Thrive At Work Team

06/07/2023

🙋‍♀️ How long does your team retreat need to be? Great question!

Once we get a sense of our client's goals and how in-depth they want to go with those goals, we're pretty good at estimating how long we’ll need to achieve them.

💁‍♀️ Some general rules of thumb:

- In a ½ day we can typically take on one learning topic, question, opportunity, or problem

- In a full day, we can facilitate a good 2-part planning or team-building session

- 2-4 days give us time to build lasting work and go in-depth. These retreats often start with planning and then get into learning and in-depth opportunity or problem-solving sessions. Our purpose retreats are 2-4 days.

📞 When we talk with you about your retreat hopes, we’ll help you decide on the right timing. Let’s get a call scheduled!

06/05/2023

Another retreat question we get:

What does my team (Thrive At Work Team) do to make team retreats special?

😎 Everyone will participate, we design highly inclusive experiences

🤸‍♀️ The energy moves- you’ll have individual time, paired time, small group time group time, big group time

🎨 We’re creative and flexible in bringing in our surroundings, thinking about other activities and experiences to support your work

☎ We follow up when the retreat is over we don’t just leave, we’ll work with you afterward to make sure you feel confident taking everything you worked on forward

💻 Your work lives on a virtual whiteboard to use afterward

💡 We co-create with you and design your retreat to fit your needs and the people participating

🙌 People will learn, connect, do good work, solve problems, get creative, and find alignment together

💁‍♀️ We flex and adapt on the fly, no retreat goes exactly as planned and we’re used to that. You never know what'll happen when you get a group of awesome people together.

Get in touch and we'll set up a call to talk about your next retreat.

06/03/2023

Sometimes clients ask us if there’s a “best” time of year to schedule their team retreat...

😎 We co-design and facilitate retreats any time of year, but the best time of year for you might depend. Here are some things to think about:

📆 When are people most available to take time away from work? When do people have enough bandwidth to feel comfortable stepping away from the day-to-day? (Stay clear of spring breaks and vacations)

🌴 Think about your retreat goals, sometimes that can help with timing. For instance, if your goal is team building and you want to be outside, then we need to either look at the location or make sure it’s warm weather season where you are.

👍 Generally speaking, our clients book retreats at the beginning of the year in January to get that “fresh start” vibe, the beginning of summer before vacations get into full swing, or fall after kids go back to school and we have that “hunker down” kind of momentum. Get in touch to talk about the timing for your next retreat! We are booking late summer into the fall!

06/02/2023

Happy Friday! 🎁 We have a gift for you! 🎁 If you are looking to get started planning a team retreat, check it out.

It's everything you need to think about so you can get going with planning an awesome team retreat.

https://www.thriveatworkteam.com/retreat-planning-checklist

Retreat Planning Checklist Thinking about your next retreat? Here is a checklist to consider when planning your next offsite or retreat. Checklist

06/01/2023

What makes for a great team retreat?

🚩 The best retreats start with clear outcomes and thoughtfully craft retreat activities and facilitation around those outcomes.

🙌 Great retreats create opportunities for meaningful connection.

🏖 They create opportunities to find alignment, feel rejuvenated and energized, and provide opportunities to learn and have important conversations.

☝ They are clear about decision-making and what happens next.

Want to think through your next retreat? Message me! Designing and facilitating great retreats is the kind of work we love. 🤩

05/29/2023

We're talking all things retreats this week. So what kind of retreats do teams have?

The retreats we co-design and facilitate for our clients tend to fall into five types. Sometimes clients mix and match and sometimes we create something completely new, but overall teams gather away from work to:

🗺 Plan. Sometimes teams want to develop a 1-2 year team or organization plan, sometimes they want a plan focused on something specific like culture or growth or a new program or product. Whatever planning a team needs to do, a planning retreat helps teams go from the big picture to what happens this month so they can get started right away.

💫 Purpose. Purpose retreats can focus on organizational or team purpose, guided by our “strategic compass” methodology. If a team or group of individuals is ready to connect with their sense of individual purpose, we thoughtfully guide people into a deep understanding of their core gifts.

