Corporate Retreats: Your Secret Sauce to Build a High Performing Team
In recent years, it seems everyone is trying to figure out how to make a positive company culture. At the same time, they want to know how to recruit and keep top talent while also building team cohesion.
It’s a difficult balancing act, but luckily, there is one thing you can do to solve these problems. Corporate retreats.
Let’s look at a few reasons why these really are the secret to building a high performance team.
Drive Connection
When people feel connected, they work together better. That’s because they learn how to speak each other’s language and what the other person needs.
But making real connections in a professional context can be difficult.
In the workplace, our time isn’t really ours. We might have room for chit-chat here and there, but we mostly are trying to accomplish tasks so we can keep on top of things.
And while colleagues might grab drinks Friday evening, so much of those conversations tend toward that one shared thing in our lives: work.
Corporate retreats give people a lot of extra time to eat together, talk together, and enjoy exciting new places together. That opens many more opportunities to actually connect — not just as coworkers, but as people.
Learning Strengths
New contexts are a breeding ground for new insights. Just by setting up in a new location, people can see things they hadn’t seen before.
When you do this with a team, this leads to learning about people’s strengths.
By having a variety of new activities to do together, we might find out that Janice isn’t just a great numbers person, she also has a wealth of knowledge about world cultures. She was a secret resource for coming up with new ideas for expansion all along!
By revealing people’s hidden strengths, you give them a chance to shine when you return to normal operations. That insight can be a big change maker in people’s careers and in the overall performance of a team.
Break Through Barriers
When there are hierarchies in a workplace, it can make it difficult for people to really be honest. It isn’t that it forces people to lie, but we tend to hold back from people who control our pay and continued employment.
A corporate retreat allows the opportunity for the hierarchies to come down for a bit. That can lead to getting a side of people that wouldn’t come out back at the office.
By changing your surroundings and engaging in both work and non-work related activities, we see the person behind the desk. And it turns out, we can speak a lot more directly with them this way.
Being able to hear people out and learn new perspectives on how things operate is a boon for managers of all kinds. After all, the view from the ground is something that many bosses struggle to get and even pay consulting companies millions to find out. With a corporate retreat, you get that critical insight while also going on a trip of a lifetime.
