Hi friends today. I've got a great show for you. So get ready and welcome to the darn good leadership podcast. This show is all about being a strong and effective leader. One that creates positive impacts on your teams and communities. And this show you're going to get ideas, inspiration, and practical advice. You can take action on to be a darn good leader. I'm your host, Emily. Holting. And today I'm starting you off with a question. When was the last time you've been face-to-face in-person with your employees or your team? And not just one of them that is co located and sits near you by happenstance. But I mean, all of your employees or your entire direct team, If the answer is never, or it's been more than a year? Well, this is me urging you to change that. Now, listen, I know everyone needs to be mindful of budgets, but we also have to lead our teams in an effective manner. And finding a way to ensure you come face-to-face with your employees and your teams at least once a year is important. And dare I say it necessary. I am a huge supporter of virtual work, asynchronous work and empowering individuals to get work done at a time and place that fits their needs. But working apart is much more effective. If everyone is aligned and formed feels connected has trust within their team and has sound loose ties to other employees outside of their team. Then they can go back and be effective in their own. Workspaces Research has shown that face-to-face communication is more important than ever. So I'm going to share with you a couple of reasons of why this is so critical. Number one is trust. Trust is the number one indicator of high productivity and high performing teams. Teams that come together, have higher trust and therefore better collaboration, greater productivity and more innovation and creativity. Too. It allows people to make new connections. And this is super critical for those loose tie connections that we all took for granted when we were in the office every day together.

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It boosts engagement and active participation. For it helps with any conflict resolution. And this is because face to face is much more effective for complex topics, delicate issues. And or sensitive conversations. Five. It creates shared understanding. Which is really critical in the virtual world or global environments where many things can be misconstrued and misunderstood. In the remote space. And number six. It improves job satisfaction. And this is because when you bring people together, And makes them feel a sense of connection and belonging to their coworkers and their place of work. And the list goes on. So now that I've shared with you some of the benefits of face to face. Let me ask you a second question. What's stopping you. What's stopping you from making this happen for your employees, for yourself and for your team. Okay. So probably the number one reason here might be budget. So this is the case. There's a couple of things you can do. Make a use case. And I understand this is slightly easier if you're a manager than an individual contributor, but if you are an individual contributor, we'll get other team members bought into this and presented out as a collective United front, back to your manager. So what might be in this use case? Well, at minimum, you'll want to outline your why, why do you need to bring people together? Why can't you just accomplish these things remotely or virtually.

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You'll want to list your objectives that you have for the onsite. You'll want to list all the people who would be there and a rough estimate of costs for traveling. Stay. To help with costs. You can also travel to a spot where most people reside, and you can plan ahead. So you're not paying escalated planes and hotel prices. What else might be stopping you? It also could be that you're just not sure what you would do once you have everyone. Face-to-face. So here are some ideas on that. Talk about your vision. Talk about your strategy. You're okay. Ours, your short-term goals processes that need to be improved workflows that need to be mapped. Team building training. Any complex conversations. Build trust and cross-functional work. Okay. What else? What else might be stopping you? Maybe you just don't feel like it. If you're a manager feeling this way. Maybe it's time you change your attitude. You have a responsibility to your people and in this role, they come first. So. Change your mindset or change your role. What else might be stopping you? If your role or company has hired you under specific circumstances where travel is not permitted. This might be slightly harder, but if you still feel strongly about it and that coming together face to face would be a value. I would still encourage you to make your case. What's the worst that can happen. If I've peaked your interest or convinced you to get your people together will gay. I want to actually share now how you would plan an onsite or offsite. And by the way, these are five steps that I use every time I bring my teams together. So here we go. I hope you find it useful. Five steps to achieving a successful onsite. Number one, make the objectives, agenda and pre reads available to everyone. Transparency is key here. So whether you use confluence, mural, word docs, Google docs, Excel sheets. Use whatever tools either a people are familiar with or be a tool that you're wanting this group to further adapt, but balance this with whatever else you're trying to do in the session. You'll also want to collaborate on the session content. It's really important that you put out the big objectives and the draft agenda, but these should be draft and you'll want to collaborate on, Hey, what questions do you have, whether they're topics were you hoping to get out of the sessions? What outcomes were you looking to achieve? What are our most pressing items to make sure that we make progress on. Allow people to help edit and calibrate on what is the most valuable things that you could focus that session on. You'll also need to prepare. So no last minute, throw togethers the weekend before. If you're going to invest in bringing your people together. Well, you better also invest in preparing for the session itself. So having a plan and a well thought out agenda. And ensuring those objectives make sense. These are all necessary