, taking the strain of routine away and offering exercises that get people thinking outside the box can lead to desirable innovation.
Meeting Planning: How To Facilitate an Offsite Meeting
Offsite meetings are about more than just training. They should have an element of rejuvenation to them. While your team is undoubtedly stocked with planners and project managers, facilitating an offsite meeting may demand the development of some unique skills.
As you enter the planning phase, cross the following off your offsite meeting checklist:
- Meeting objectives
- Discussions you hope to spark
- Budget
- Travel range
Tap someone to be the primary facilitator and work to schedule enjoyable, effective activities. Plan ahead to produce materials that can support the offsite time.
Define and Communicate the Meeting Objectives
Set some ground rules for your team offsite and clear objectives. Team members new to the concept may wonder why they’re suddenly doing outdoor yoga with Janice from HR. If you clarify the why and define achievable objectives, you’ll see better engagement and results.
What To Discuss at an Offsite Meeting?
Of course, it won’t be all play and no work. Using this time to align on concrete work goals and strategies can be effective for some teams. It may be an ideal time to move away from the detailed expectations of an in-office meeting and pivot to:
- Big-picture goals: Choose your non-negotiable, strategic objectives for the year and pin them down. Centering teams on an action plan in this setting can help them stay on track when everyone is back in their normal environment.
- Key metrics: When you look back a year from now, how will you measure whether your team met the goals you set during this meeting?
- Thematic alignment: Is there a theme you hope to umbrella projects under this year? Perhaps this will be the year of “innovation” or “giving back.” Establish that now.
Estimate the Budget and Find the Ideal Venue
The distance and degrees to which your team travels for an offsite meeting will vary depending on your budget. But this is nothing new — all team projects likely have budgetary restrictions. Your strategic planning and assistance from experienced offsite professionals can help you make a lot from a little. It can also help you plan the kind of offsite your team will never forget.
Some common ranges for offsite meeting expenses include:
- Budgets for day trips: About $100 to $800 per person, depending on the size of your group. The more people, the lower the price.
- Budgets for overnight trips: About $700 to $1,000 per night per person.
The Offsite Co. suggests a target budget of:
- Venue: 35%
- Food and beverage: 25%
- Activities: 25%
- Other: 15%
Smart budgeting hacks like choosing locations in their offseason and getting group hotel rates can help stretch your budget.
What To Look for in a Venue
The setting of your meeting is essential as well. Here’s what to look for in a venue to find the best offsite meeting locations:
- Distance: If team members must travel by themselves, the location should be within a reasonable distance. Venues farther away should plan for travel arrangements.
- Space for large groups and break-out groups: Your planned agenda will likely include time for large group collaboration and smaller group connection, requiring offsite meeting rooms that can be multi-functional.
- Opportunities for culture-building/recreation: Fun can be a big part of offsites, so look for a venue that offers chances for team members to time together.
- Tech essentials: If you’re not going for an unplugged offsite, make sure your chosen location has accessible internet and space to charge electronics.
- Perks: Offsite meeting venues should have access to office supplies, beverages, kitchenettes, and other perks.
Select a Meeting Coordinator
There’s no doubt your team has plenty of folks ready and available to coordinate meetings. Choosing a meeting coordinator should highlight their project management and interpersonal skills.
A great coordinator will have a personality that can engage everyone on your team. They should also have availability in their workload to take on a broad project like this.
Plan Engaging Exercises and Activities
Exercises and activities aren’t for fun or productivity alone in this setting. Instead, look for activities that can provide social benefit when you return to the workplace.
For example, could your team use the feeling of a win by conquering a hike together? Or perhaps your team has become too complacent. A friendly scavenger hunt could stir up some positive competition. Exercises and achievable activities that offer social skills building are ideal for offsite meetings.
Prepare Support Materials, Share Relevant Data, and Meeting Agenda
Knowing what to expect can help your teammates make the most of the offsite meeting. An important prep practice includes making support materials such as event programs, meeting agendas, handouts, diagrams, and maps of your space.
If you want to achieve a particular goal or metric, providing relevant data upfront can help jumpstart conversations and brainstorming. A sales team starting the meeting hoping to top last year’s sales by 50% can strategize with purpose when they have concrete data in front of them.
Gather Feedback and Follow Up on Action Items or Next Steps
Like the success of many other facets of your work, what gets measured gets managed. Take some time to request feedback from participants on the event’s effectiveness. This is especially important in your early offsite meetings as you learn what kind of meeting structure, budget, and offsite meeting space best serves your team.
Consider a survey or paper-based suggestion box at the end of the meeting. Facilitators should follow up on any action items in any required real-time responses and plan for the next meeting.
Find the Ideal Location To Hold a Successful Meeting Offsite
When looking for the ideal location to hold a successful meeting offsite, you can’t go wrong with one of Industrious’s many workplaces. Prioritizing member experience, we offer conference and meeting rooms built out for your team’s needs. Available in more than 200 desirable locations and 65 cities, you can spend collaborative time in the workspace and then head out to excursions in nearby areas.
Book a tour to see how an Industrious workspace can be part of your next offsite meeting.