Corporate Offsite on Mornington Peninsula – we can definitely help you.
School holidays – tick
Back to school – tick
Back to work – tick
January has flown by. Kids have a new teacher, new textbooks, maybe new shoes, new goals, new friends. What about your business?
Now is the season when many businesses look to redirect, revitalize and refocus. Enter the offsite corporate retreat.
Offsite meetings offer opportunities to galvanise your team and to extract even better performance from your greatest, and simultaneously most precarious, asset: your people. No wonder then that the Offsite Meeting can either succeed brilliantly or fail spectacularly. So, what makes for a successful offsite?
A killer location definitely helps, and that is where Peninsula Group Stays can help. Spacious Sorrento Retreat and Bayviews from Drury Lane are popular choices for corporate retreats on the Mornington Peninsula.
Crafting the perfect agenda is also key – a careful blend of team activities, challenges, business planning and strategising, and fun seems to extract the best from most people.
The crux of the successful offsite, however, is handling the human dynamics deftly and thoughtfully. You are bringing people together in order to reach agreement about business processes and priorities. What you need to acknowledge is that each individual will attend with their own understanding, knowledge, and priorities as well. They will want to be heard. Harness their individuality.
Keep it small
Resist the temptation to include everyone. Ideally, you will harness your organisation’s diversity of experience and skillsets, so have at least 5 people attend. Go much beyond ten and it will be difficult to remain inclusive. Alienate individuals and you risk derailing the offsite meeting.
Ensure participants are engaged:
Quiz your participants in the lead-up: what do they want to achieve? what are their expectations?
Do certain agenda items resonate with them? Can they lead those discussions?
Are you expecting one individual to be a thorn in the side? Assign them a role – give them specific permission to challenge.
What is your definition/the team’s definition of success?
The social contract
You are no longer at the office, so here is a chance to redefine normal/acceptable behaviour.
Have a “rules of engagement” exercise – how do your participants want this to run.
The parking lot
There will always be discussion points or ideas that can’t be dealt with at the time, or which are important but off-topic. Have a mechanism to record these for future reference or further work without disrupting the flow of proceedings.
Be goal focussed
Each session should strive for a solution or a decision. Avoid wasting time delivering information. Use time wisely to discuss and exchange ideas. You can always deliver information ahead of time in a project folder or via email.
Challenge
Here is a rare opportunity to ask those “what if” or “why” questions. Challenge or clarify. Your aim might be to arrive at a new way of working or to embed and strengthen current practice.
Outcomes
“Maybe” or “possibly” doesn’t really cut it here. You should strive for definites.
Group dynamics
Control those dominant individuals…they can even be forewarned that you will be seeking everyone’s opinion. Be polite but firm in wresting control of the floor from the one or two individuals who will otherwise prevent the less forceful to have their say