things to do. And as I say, plans are useless, but planning is everything. Number two. The second step to achieve a successful on-site is get cross-functional. Whether this is bringing in specific teams or individuals for specific sessions. Or you even think radically about creating an entire on-site that is cross-functional. This can be really helpful for teams to get to know each other, especially teams that need to be able to work effectively. You want those individual contributors and the people in the day to day to be able to reach out to those other team members outside of their own team. And solve their own problems. This is true empowerment. This is allowing people to do their best work. So you've got to bring these groups together for them to meet each other. share perspectives, discuss common problems and most importantly solution together. And when you do this, you will unleash a whole new level of productivity. Because these teams are now creating rapport outside of their own direct groups. The third step and achieving a successful onsite is to bake in breaks and fun. Of course, we always want to have a stellar agenda, but before you know it, that crisp session can quickly become over-packed we've all been in those meetings. We're onsite somewhere there aren't adequate breaks and you're just hanging on being like, when are we breaking? I've gotta use the bathroom. I'm hungry, I'm hungry. I need a snack, or you're mentally just overload in there. Like I need to. Get out of this room. So you've got to allow people to break both from the session and from the seriousness. So it's important that you have little bits of fun baked in. And that you allow the space for people to wander off and start to have organic conversations, organic conversations with their own team and hopefully organic conversations. But those cross-functional loose tie connections that we so desperately want to create. The fun factor is necessary and keeping people engaged and bringing out the best in folks. And fond does not have to mean cheesy. Although I get a little cheesy from time to time as a leader. Uh, but do what feels genuine and authentic to you? Fun can be simple things like going to happy hour. Dinners allowing folks to break off into smaller groups, explore the area. You can also do bigger team building events. That's more leveled up like bowling ax, throwing hikes, mini golf, go-kart racing, arcades and murder, mystery dinners. The point here is that in the breaks and fun it's in that space that we have reserved before. In between. And after those working sessions where people truly connect, where they learn about each other, they find commonalities and interesting facts and they start to build rapport. So do yourself a favor and your teams a favor and make sure your agenda has lots of hefty breaks and fun. Built-in. The fourth step to achieve a successful onsite is starts and in the day strong. Now, what do I mean by strong? Well, don't just jump straight into a session and don't just leave. Uh, session and be like, I don't know. I'll pick it back up tomorrow. Be intentional. Here are my recommendations on how to start and end the day strong with intentional efforts. Use icebreakers. So think about the group you're bringing together. Is this your own team? Or is this a cross-functional group? And how well do they know each other? What is the trust level here? And then you'll want to select specific icebreakers. To allow that group to start to soften and get to know each other better and really break the ice. So these are important. I'm just easing into the conversation. Easing into understanding everyone's background and context and roles and what their perspectives are and what their personality type is like. So make sure you don't just jump straight in. With some complex topic when people don't have rapport. Use the first 30 minutes to have casual conversations. And make it fun. Bill building a little bit of fun to it, because if you're going to be there for a couple of days, no doubt. There will be moments that you're going to have more serious conversations. So start the day off with a little bit of fun. And how to end the day strong. I would suggest using retrospectives. Now, what questions you ask at the end of the day can be up to you. But here are the things that I typically run through. First, I think about all the sessions that were held that day on the onsite. And I try to pull away what were the biggest takeaways we had throughout the day from each session. what value we got out of that day's work. And then we talk about as a group, what seemed to work well today? Do people like the breaks that people like the food did they like the format? Get that feedback of what seemed to go well. So you can do more of that the next day. And then you got to talk about what needs to be changed or improved before the next day. Maybe the room you worked in was too small, or maybe, they, realize that the agenda for tomorrow needs to change that's really important too, to reflect on. All right. We had this plan member. We were prepared for the session. But we want to inspect and adapt. Is this plan still make sense or is there a different type of session and conversation? Or space that we need for tomorrow. make sure you review what is up on doc for tomorrow? What are the sessions who needs to be there? And what time are we starting? And don't forget to mention to people about food. Should they come hungry because you're bringing in breakfast or should they make sure they grab a bite before they come in? So starting and ending the day strong. And finally the step number five to achieve a successful onsite is. Share your outcomes, output and next steps. The same way that we shared, and we're really good with transparency when we were creating the objectives and the agenda and the pre-reads for this onsite. We also want to be just as transparent when we're sharing out the outcomes, output, and next steps from that onsite. Especially, if you had to make a use case for this, with leadership, they're going to want to know what was the ROI on this? What value did the team get and add some subjective and some non-subjective items to this, if you can. One way to do this is typically for each of the sessions or at the end of the entire onsite. I will ask the group at hand. How valuable was this for you? On a scale of one to five or how well do you feel that we work