Offsites and sundays
They say a lot about company culture.
Imagine a Sunday night, your colleagues gearing up for the week ahead. Are they curious and excited or dragging their feet with dread? Culture goes beyond ping-pong tables and free snacks—it's about how your people feel about their work and the team they’re part of off the clock.
The ‘Sunday-night-motivation-check’ speaks volumes about your team's morale, and offsites can shape that sentiment.
While offsites take people from their daily grind to a more relaxed, open setting, it’s not just being out with colleagues that makes it memorable. Moments like brainstorming sessions under the sun, team-building activities sparking creativity, and open conversations strengthen bonds and remind them remind them of the glue that unites everyone. These ‘out of office’ moments aren’t just an expense; they invest in your company's core - its culture. Offsites have the potential to offer a very trackable, high-yield ROI.
More than Sunday blues
In a world of distributed teams, remote work, and flexible schedules, it can be challenging to find dedicated moments to bring people together for meaningful connections. Offsites provide the perfect opportunity for genuine input and alignment around strategies and create ownership across all levels of your organization. They’re a space for building trust and inviting every voice to be heard.
Planning successful offsites: Striking the right chord
But how do you ensure your offsites make an impact that echoes into motivation levels on Sunday nights? It’s about nailing the most important bits: from logistics, location, and memorable activities - to intentionally designing the agendas and experience. By giving attention to the flow of the day, you can foster collaboration and ensure engagement. This is part of why it’s so important to have expert facilitators on board- ensuring all of the above is seamlessly designed and guided.
Dive deeper with our open source Miroverse template "Ultimate offsite checklist"
Co-creating your offsite with expert facilitators also allows internal leaders to outsource the responsibility of managing energy and attention on the day. It allows them to take part in the activities and contributing energy, focus and input to the work at hand.
The beat drop
When done badly, offsites can feel like a firework moment: they’re exciting and feel special, but quickly fade. When done well, though, offsites are more like the beat drop of a song: powerful, memorable standout moments.
Their impact comes from the preparation beforehand and the follow-through afterward, forming an essential part of ‘the rhythm’.
This rhythm carries the energy and commitments from your offsite into your day-to-day work, where it shapes your culture.
Hitting the right note in practice
Here’s a tangible example with our Mischievous approach. Client X wants to launch new values and behaviors. They’re announced during an offsite for teams to begin adopting & living by. During the offsite, we use different techniques and exercises to unpick and understand the values, align on how they translate into tangible behaviours, and explore how they would play out with our ‘Scenario Game’. Teams create rituals to put their values into practice.
After the offsite, we meet regularly with team leaders and value ambassadors to coach and support the application and evolution of their rituals. We co-create bespoke resources like meeting guides and host breakout team days to deepen the practice on local and departmental levels.
This creates resilience - not the kind that’s written in a funky bold font on a poster, but the kind that bounces off the walls into the halls and becomes mutually understood and owned by your people. They know when they are living up to it, how to recognize when they’re not, and what to do about it. They know exactly how to tackle it head-on on Monday by tapping into your value- and most importantly practice - of resilience.
Ready to dive into offsites and make your company culture hit all the right notes?
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