Ahead lay the whole day and night of strategic team alignment and most importantly relationship building.
Today, several months and hundreds of Zoom calls later, all this seems like a luxury.
But even within the boundaries of the online world, it is possible topull off an impactful company event.
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PREPARATION PHASE
1.
Online, peoples attention is much more susceptible to dropping, so not overcomplicating the agenda is key here.
Keep it simple and short.
For instance, we replaced our usual full-day-long program with only three 60-minute content blocks.
This is what our agenda looked like in overview:
2.
People need to recharge before they can process new information.
When we closed the official part, we had another 30-minute break before the evening fun activities.
Simplify the main message
Offsites are high-stakes meetings.
This one definitely was for us.
We were to present the new strategy for the upcoming 2-3 years.
It was critical for us to ensure it was clear and that it stuck with our team.
For this reason, we cut all the fluff, and all the unnecessary spin offs and details.
We wrapped the whole narrative around one single topic our new strategy.
Assign roles
It takes a team to deliver a successful offsite.
Set up a remote studio
This was a game changer for us.
If possible, set up a small studio in your office and deliver your offsite from there.
It also made the whole event more professional.
Just like with all our meetings, we used Google Slides along with our ownSlido for Google Slides integration.
DELIVERY PHASE
8.
Create a fun opening
The offsite is no ordinary meeting.
Youve got everyone together on one video call.
We opened our offsite with a musical number!
Polls are your great helpers here.
In any event, it will be worth it.
Use Zoom breakout rooms for small group discussions
New information sparks lots of questions.
Create a space for your team to digest what theyve just heard and discuss it together in small groups.
In the second content block, we dedicated 20 minutes to small group discussions.
Zoom breakout rooms proved invaluable here.
We split the team randomly into groups of three to four people.
The assignment was simple: Share your thoughts and discuss the new strategy.
Then come up with questions about anything that is not clear.
For some it was the highlight of the meeting: Breakout rooms were an amazing move!
It was so nice to talk to random people in a sort of round-table setup.
Collect teams questions strategically
Offsites are a unique opportunity to address the teams questions.
Heres what we did.
Thats a lot of points to discuss and clarify.
But what can you do to make the Q&A as effective and worthwhile as possible?
Instead, let the moderator read the questions to the CEO.
Another thing that can move the discussion forward is upvoting.
Thats really powerful and can transform your whole Q&A session.
Before you wrap up, bring the key message back on the slide and let it sink in.
We ran a newbies quiz just after lunch to pull people back in and enjoy some friendly competition together.
It was fun we even got some sweet prizes for the winners.
Let your creative juices flow!
He also crossed Iceland by bicycle.
