5 Fun and Epic Company Retreat Ideas
As more and more companies are required to enact extended work-from-home policies through 2021, planning and executing an epic company retreat to bring the team together is going to be more important than ever. Whether you’re planning your first retreat for your company or you’re a seasoned offsite planner, you’re probably looking for those unique ideas to set the experience off for your team.
A well planned and thoughtfully designed retreat will leave your team inspired and excited throughout the entire length of the retreat. When designing the experience and coming up with ideas for activities, we recommend taking a step back and really thinking about what makes your team and culture unique. Many times, this can drive toward a really cool idea that gets everyone really excited.
THE BASICS
Let’s Talk Basics
Establish Goals
First things first, we have to figure out what you hope to gain from the retreat. Setting the vision means having a keen understanding of what the experience might actually look like for any employee while on-site. What does a rough itinerary look like? What is the lodging situation look like? Single rooms, shared rooms, are bunk-beds ok, how about glamping? Are we looking to offer just beer and wine or do we want a full-bar? How much space do we need for an all-hands session? How important is Wifi, Cell Service, or a VPN? These are all questions that should be answered before you start planning.
After creating your vision, it’s time to get down to business and establish your goals. We recommend having 2-3 goals. Whether it’s to increase productivity or focus on employee bonding these goals will become the building blocks when planning your company retreat!
Set a Budget
Let’s talk money. As dreaded as this conversation may be, it is by far the most important one when planning your company retreat. You probably already know that a budget is crucial in determining which features and venues are suitable options for your retreat, but the act of actually setting a budget can be all sorts of overwhelming. So, we’re here to break it down. First, start by answering these questions:
How much is your team wanting to spend per person?
What locations will allow our dollar to go the furthest?
Will transportation be handled individually or as a group?
Is your team comfortable with single or double occupation?
Now that you have a good idea of the vision, goals, and requirements, break it down per night based on the following categories and start allocating a dollar amount per required activity for the retreat: Transportation, Lodging/Venue, Workspace, Food and Drink Team Building, and Activities. We recommend allocating at least $500/night/person for the all-inclusive retreat experience. If you don’t think your company can accommodate, try planning a single day experience. Not only will your team still get an amazing bonding experience, but the cost will be substantially lower! Now that you have a number, you can move onto budget allocation!
Focus on a Buy-out
With the majority of companies still forced to work remotely, a buyout is becoming a better and better option. If the safety benefits weren’t enough to convince you to consider a buy-out, the increased employee engagement definitely will be. By having the venue to yourself you’ll have full run of the land and extra time for campfire karaoke and other amazing teaming-bonding activities! The best part? At offsite we already have dozen of opportunities for the perfect buyout retreat!
Food and Drink
Food and Drinks, quite literally, the bread and butter of your team’s epic retreat. Now that you’ve established your goals and secured a budget, it’s time to craft the perfect menu! Start to piece together a rough itinerary of your retreat details with key items in place such as transportation time, meetings, and workshops, activities, and then you can start to see where the natural meal times will fall into place.
With groups ranging from ten to three hundred, how do you craft a custom menu that suits all different pallets? When planning out each meal, the number one thing we aim to do is create diversity in options. If you’re working with a hotel, it’s common for them to organize buffet options that usually feature a protein, veggie, and side dish, and a salad. These packages are usually more cost-effective than ordering a-la-carte, and often items can be swapped for an alternate depending on your group’s needs. To continue to cut back on costs, consider offering a light lunch and splurging on an amazing Happy Hour and Dinner experience, just make sure to be cautious of everyone’s dietary needs!
Those were just the basics for a more extensive overview, check out our company retreat planning guide!
“The Offsite crew handled our first company-wide retreat, and they were outstanding! It was almost 100 people and everything was smooth and simple. Very personable, organized, professional, and a fun crew to be around!”
Now to the Epic Company Retreat Ideas!
Adult Camp
If you’re planning a retreat outside of SF or NYC, you have probably thought of the camp vibe theme for your offsite. It’s a great idea for a lot of teams and can usually be executed in a fairly cost-effective manner. We like to take our Camp-Outs to the next level!
