Many organizations are using planning offsites to get their teams together to strategise and chart the way for tomorrow.  Before you decide to make that investment in time and money, here are 2 facts that you need to know about offsites:

• You have only one chance of success.  If your offsite ‘fails’, you are probably not going to say “hey everyone, we didn’t do what we planned to do, how about staying for another weekend?”.  An offsite is a one-shot deal which MUST be successful.
• Offsites are expensive.  I facilitated an offsite for sales managers in Jakarta where more than 20 sales managers from all over Asia flew in to attend.  The cost from flights and accommodations were seriously high.  But that was the least of the cost — imagine the opportunity cost of 20 sales managers spending 3 working days not selling!

Very few offsites ‘fail’ because many managers are too embarrassed to say, ‘I got all these people together and we didn’t achieve what we should have’.  So plan to make your expensive, one-shot-for-success-only offsite a genuine success by considering these suggestions:

Be sure what you want to achieve

First of all, be absolutely clear what you want to achieve at the offsite.  Spend time speaking with your direct team to determine what are the issues and what will be time well spent at the offsite. Then, with your inner team, craft out 2 or 3 measurable objectives for the offsite and then focus all your energies on making sure these objectives happen.

Be clear what is success and failure

Ask yourself and your team, what is success and failure.  I often ask my clients “If today was the day after your offsite and it was an outstanding success, what would you boast about”. Give the offsite a rating of A+ before it even starts and then clearly think through what an A+ offsite looks like.  Also visualise what failure is and do whatever it takes to ensure that failure does not happen.

Anticipate and deal with obstacles before the offsite

You know your team best so, what or who will cause your offsite to fail?  Deal with these issues BEFORE the offsite because it’s just too late on the offsite itself.  Anticipating and dealing with obstacles is time consuming but necessary to ensure your invest in time and money at the offsite does not go down the drain.

Use your offsites to problem solve and think as a team

I knew of a manager who flew in his best people from all over Asia to a 5-star resort for 2 days.  They ALL then proceeded to be bored to death by 2 days of constant presentations.

Don’t waste valuable time and resources.  Use the rare opportunity of having your best people in one location to solve your most difficult problems.  Sincerely believe that the thinking and creative power of your team is tremendous and use the offsite to harvest the best ideas from your team.

Balance between hard results and building people

When planning for your offsite, try to strike a balance between achieving hard tangible deliverables and building people.  A 2-day offsite, has numerous opportunities for people to bond and get to know each other better.  To start with, every day has at least 3 meals two tea breaks, and evening drinks for everyone to do their favourite thing together — eating and drinking! Use these opportunities and create more to help your team members build strong relationships with one another.   Consider setting time aside to play games or do team building activities together.  Plan to have fun.  Your team loves to have fun so build fun into your offsite.

On the other hand, if your offsite is only full of team building exercises, consider setting time aside problem solving or strategizing on real-life work-related problems so that you can see tangible deliverables from your offsite.

Get someone good to deal with logistics

There are two parts in planning an offsite that MUST go well to succeed: the logistics and the agenda.  I would advise that two separate people deal with the logistics and the agenda respectively.  This will free up the person managing or facilitating the agenda to focus on achieving the offsite objectives while the logistics person will deal with the nitty-gritty administrative details.

Finally, be involved with your offsite planning — don’t delegate the offsite planning completely to any one person.  It’s your team. Ensure that you have a big part to play in planning so that your investment in time and money has the returns you want.

Stephen Yong, Principal Consultant for Blue Dot Learning, specializes in Leadership Skills for Junior to Middle Managers. For more information, please go to http://www.bluedotlearning.com