together as a team, or how much stronger do you feel your connections are with this team? Or how much more empowered do you now feel in your role at work? Or how much better do you understand the objectives that we are off to do for next quarter, but ask questions around whatever you were trying to do at the end. So you can rate and you can get input from not only your own personal understanding of how the event went, but all of the attendees, how did they feel? A wind. Then you have real data that you can use for yourself as a leader to figure out what you need to do differently, or the same, the next time you want to do something like this in the future. And when you're sharing your outcomes and your output and your next steps, you can use several formats. There might be things you want to do. Asynchronously, there might be an executive overview you want to put together maybe there's something that you worked on, that's going to impact a group. You definitely want to make sure you communicate that out. Typically I do put together an executive overview. I also put together more detailed notes for team members who weren't able to make it. And I will either present or record an overview of how the session went and I'll make it available to whoever wants to watch it. Who's interested in learning about what we achieved. And what the next steps are from that onsite. Fun fact, I'm actually getting ready to have an onsite with my team, this coming week. And we have people flying in from various locations throughout the world. We will have four days of cross-functional sessions taking place. And I thought it might be useful to walk through those five steps again, with my specific examples. So here we go. Step one, make the objectives agenda and pre-reads available to everyone. So I started working on this on-site the moment the last on-site ended. Where we had the group come together. And at that onsite, we decided we needed a quarterly cadence of coming face to face. So before we even left that session, we identified the dates. We were targeting for our next onsite, which was three months away, which is next week. A month ago, I began drafting the objectives and the agenda, and then I opened it up to my teams and other groups who would be in attendance over the last three weeks. I had one of my amazing team members focus on the pre-reads that needed to get ready and prepped. And over the last two weeks, we began having short working sessions, both synchronously and asynchronously around the agenda itself. All of our objectives agenda and pre-reads are now in confluence and open to anyone at the company to access and read. Also, we worked pretty tightly with our people ops group. Who's also amazing and they helped us plan and prepped breakfast lunches and figure out what we wanted to do at night for dinners and happy hours. Step to get cross-functional when we held our last onsite, we had a cross-functional group come together and it worked extremely well, but we also identified, we need to have a better global representation of the business. So I'm very excited for this on-site to host a globally cross-functional team and build stronger connections with those folks who I typically don't get to see face to face in the real world or face-to-face even in the virtual world. Step three. Bacon breaks and fun. This time around, we've baked in more breaks than our last iteration, but we also have four days instead of the two that we had last time. So that does help. We decided to bring in lunch two of the days, but not to work through those lunches and allowing folks to socialize and have hopefully some nice water cooler moments. Two of the days. We are also having folks go offsite in small groups for lunch to explore both the area and new connections. We have baked in 15 to 30 minutes between each of the sessions. And have dinners and happy hours planned. Additionally fun is of the essence. And at our last onsite, we gave the team there a code name of team, deep dish. Now this name is very much an inside joke. As it comes off a heated, a fun, heated conversation of what is the best type of pizza. There is no better way to get people talking and talking about food. If you're looking for a good icebreaker. The conversation was so funny and the debate on pizza was such a memorable moment and a unifying moment that the team name, team deep dish emerged and still lives on today. Set for start and end the day strong. Each day we have an icebreaker prepped and each afternoon we have a 30 minute session to review the day's takeaways. Take a peek at tomorrow's agenda and adjust sessions as needed. We have spaces reserved for session notes and spaces created and ready to go for asynchronous retro feedback throughout any given day. So team members at any moment can other thoughts on what's working, what they like and ideas, they have to improve giving us the ability to adjust not only day to day, but also on the fly, if need be. And finally, step number five, share your outcomes, output. And next steps. I spoke about this before, but each session we will record takeaways and next steps. And then off of that, we'll be able to create an executive summary for leadership and any stakeholders who weren't able to attend, but still have interest. At the last on-site we had some pretty impactful changes. So I ended up dropping into five different team meetings of the teams that were impacted to explain the change. Discuss the why's and answer Q and A's and likely that might happen again. So we'll figure out before we leave what those next steps are and proceed accordingly. Let's recap. The five steps to achieving a successful on-site are number one, make the objectives, agenda and pre reads available to everyone. Number two, get cross-functional. Number three bake in breaks. Number four start and end the day strong. And number five, share your outcomes, outputs, and next steps with everyone. So let's start the same way we began. When was the last time your team was face-to-face in person. If you're looking for ways to make your team more productive than invest in time to make your case for bringing them together, invest in planning and preparing for the event and watch as your people become more United, more aligned and more engaged. I hope this was helpful and I wish you a wonderful rest of your week. Be bold, be bright. B leader who creates their own team deep dish cheers