🙌 Teambuild. This is the type of retreat you need when the team needs to bond, connect in meaningful ways and share experiences together that build trust and belonging.

🧡 Heal. Some teams endure incredibly difficult experiences and need to make sense of what happened in order to move forward. Healing retreats are designed to help people make sense together, identify lessons learned and chart a path forward.

🌊 Deep dive. When your team needs to explore an opportunity or problem in depth, we’ll go from identifying the “pieces and parts” to identifying key questions and putting together action steps forward.

✏ Learn. Sometimes a retreat is just about learning how to think about or do something new. If the learning has to do with people and work, we’ve got you. We put together engaging learning sessions, tap into your team’s expertise, and partner with outside experts as needed.

Of course, if your team needs something beyond what we’re talking about here, we design custom retreats too. There’s work that cannot be done every day, and there’s work that can only be done together, that’s the power of retreats.

Learn more here: https://www.thriveatworkteam.com/retreats

Need help designing your team retreat? For many teams, hybrid work can mean a daily gauntlet of back-to-back virtual meetings, email, chats, and fitting in “actual work” in off hours. It’s never been more important to step back from day-to-day work and carve out quality time together. We desig...

05/26/2023

What happens when you make time for team retreats?

When you make time for a team retreat once or twice a year you make time to:

-Build connections, bonds, and belonging that fuels trust, collaboration, and velocity of work 🙌

-Improve communication and collaboration 🤩

-Brainstorm new ideas and solutions to problems that get pushed off in everyday work 💡

-Learn new skills 📚

-Reflect and learn from progress and set new goals 🗺

-Celebrate successes, achievements, and survivals 🎉

-Refresh and recharge 🏖

When your team feels connected to each other and their work, they are more engaged, creative, collaborative, and productive.

Workplace retreats can provide a much-needed opportunity to build the social fabric of the team, explore opportunities, learn, and solve problems that are hard to solve when you’re not all together.

The time invested in a well-designed retreat pays off exponentially in how people work together afterward and the depth of connection they feel to their work and the team.

As one of our clients recently reported back to us:
“The time you spent with us was eye-opening. We’re all seeing our work through new perspectives, we made connections we’ve never made before, and we understand each other differently, so we’re working differently. We refer back to our retreat weekly”.

Want to plan a retreat for your team? Let's talk! Message me and let's design an awesome retreat.

05/25/2023

Let's talk about work retreats! Check out Evan Ishida's new blog post on the do's and don'ts of great retreats. With hybrid and remote teams, it's especially important to get a couple of team retreats scheduled every year, so you can build the kind of connections that fuel collaboration and get work done when you're back at your desks.

https://www.thriveatworkteam.com/blog/the-dos-and-donts-of-team-retreats

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05/05/2023

While technology has some pretty impressive powers, it has displaced some of the community spaces that generations of humans were accustomed to like:

*going to the grocery store (Instacart)
*going to the bank (Venmo)
*going to the bowling alley (still fun, but Nintendo)
*post office (print-at-home stamps)
*shopping for anything (Amazon)

We’ve been noticing for years that one of the last places where organic community exists is at work. It’s the one place where you show up and have to interact with, be in a relationship with people you didn’t choose, who may be very different from you, and you have to figure out how to get some things done together.

Our real interest is in bringing community architecture to work supported by community-focused mindsets and practices.

We’re excited to find out if by adopting a community framework, workplaces not only do amazing, productive work but could it tap into the way we’re wired so people feel: fulfilled, connected, supported, valued, engaged, competent and resilient?

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.

05/03/2023

Did you know we're wired to be in community and do “good work” that helps others?

We're taking what we know about our wiring as humans when it comes to work and pairing that with a framework for “work as a community.”

This research will help shape some of our brand-new offerings to help leaders and teams do really good work, together, no matter where you work.

Send us a message if you'd like to know more!

05/01/2023

Here's our latest newsletter all about community at work. We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments or send us an email.

https://mailchi.mp/thriveatworkteam/community-at-work-1

We love a complex question over here at Thrive HQ. We’re real deep into a few questions that are shaping some brand new offerings to help leaders and teams do really good work, together, no matter where you work.