In creating an engaged workforce, the metrics are hard to refute. Engaged workforces outperform their competition almost 2-1. According to Kenexa research, engaged companies also have five times higher shareholder returns over five years.
As former Campbell’s Soup CEO, Doug Conant, once said, “To win in the marketplace you must first win in the workplace.”
1. Employee engagement is a key to activating a high-performing workforce.
We’ve found that successful corporate retreats offer an unparalleled opportunity to increase employee engagement and a litany of other tactics to increase critical components of an organization which contribute to a corporation’s bottom line.
Keys to Increase Employee Engagement at your Corporate Retreat
Workforces that aren’t engaged are only 50% less productive compared to their engaged counterparts.
This means that even if your company running without need desire for improvement operationally — which is a corporate rarity — if your workforce isn’t engaged with your organization’s key values and vision, you’re going to lose to the competition.
The reason is simple: when employees are engaged, they have an emotional commitment to the organization and its goals. They actually care about their work and their company. They don’t work just for a paycheck, or just for the next promotion, but work on behalf of the organization’s goals.
So how do you cultivate an emotional commitment to your organization and its goals?
Your employees have to develop intimacy and trust. Teams who trust each other get more done and have more fun. It’s a winning combination.
The problem is that it’s very difficult to develop the level of trust and intimacy to create engaged employees solely by working with each other in the workplace.
This is a key benefit of an off-site retreat: corporate retreats offer a great opportunity to cultivate increased intimacy and the trust necessary to increase employee engagement.
Your competitive advantage lies in the texture of the relationships between the individuals on your team. These relationships can be curated and accelerated by leveraging the value of an off-site corporate retreat.
2. Cultivate Your Leadership Team Carefully for Optimal Results
Great leadership teams are the foundation of great organizations. The most successful companies know that great leadership teams rarely happen organically rather they are the result of careful cultivation.
Retreats are invaluable because they provide the space and time for leadership teams to work both on their business and on their relationships — which is very difficult to do in the demanding day-to-day work environment.
Imagine putting together a basketball team of miscellaneous players and asking them to produce excellent results without ever practicing. Imagine telling them that they have to get better only playing together during the games.
It seems absurd doesn’t it?
Well, that is exactly happens with leadership teams all too often. We ask them to perform well together without ever setting up rules, or without learning about each other strengths or establishing a joint strategy.
Corporate retreat allows for you to focus on learning the strengths of your leadership team and develop a joint strategy so you can develop a championship team capable of producing great results
3. Springboard Your Team’s Creativity to Find Unexpected Solutions to Common Problems
Creativity isn’t a luxury, it’s a smart business strategy.
“Creativity and innovation are about finding unexpected solutions to obvious problems, or finding obvious solutions to unexpected problems.” says Rei Inamoto, Chief Creative Officer at AKQA.Organizations like Apple and Amazon rely on creativity and innovation to create breakthrough products which greatly increase their bottom line.How do you improve creativity in an organization?
The truth is that it’s hard to see new sides of problems or think of creative solutions when teams are in the same, daily work environment. Taking a step back and going into a new environment can give well-rounded perspective to employees.
You simply don’t know what you don’t know — and sometimes you need other people to help you see things differently. This is why retreats are helpful for organizations. Retreat offer opportunities for employees to spur their creativity and take ideas from their counterparts to apply to their own departments.
“You can look at what other [producers] are doing and ask how does this happen, and they can hit you over the head with the most obvious thing,” says Denise Blasevick of The S3 Agency.
4. A Successful Retreat Should Serve as a “Reset Button” for Your Team.
We’ve worked with large and small organizations and they all have one thing in common: people.People work in large organizations and people work in small organizations.
Corprate retreats are a tool for tuning-up the most important (yet most overlooked) component of your business: the people who make it run and need to be engaged in order to make your business profitable.
Successful corporate retreats do just that. They help to restock and refuel the energy of your group.
The best corporate retreats act as a reset button for a company or a team. When organizations look at fun and laughter at corporate retreat not as frivolous, but essential, the best results are produced.
The retreat should be an enjoyable activity that employees look forward to and enjoy attending.
5. The Retreat is NOT for You..
As business owners and managers, it’s tough not to think about how much work could be getting accomplished if you and your team were in the office handling job responsibilities instead of attending a retreat.
Every so often before scheduling a retreat, we’ll hear a CEO say, “Retreats are of little value to me personally.”
As a leader at your organization, you must understand the following: the retreat is not for you, it is for your team. It’s easy as a CEO or manager to dismiss corporate retreats as an expense which you can’t calculate the ROI for. But consider the negative costs to your business if you don’t push for your team to become highly-engaged workforce.
Don’t make the mistake of sacrificing the retreat because you personally don’t get a great deal of value from it.
