Why Every Team Needs to Do a Company Retreat

Business is more about catering to employees and customers than it is about numbers. Numbers are important, but they're only factorable when you have happy customers and employees. This means it’s imperative to keep people happy in order to increase revenue and profit margins.

While you might have implemented many strategies to keep your customers happy, having disgruntled employees and high turnover rates could be turning customers away. To remedy this problem, it’s important to create retreats for your employees, especially for those who have done hard work for your company.

Reward Employees

Depending on the size of your company and the exclusivity of the trip, you’ll want to plan a retreat every six months or at least every year. Having this established will give your employees the advantage of knowing when each retreat is coming up and to help them better prepare for it.

If you plan an extravagant retreat that appeals to your employees, you can reward a handful every time to go on the retreat. This is a great way to boost morale and performance from employees because each one will be motivated to try to be the one selected for the retreat that year.

Build Interpersonal Relationships Between Coworkers

One of the best benefits of a retreat is that it guarantees to build interpersonal relationships between co-workers. Since most of these retreats eliminate anything work-related, it gives each coworker on the retreat an opportunity to get to know each other on a more personal level.

If you find that there is tension between certain employees, you can set aside a specific retreat that will help build a stronger relationship between coworkers. Sometimes, work stress can cause a natural disliking toward certain people. So, it’s important to try to clear these instances up as soon as possible for a smoother work environment and decreased employee turnover rate.

Help Build More Creative Collaborations

Depending on the retreat, you can help with building more creative collaborations between coworkers. If you take them to a location that requires them to use their creativity, it can be a helping hand in helping them collaborate and deliver even better ideas together. The more time creative-minded people spend together, the stronger their collaborations at work.

This can be a great retreat for a marketing team since they need to work together to create content that’s appealing to consumers. So even something as simple as art gallery viewings can get your employees’ creative thoughts flowing. Consider it the next time you want to set up a retreat.

Increase Team Building Skills Among Coworkers

If you want your business to succeed, you need employees who are willing to work together. Sometimes, you’ll have employees who are more self-centered and forget the meaning of teamwork. Planning a retreat that forces them to work with others can help with opening their minds to working in a team and collaborating with others.

Whitewater rafting is one of many exercises you can implement on a retreat where you force someone to be a part of a team. Even the most skilled whitewater rafter could use the assistance of another to help manage through the rough watery terrain. This puts the extreme in front of them and helps them work with the other coworkers.

Provide Relaxation

It’s not fun being a part of a company that’s all business and no fun. Millennials enjoy working with companies who are willing to put their employee’s need before their own. As they begin to dominate the workforce, it’s important for businesses to stay alerted of this. Retreats are becoming more imperative to help with promoting a more relaxing and rewarding work environment for the upcoming generation.

Work-life balance is imperative for people. So, if you can integrate their life with their work a bit, it can help everyone feel more comfortable and promote a better work environment. Plan a retreat that can take people away from work and provide them with a nice, life-related experience with coworkers.

 

Photo: Flickr / kris krüg

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Written by:
AJ Agrawal is an entrepreneur, speaker, and writer. He is the CEO and Co-Founder at Alumnify Inc.
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