Leading Successful Offsite Meetings
A team offsite is a great opportunity to reflect and regroup. Leaders can review the first half of the year, celebrate team successes, and course-correct before moving forward. But outside of developing an agenda and clear objectives, agency leaders are given surprisingly little guidance in designing strategic offsite meetings. That is—until now. With this article, my goal is to help you think through these important decisions in order to facilitate your best offsite meeting ever.
Before the Meeting
The success of your offsite meeting is first determined by what happens before the meeting. Answer these 5 simple questions prior to scheduling your offsite:
What is the objective of the offsite meeting?
Who should participate?
How will addressing the objective impact our business?
When is the time frame for the issues being discussed? 90 days, 6 months, 1 year, 1 to 3 years?
How will we know if the meeting was successful?
Next, let’s think through how we might answer some of these questions.
Meeting Goals
There are generally 3 main goals you can decide to focus on during an agency offsite meeting. These include:
Generating ideas
Lobbying support for specific ideas
Building a consensus
To guide your team offsite, marry one of those meeting goals with one of the strategic topics below.
Example: Let’s say you want to generate ideas about improving client retention or securing right-fit clients. Your goal could also be to lobby support for your idea around reducing agency overhead.
Topics for strategy discussion:
Improving client retention
Securing right-fit clients
Upskilling agency staff
Increasing efficiency and effectiveness of work
Improving expertise
Reducing costs
Meeting Participants
Meeting goals have an important function: to provide clear guidance on who should be present to discuss the issues at hand. If your goal is to generate ideas for business development, then you want your entire leadership team present. You might also include your account managers—they will have ideas on how to drum up new opportunities from current clients. If your team has less than ten people, then it makes sense to invite the entire agency. But once you start creeping past fifteen people, you might want to be judicious about who you invite to the offsite meeting. Ultimately, your meeting goals will help you decide who should be in attendance.
Business Impact
Far too often, offsite meetings are like footprints in the sand—they don’t leave any lasting marks on your business. To avoid this, it’s crucial to plan and think about the specific impact you want to see on your business. If the offsite doesn't impact your business in some positive way, then what's the point of convening all those smart people away from the office?
Time Frame
Everything discussed at an offsite should be time-bound. At the end of these meetings, people often leave energized; yet they also have a lengthy to-do list. That list is promptly dropped by the wayside when employees return to the office. To ensure follow-up, it is helpful to prioritize the output of these meetings by creating a time frame for implementing ideas. When do you expect to see some impact to your business? Do you want to see progress in 30 days, or is it more realistic to see impact in the next six months?
Meeting Metrics
The simplest way to measure the success of your offsite meeting is by looking at Return on Objectives (ROO). Did you achieve what you set out to achieve? Thinking about ROO during the planning stages ensures that your established goals are SMART meeting goals. SMART is an acronym that stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely. The first check-in after the team offsite is a great time to look at your Return on Objectives. It is during this check-in that you’ll confirm the timing to reach your stated goals.
Whatever you do, don’t take an agency offsite meeting lightly—after all, it can significantly improve your agency’s effectiveness and agency culture. Use the questions in this article to plan your next offsite and organize an unforgettable experience.