Can This Off-Site Be Saved?

If you want to help your company make change, then make it your business to change its approach to off-sites.

These events just seem to come with the territory, in both good times and bad. Business is booming! So how are we going to handle the growth? Business is cratering! So how should we retool our strategy? The HR department books a nice hotel or a fancy resort, hires a cast of nonthreatening facilitators, rolls in some easels and flip charts -- and the brainstorming begins. (Did we mention the "trust-building" exercises and the icebreakers?)

Then, a few months later, the disappointment sets in. What actually changed as a result of that three-day retreat? How did a room filled with so many smart people produce so few ideas with impact? Why do we keep having these meetings anyway? It doesn't have to be this way. While plenty of companies are subjecting their employees to the same cookie-cutter events (does anyone reading this not have enough canvas logo bags to upholster the State of Rhode Island?), other companies are finding ways to design off-sites that are exciting, energizing, and memorable -- meetings that make a difference. How? By paying as much attention to logic as to logistics, worrying about attitude as well as atmosphere, focusing as much energy on brainpower as on the buffet.

"People who are involved in planning off-sites aim too low," says Brenda Williams, a founding partner of the Lab, a Chicago-based branding firm. "They see them as a chance for people to get to know each other, to get away, or to share information. These planners aren't thinking strategically: What problem will this event solve? What decision will it help people make? What new ideas will it produce? You have to anchor an off-site with goals that actually mean something to the business."

After dozens of interviews with the best meeting planners and event designers, and after compiling a collection of firms that have seen results from retreats, Fast Company has come up with its own answers to the question, How do you plan off-sites that pay off? Here are our seven take-aways.

Take-away #1: Agree on a definition of victory that matters. The most common mistake made when planning an off-site is assuming that one is necessary at all. Just because the company has always had an annual meeting for the sales force doesn't mean that it's still a good idea. "A lot of people will go through the motions of picking a venue, inviting speakers, and getting executives to attend without having a clue about what needs to get done," says John Coné, former VP of learning at Dell, who has organized more than 300 events in his career. "You need to spend time on the critical questions: What are we trying to accomplish? How should we go about it? How will we know if we've succeeded?"

Indeed, the best off-sites are born not from event-planning sessions but from serious discussions about business objectives. When the Timberland Co., the outdoor-gear and footwear company, began planning for the launch of its Fall 2001 line of footwear, it saw a problem: the need to create groundbreaking ideas at breakneck speed. "We had to do more than evolve our product lines," says Doug Clark, VP of footwear product management. "We needed a revolution. But it takes 180 days just to make incremental design improvements. Total overhaul or reinvention of a product could take years. We didn't want to wait that long. We needed a way to jump-start these products."

That jump start turned out to be an off-site of about 60 people that included designers, engineers, and marketers from Timberland, along with key suppliers from around the world. Every type of supplier or manufacturer that was involved in making the shoes was represented: the manager of a leather plant in the Pacific Rim, a rubber-mold manufacturer, specialists in materials science and development. And the definition of victory was clear from the outset. The participants weren't just going to brainstorm big ideas or evaluate what-if scenarios. They were going to settle on production blueprints for three new products: a redesign of the yellow boot, which had been the company's long-standing icon product; a new casual shoe that would end the compromise between comfort and style; and a new category of shoe for outdoor athletes that would provide the sturdiness of a rigid boot and the agility of a sneaker.

The off-site took a full week, but at the end of that time, the teams had met their goals. "Everyone walked in the door aligned with our target of coming away with blueprints for products that could go into production," Clark says. "Having that concrete goal allowed us to walk the line between exploring creative flights of fancy and remaining results driven."