Benefits to Offsite Meetings
Sometimes solving a problem or coming up with a fresh idea requires you and your team to leave the office and have an offsite meeting. You may be asking yourself why this is necessary when you have a perfectly good conference room right in the building. Below are the benefits of having an offsite meeting as well as a few tips on how to ensure success.
Helps Improve Focus
Working in the same space day after day can become monotonous, not to mention the number of distractions prevalent in any office. As long as you are in the building, someone will always interrupt your train of thought asking you to solve some emergency. This is why we recommend cutting your losses and going offsite. A new workspace can lead to improved productivity and better meeting outcomes.
Helps Facilitate Team Bonding
Even though your employees often work together (usually through email and phone communications), there is no substitute for meeting in person. Depending on how long the meeting is, it should be broken up with team building activities. These can be as simple as a nice meal or an activity such as an exercise class. We recommend skipping the mandatory karaoke and trust falls.
Helps Encourage Creativity
Offsite meetings are perfect times to brainstorm new ideas or come up with plans for moving forward. Giving your employees a new environment to work in helps inspire creativity and encourages new ideas that could not be devised in the office.
Identify the Objectives
Having and communicating a clear goal of the offsite meeting is key. Extra credit if you provide your employees with an agenda beforehand.
Not only does this help your employees come to the meeting prepared, it can help them stay on track during the event. Knowing what the end goal is makes everyone at that meeting culpable for accomplishing the tasks.
Welcome Anonymous Suggestions
The goal of any meeting it to have a successful exchange of ideas and to work together to come up with an agreed upon solution. If something in the offsite meeting could be improved and thus used at the next meeting, wouldn’t you want to know? You can get this information by sending out a follow-up email with a link to an anonymous survey.
Offsite meetings can be very beneficial, as long as you follow these tips.