Planning a Team Building Retreat in Business
Businesses are turning to team building retreats as a way to improve communication, strengthen team relationships and improve productivity. These retreats help people to work together to meet a goal – exactly what a business owner wants for their workforce.
Why Businesses Should Plan a Team Building Retreat
Team building retreats are a great option for businesses, and it’s a day outside of the office that employees will enjoy. When you’re trying to decide whether or not a retreat is idle for your business, consider the following benefits:
- Strengths and weaknesses are improved. Even the strongest team will have faults, and these events will focus on strengths, amplifying them and correcting many issues along the way. A retreat that focuses on improvement will help develop the traits that a team needs to be more successful in the workplace.
- Remote teams are strengthened. Businesses that have remote teams are strengthened, allowing these remote workers to get to know each other and connect on a more personal level. If these are the type of teams you have, TeamBuilding has a great list of online activities you can check out.
- Motivation. These events help motivate workers, building trust between staff and management. When there is trust, this boosts overall job satisfaction, according to 64% of employees.
When a business retreat is a success, it helps strengthen the team, ensuring that the team is working diligently and optimally.
Planning a Successful Retreat
If a retreat is something your business wants to pursue, it’s time to get down to the logistics. You can work with a company that offers business retreats, but they will charge more for this service.
And that’s why it’s often best to choose to choose your own retreat, allowing a competent member of management to run the retreat.
When trying to plan a successful retreat, you must:
- Create a committee. A committee will help plan the retreat. This is great if every team has at least one member being part of the committee.
- Define a purpose. What’s the purpose of the retreat? Do you want to improve relationships, innovation, creativity or develop a team’s deficiencies?
- Goals. What is the goal of the retreat? This is the end goal, and it may be what you want the team to learn at the end of the retreat.
You’ll want to involve teams to ensure that the retreat is a hit.
Once you’ve done that, you’ll want to move on to choosing a venue. There will often be a lot of recommendations, and these recommendations may include:
- Tours for new teams that work remotely. You can choose a local tour, or opt to offer a safari tour, where team members can bond.
- Escape rooms that help teams learn to work together to break out of the room. It’s a game of testing a group’s strengths and can help add to their problem-solving abilities.
- Races of some sort are great, and this can include trying to reach the top of a mountain during hiking in the most efficient manner.
- Problem solving competitions, where each team has to come up with a solution to a problem as quickly as possible.
There are ample options for team building events, and including team leaders in the decision-making process is a smart choice.
