The “no work” work retreat - planning
Last week, I talked about vacationing and how our team retreat set me up for one of the best vacations I’ve ever had.
So, about that retreat - the “no work” work retreat. How did we plan it?
The inspiration
We’ve been talking about doing an in person team retreat for a while.
But the value of it really became apparent when Malaika, Danae and I travelled to Seattle last year for work. We built in downtime, ate some amazing meals together, and I stayed on for an in person retreat with my coach who also happens to be in Seattle.
We’ve always been a remote team. We started out doing in person work with clients but that all changed in the pandemic of course.
We’ve actually found that delivering our work virtually offers many advantages and can in fact be more inclusive.
Most of our clients past and present have also remained mostly remote. Of course it depends on the team and the nature of the work, but I truly believe that remote teams can be just as if not more effective than in person teams in many cases when created intentionally. The key is that remote teams need different strategies for communication, connection, collaboration, decision making and consensus building etc, than we are used to in person. Many of the challenges we’ve seen with remote teams is because they were thrown together hastily when everything shut down in March 2020 - by necessity - but were never redesigned.
Having said that, what I was reminded of on our trip last year was the power of in person touch points. There is undeniably a different kind of connection that can happen in person - an embodied understanding of one another when you can read full body language in physical space and through all five senses. There is something about being physically present with one another, and especially in groups, the conversation simply flows better without mute buttons and audio issues and the confines of those little video squares.
How the retreat came to be
One of the things that made our retreat possible was that LaVoya, who joined our team last year right when we returned from Seattle in fact, offered to design and facilitate it. It was a group effort of course, and ve got lots of input for the team, but ve brought ver own vision of something spacious and designed for rest and recovery, which is part of ver role on the team.
Ironically, as we were looking for houses to rent, the 8 bedroom houses were not quite big enough for our 8 person team as one of the bedrooms would invariably be a kids room with bunk beds. I wanted everyone to get a grown up bed! But our next choices up they met all our criterial were 20 bedrooms or more.
We ended up making what felt like a very radical decision to rent a 24 bedroom house!
I have to admit I was hesitant at first, not even because of the cost because it wasn’t actually that much more expensive and was still in budget, but it just seemed like more than necessary.
And then Danae pointed out, slightly tongue in cheek but also serious, that maybe it was way more space than I needed, but that she needed ALL the space - and that convinced me!
First of all, I’m a New Yorker with a very skewed sense of how much living space is enough (ie not very much) and secondly, damn right that we need and deserve to take up space as women and gender expansive people of color doing DEI work!
WE GET TO TAKE UP SPACE.
Plus with mostly introverts on the team, most of whom hadn’t met each other in person before, it would give us enough space to really spread out and get much needed alone time, then gather in communal spaces when we wanted.
The retreat schedule itself was a thing of beauty
V shared the schedule with all of us the week before the retreat and I think we were all surprised, myself included, at how… unscheduled a schedule it was, with only one planned full team session. As I talked with people in our 1:1s the week before about how they were feeling about the retreat and any needs or concerns they had, I realized there were a few things I needed to make clear to the team before we all gathered.
Here is the slack message I sent to the team as we all were in transit to NC:
Ok @channel it’s travel day for most of us! Remember that all your travel is reimbursable, including car service from your house to the airport. Those of you with corporate credit cards can charge the card, everyone else can submit for reimbursement in Gusto. 💳 💳 💳
All meals are covered once you leave your home too. Usually it’s $40 per travel day and $75 for the full day. However, as we’ll be doing group meals and groceries, we’ll try and cover those on corporate credit cards (all our full time employees - me, Malaika, V and Lori) and if you grab meals or snacks by yourself you can submit for reimbursement. 🥘🥘🥘
Regarding time tracking for this week, everyone on the retreat can track 8 hours per day including travel days. There is a category in Toggl called Admin/Spring Retreat 2024 precisely for this. This means part time employees will be significantly “over” this week but that seems only fair given the time you are investing away from your families and other responsibilities. 🕑🕑🕑
Aside from logistics, a few things I want to say about the retreat:
There is no work that has to be done on this trip! In fact there is nothing that has to get “done” to make this retreat “valuable” - just being together (or in the approximate vicinity of each other!) and taking up space to rest and recover is all the value we need. 🏖️🏖️🏖️
I am serious. Our “job” this week is to relax, recover, heal, and focus on wellbeing, self-care, and community care (the community being us as a team) - this is part of the work. 🛏️ 🛏️ 🛏️
I hope we can all give ourselves permission to do nothing but meet our needs as best we can in any given moment. It’s ok to spend time alone. It’s ok to spend time 1:1 with others, or in small groups. 🥰 🥰 🥰
The only pre-scheduled times we should all plan to be together are for the team dinner on day 3, process group and mimosa brunch on day 4, and for DEI consultants, process group on day 5. There are optional activities the other days per V’s amazing itinerary and travel guide and I imagine there will be other times too - I propose we consider being organic and intentional. 🙏🏼 🙏🏼 🙏🏼
My hope is that everyone gets to hang out with everyone else in smaller groups or 1:1 at some point, as well as all of us together, and that everyone also gets the alone time and rest they need as well. ❤️❤️❤️
A big thank you to @LaVoya for taking on the work of planning and facilitating the retreat. See you all soon!!!!! 🎊 🎊 🎊
(Yes we use lots of emojis in Slack - it’s one of the ways to build connection and culture on a remote team and I’m not even kidding!)
In the next post (now available here), I’ll share about how the retreat itself went.
Banner photo by Alethea Cheng Fitzpatrick from the retreat.
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