“Offsite Meetings”: Productive & Fun

• Elect a coordinator: Choose someone to communicate reminders, coordinate day-of plans and be the point-person for any questions.  At Lake Breeze Terrace the office coordinator works directly with Lake Breeze Event Manager to accomplish the perfect meeting.
• Finalize and share your agenda: Share your meeting agenda well in advance of your offsite (at least 48 hours). Give teams the opportunity to start thinking about what they want to bring to the conversation. 
• Assign pre-work: Sharing the agenda is important, but you also want to provide as much additional context as possible by assigning “pre-work” or “pre-reading” – that way, you can spend your valuable offsite time making decisions, rather than getting everyone up to speed. For example, if your offsite is for problem-solving, assign some pre-work brainstorming or reading over a briefing on the problem you’re solving for.
• Assign a note-taker(s): Instead of everyone taking separate sets of notes, assign a master note-taker. This person will be responsible for taking and sharing all notes.

Your offsite meeting agenda

Every offsite is different depending on your objective, but this basic structure can be followed for most purposes.

1. Objectives – why we’re here

Use this time to share “why we’re all here” and what you want to achieve at the of the offsite.

2. Ground rules

Here’s where you’ll outline the logistics of the offsite. You might assign smaller teams, send people to different physical locations, set time restrictions and more.

3. Activities/sessions

You’ll likely have a few different sessions and activities throughout your offsite meeting. This section of the agenda may take several hours or even days.

4. Team Builders

Team Builders are sessions that encourage the team to work together to solve a problem or to have fun or sometimes to complete for fun.

5. Next steps

Always close your offsite with a summary of what’s happening next.