How To Plan a Team Retreat – Part 4: Retreats for Large Groups and Entire Organizations

It’s easy to get lost in the day-to-day operations of your organization. A large group or even organization-wide retreat is an opportunity to bring your entire team closer together, improve cooperation, establish culture, and also celebrate the work you’ve done so far. 

In earlier parts of this series, you’ve learned about the importance of designing a retreat to address your specific organization, as well as tips for retreats with senior leaders or executives and managers and their individual teams. In this final entry, you’ll learn about larger-scale retreats tailored for an entire business. 

 Retreats for Your Whole Organization 

Whether you’re hoping to design a retreat for a larger group or for everyone who works for your organization, it is key to identify a few objectives to be address during the retreat. Regardless of the size of your operation, it’s rare in today’s work environment for an entire business to take the time to look at the practices, policies, and procedures that determine how work gets done, and a retreat offers a safe, separate space for your team to do so. 

The opportunity to get this large group together likely won’t come often, so it’s important to address business-wide goals from a wide perspective while still allowing the teams and individuals that make up your organization to see the role they play in the company’s success.  

 Build on Goals, Priorities, and Strategy 

A large-scale retreat is the perfect time to share and discuss your organization’s upcoming goals. The change in scenery and mindset allotted by a retreat allow you to not only present the goals, but also explain the reasoning behind them, how they’ll be measured, and even give examples of how different business areas can help achieve them without the restrictions of a traditional meeting setting.  

As important as organizational goals are, it can be difficult for individual departments or employees to see how their work can make an impact. A retreat gives you the time to develop and discuss the strategies needed for each organizational unit to make progress toward your desired results. 

 Meet New People, Build Relationships, Find Connections 

It’s not uncommon for employees to silo themselves into their work teams or within a small group of coworkers they work with the most. An organization-wide retreat can be one of the only opportunities your staff has to break out of these bubbles and get to know people from other teams or business areas. 

To encourage this, it’s important to schedule activities that encourage (or even require) individuals to work with a group they rarely interact with. It could be something as simple as ice breakers or something more objective-related, like brainstorming business goals or priorities, process updates, or more. 

These activities help foster new relationships within your organization that can lead to higher levels of camaraderie and even open the door to cross-business collaboration and innovation. 

 Organizational Culture Starts Here: Establishing a Culture of Trust, Empathy, and Collaboration 

As rare as it is for your entire organization to have the opportunity to get together in this setting, times where senior leadership and executives get to interact with all levels of the business can be just as infrequent. Because of this, a retreat could be one of your only occasions to address and establish company culture in a meaningful way.  

Organizations often want to emphasize the importance of trust, empathy, and collaboration. In order to do so, these characteristics must be visibly demonstrated from the highest levels of your organization on down. Large group retreats that let executives and management interact with all levels of employees allow your senior leaders to show these cultural traits in action and truly lead by example. A team that sees these values in their leaders is much more likely to embrace those values themselves. 

 Boost Morale 

While it’s important to accomplish key business objectives during a large-scale retreat, this can also be a time to slow things down and concentrate on the human-side of your organization. Retreats can be used to show your team that the business is invested in them, their well-being, and their worth. By highlighting the efforts and individuals behind the numbers and profits, your team will feel seen, cared for, and appreciated. 

 Where to Begin with Your Organization-Wide Retreat 

Looking for some prompts or topics to use in designing your large group retreat? Here are some recommendations: 

• Organizational Goals: Why, When, and How – Dedicate some time during your retreat for senior leaders to not only share the goals for the next year, but how and why the executive team prioritized these specific goals, why these priorities matter, how they affect the company as a whole, and what they need from every level of the organization to be successful. Once these are discussed, let smaller teams brainstorm how they’re role can make an impact so they can feel a level of ownership in the business’s success. 

• An Honest Conversation about Company Culture – Discuss the current organizational culture, the policies and behaviors that reinforce it, and the desired changes teams want to see. You can further establish a sense of community and trust amongst your organization by involving everyone in this dialogue. Be sure to set a positive and constructive tone and tempo in order to keep the focus on creating the changes you want to see. 

• Revisiting Company Policies – Are your current rules and procedures working for everyone? Take a fresh look at why these became rules to begin with and discuss ways to modify, replace, or reimagine them to better suit your organizational goals. 

• Celebrate and Motivate – Your organization wouldn’t be here without the hard work and dedication of the teams and individuals that comprise it. Set aside some time to acknowledge and honor the accomplishments made throughout the organization while also motivating the team as a whole to build upon those successes. 

 Start Designing Your Organization’s Retreat 

With these tips in mind, it’s time to start building your custom-tailored organization-wide retreat. Loeb Leadership is here to act as retreat partner and facilitator along the way. Contact us today to get the retreat process started.