Most often we see people start by trying to find the venue. You’re going to do A LOT of research and have to submit a lot of RFP’s if you start there. Let’s start with the vision and the bigger question, what does the itinerary look like? How do I want this retreat to go so that everyone walks away really inspired and excited about our company?
Once you have that idea on paper, it’s time to design the experience!
If you’re dealing with over 100 people, we recommend designing teams before the retreat. This is an opportunity to build pre-event hype and get people in the office working together even before the camp begins. From there, it’s a matter of designing fun and competitive challenges for the teams throughout the retreat.
Don’t forget to give people the chance to chill-out, lose the team mentality, and bond with everyone. Usually, a Happy Hour with Lawn Games can do the trick here!
Survivor
It’s not uncommon for a client to come to us with relief and excitement because they just got done with a 6 to 12-month internal sprint. Here’s how it was recently described to us on a discovery call:
”Our entire team has been heads down grinding for the past 7 months. Not only have we re-launched three of our core services but we’ve almost doubled our headcount and just closed our Series B round of funding. Everyone is a little bit burnt and we need to take some time to relax, refresh, and realign our culture and values internally.”
Designing survivor related challenges is a great way to involve everyone in even the most diverse teams. Certain challenges can speak more toward cerebral thinking while others can be geared toward physical accomplishments.
“Mat and his team went above and beyond to make our event successful!”
The Multi-Day Hunt
To make an offsite experience engaging and interactive for your entire team throughout, we recommend designing a multi-day scavenger hunt experience. This theme can be incorporated into every element of the experience from announcing the offsite to your team through transportation, room assignments, work sessions content and team-building activities.
Landing on a theme early is recommended because although it takes more upfront thought-process and planning, it can save you loads of time and stress when diving into the research and planning.
Hack-A-Thon
The requests for a hack-a-thon style event have really reduced over the past couple of years from our clients. We still think that it can be the ideal experience for some clients, with a little rebranding. In the most well-designed hack-a-thon retreats and offsites, we incorporate puzzles, challenges, and activities that broadly touch on various aspects of your core business. Thinking of the entire retreat as a hack-a-thon and designing in such a way is a great opportunity to get different departments and teams to really utilize each’s unique skills and personality to come up with solutions to unique problems.
“The energy this team brings to the table is next level. We had an engaging program outlined from the Offsite Co. that allowed us to connect over 40 remote employees that were able to form meaningful connections through online games, video challenges, trivia, and more!”
Jeopardy
We love this idea for a company retreat for 25-75 people. So much so we’ve even incorporated for teams of 120 in a more broken down version. We recommend using this after dinner and maybe offering a few drinks before or during this event if your company has a more liberal alcohol policy.
Send out a form to everyone on your team and ask them one question: What is something unique about you that people don’t know?
Take all of the answers put them in a slideshow (on individual slides) to be displayed on a projector during the retreat. You will also need small whiteboards and dry erase markers for the game.
Go-Time: Put the slideshow up on the projector and show each slide one at a time. Once the slide is up, read the sentence aloud and give everyone a minute to guess who on the team that unique story is about.
This always ends up in some fascinating team building and allows for many inside jokes to go home among the team after the retreat.
The “Company Name” Ultimate Race
A high-energy relay race designed specifically for your team. This one might be harder to pull-off in-house but it is certainly a client favorite on Offsite Co. designed retreats.
Create a series of relay race style challenges based on unique inflection points for your team and company culture. Each team has to elect one member of their team to tackle one challenge within the race as a whole. Typically, we have between 10-15 stops on a relay race for our clients. We love to incorporate inside jokes and funny memes from the internal culture of the company if possible.
This race usually takes between 1 and 3 hours.
For further inspiration, check out our guide for planning the Ultimate Company Retreat. We breakdown the basics in designing epic retreat experiences on-budget.
500+ Custom Retreat Packages
The Offsite Co. partners with each client to design highly curated retreat experiences. Everything revolves around your teams unique goals, vision and budget. Provide some color on your retreat and we’ll be in touch within the hour.
