Designing Retreats That Spark Joy and Transformation
Imagine walking into a company retreat on the first day feeling energized, and excited to connect with your peers. Imagine leaving with some more clarity on how to do your work, aligned on the organizational mission, and deeper bonds with your colleagues. Now, imagine the opposite – a retreat that feels like just an extended all-staff meeting or the same problems being hashed out over and over again. What makes the difference?
At Novalia Collective, we are firm believers that good team retreat can spark excitement and innovation, foster trust and better relationships, and work through challenging issues. Here are the three elements we consider in cultivating a successful team retreat based on our Joy-Based Approach Towards Transformational Change:
1. Creative and Community-Centered Environments
The environment, both physical and emotional, of a retreat sets the stage for everything that follows. A thoughtfully designed space, which takes the needs of everyone participating, fosters collaboration and encourages creativity and sets the foundation for the important work and conversations ahead.
Intentional Space Design: Choose a venue with natural light, comfortable seating, and open layouts that allow for participants to move around and break up into small groups. If possible, find a venue that has an outdoor space to provide variety for different activities.
Accommodating Needs: Ask participants about what they need to fully participate. It might be closed captioning, hearing aids, scent-free environments, dietary preferences, mobility restrictions, masks preferences, etc. Being community-centered means being able to ensure everyone can participate.
Adding Playful Elements: Infuse fun and creative energy into the retreat with games, music, or movement activities in between content and discussions. Playfulness stimulates different senses and parts of the brain, providing more opportunities for creative ideas.
Collaborative Activities: Plan opportunities for small group activities and connection moments to ensure that everyone can participate and share. In larger group settings, it can be difficult for everyone’s voices to be heard so intentional small groups provide moments of conversation and sharing of thoughts.
2. Curious and Optimistic Mindsets
A retreat is not only an opportunity to break away from daily responsibilities and tasks but also a ripe setting to tackle big challenges and dream big. By creating conditions for curious and optimistic mindsets to flourish in a retreat setting, you help your team explore new ways of thinking and imagine possibilities.
Ask the right amount of questions: Sometimes during retreats, planners want to take advantage of everyone being together in one space to tackle a lot of questions at once. While it may be tempting to do so, more questions means less time to dive deeper into the truly important issues your team might be facing. For example, if the goal of the retreat is to design a new vision for the organization, ask, “How do we see our organizational impact in the next five years? Who are we serving and where? How are we providing these services?”
Encourage Experimentation: Great ideas come a little after the first spark – where excitement, creativity, and play comes into the mix. However, when people are rushed or pressed for time to move the agenda along, there might be pressure to choose the first “okay-ish” idea. Try low-stake challenges or games to help foster a curiosity mindset, before tackling bigger challenges. Encouraging and providing space for experimentation in a retreat environment gives participants the permission to challenge themselves to think differently.
Celebrate wins: Highlight successes and lessons learned from the past year and even celebrate wins from the retreat. When working through challenges, it is easy to default to thinking about all the things that are wrong and things we don’t want. Recognizing what’s working builds confidence and sets a positive tone for tackling future challenges.
3. Authentic and Trusting Relationships
Retreats provide opportunities for team members to have spaces of vulnerability, connection, and positive interactions with one another. These spaces can lead to more resilient relationships which help when conflict or challenges inevitably arise when working with one another.
Provide unstructured time: Instead of packing the entire day with agenda items, give time for participants to have shared meals, go on walks, and have time to decompress. When choosing a retreat location, consider finding a place that is walkable so participants can explore their surroundings.
Use different conversation formats: Depending on the topics or issues you’re looking to discuss as a team, consider different conversation formats that will ensure all voices are heard. Three frameworks you can use are detailed here. When people feel safe to share their thoughts, feelings, and opinions, it provides the foundation for more trust, communication, and collaboration.
Encourage follow-through: Trust is built over time through shared moments and actions taken. It can be very frustrating to attend a retreat, spend a lot of time and energy thinking through challenges, and then feeling like nothing changes. In order to build trusting and authentic relationships with one another, it is critical that there is a clear plan for follow-through after the retreat. It helps to have designated check-ins and clear owners for each of the follow-through items.
Ready to make your retreat more joyful, generative, and transformational? Let’s partner together!