Take advantage of off-site services

After ten years of research Harvard Business Review A performance-enhancing alternative for helping employees build meaningful collaborative networks is pointed out: Corporate offsite.

Offsite working or corporate retreats are nothing new. However, recent research in Harvard Business Review provides the first visible evidence that they can be a powerful strategic tool for managers, allowing them to reshape employees’ informal organizational networks to promote more ideas and expertise Knowledge sharing.

Why choose another place?

Collaborative networks, especially across departments, can improve individual and corporate performance. But when more employees are working from home or in hybrid environments, there are far fewer organic opportunities to build critical connections based on trust.

Even in a shared office environment, organizational hierarchies and departments can cut off colleagues’ opportunities to acquire diverse knowledge and complementary skills.

Offsite events—company-sponsored, often multi-day events that bring employees together outside the office—bring about interactions that might not otherwise occur. Being offsite creates unique opportunities for employees to connect face-to-face, form new relationships and strengthen existing ones. Therefore, being offsite helps people gain access to others’ knowledge and builds interpersonal trust, both key elements of effective collaboration.

Provide offsite work for attendees

Recent Harvard Business Review research with a large global company explores solutions to the pressing problem of jump-starting collaboration. Their research was exhaustive, looking at eight years of the company’s annual offsite data and analyzing more than 350,000 instances of formal working relationships using the work records of more than 750 employees.

After examining collaboration networks for several months before and after offsite, the results concluded that offsite worked for attendees, not only creating personal connections between employees but also generating significant revenue for the company.

Here are the immediate and ongoing benefits:

• Attendees received a 24% increase in new incoming collaborative work requests compared to prior off-site, particularly among those who had been with the company for less than five years. Why? Simply because of the increased visibility and opportunity to showcase their expertise.
• An HBR analysis of company records shows each offsite study generated more than $180,000 in revenue from new collaborations in its first two months.
• Two years later, 17% of new connections were still active and their value had increased significantly.
• Even for those who don’t attend, off-site events are valuable because research shows the impact ripples throughout the company, increasing collaboration between everyone in the company.
• Generally speaking, offsite encourages company-wide collaborative activities and rewiring of organizational networks.

Make the most of being offsite

Offsite hosting is a significant investment. As leaders create their annual budgets, a natural question is: How can they get the highest ROI from offsite?

Based on further qualitative research, plus a decade of working directly with senior leaders from more than 100 global organizations to plan and follow up on corporate retreats, Harvard Business Review proposes four strategies for leveraging offsite workers.

• Customize meetings based on pre-event data

Many times, the focus of offsite staff is on the goals of the leader rather than the goals of the attendees, so before the event, survey people (especially those working hybrid or remote) to understand their specific needs and goals for the gathering .

• Set offsite goals for new hires

New hires get the most from targeted network building: in just a few days (or hours) they can significantly improve network quality, leading to more interesting projects, higher job satisfaction, and higher Performance paves the way.

• Instruct employees to prepare for work

Attending events is easy, just keep your fingers crossed. While you may get lucky sometimes, that’s not a recipe for success. Instead, provide tools to help employees make the most of offsite opportunities. Diagnostic tools range from psychometrics to 360s to elevator pitch workshops. They help employees identify 1) areas in which they excel, and 2) areas where they need additional knowledge and perspectives from colleagues.

• Track value offsite

Monitor the key outcomes of the meetup. For example, what relationships were established? Which ones are resurrected? What commitments were made and what joint work resulted? What new business will result from these new or improved relationships? What other strategic benefits are elicited (e.g., higher customer satisfaction, efficiency, talent engagement)?

Leaders can also ask about any changes in employee collaboration through short surveys or focus groups.

This data provides a more comprehensive and tactical picture of ROI than the highly subjective forms of assessment used by many companies, or, worse yet, simply assuming that value has been created. Collecting data that aligns with your offsite goals gives you a solid foundation for designing future meetings and planning other events and programs that inspire collaboration.

Harvard Business Review’s Research Methodology appears in Strategic Management Journal.

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