4 Advantages to Holding a Company Retreat

The AOE team recently met at our offices in Chicago for a company retreat. Having just joined the team this spring, it was a great experience for me to finally meet the team face-to-face. In addition to face time, company retreats can make a meaningful impact on strategic planning and team morale. The benefits of a team-wide meeting in person can strengthen a company’s workforce and improve its bottom line—especially in today’s environment of remote working. Here’s why you should begin planning your next company retreat today.

1. Team Building

By spending dedicated, focused time together, team members get to know each other’s specific personalities, which can enhance communication and improve relationships. Additionally, by better understanding how team members work, what makes them tick, and their strengths and weaknesses, the company can better allocate work and roles to improve overall company performance.

Team building also increases employee loyalty, motivation and overall job satisfaction. By getting to know their team members and gaining a clear understanding of how their role fits into the overall company structure, employees will likely experience increased enthusiasm and excitement around their individual roles and the company as a whole.

2. Strategic Planning

There’s no better time to dive into complex issues than when the entire team is together. Company retreats present a great time to plan ways to meet future company goals, set new goals and determine the best routes to meet those goals. By bringing so many diverse perspectives together in one room, strategies and solutions may be identified that otherwise risk being overlooked.

By bringing together multiple perspectives, companies also can gain valuable insight into how they should move forward to navigate the current industry environment. They can identify solutions to challenges related to specific departments, client relations, company workflows, team communication, company budgets and more.

3. Problem Solving

Retreats are a great time to tackle company challenges head on. With all team members present, solutions to challenges may be solved more effectively—or in unexpected ways. If one department is experiencing a challenge, a team member from a different department may lend a unique solution.

In today’s fast-paced world, industries are changing quickly. For example, marketing and communications firms like AOE are navigating how to best use AI to their benefit and to the benefit of their clients. By bringing the entire team together, insights and pathways can be identified to stay on top of trends and industry changes to remain competitive.

4. Skill Building

Company retreats are great ways to address gaps in skills with training through workshops and presentations. Employees can break into groups to focus on specific skills, or the entire organization can learn something new to improve the company’s bottom line overall.

This is a great time to develop a skill that will allow the company to enter new markets, which can increase the company’s ability to compete in previously unexplored areas. Expanding to new markets allows companies to reach more clients and add more diverse projects to their portfolio.

Though a company retreat may have a high upfront price tag, the potential advantages of bringing employees together are invaluable. Whether a retreat happens once every few years, annually or a few times per year, companies benefit from team members interacting in person. And companies benefit from employee engagement in hard-to-quantify ways that can increase the company’s ability to compete and positively impact its bottom line.

For AOE, the meeting was called a success not only in terms of strategic planning and morale, but also diving into some key trends that are facing our industry. Employees dove into the advantages of AI and analyzed personality test results to optimize team strength. By bringing the team together, AOE identified new ways to strategically enhance the business and continue bringing value to customers for many years to come.

Need help brainstorming your next retreat? Contact AOE today.