I think it is me that keeps making threes! Yesterday I outlined a new roadmap for something and it too had 3 areas. 🙂 I am glad I am not alone.

1. This retreat went together very quickly — but we worked hard to share the load across the company. At the 2019 retreat everyone had at least one responsibility. I believe we were building off that involvement and leadership this year. It made it easier to find volunteers willing to plan something. I’ll happily send a few examples of our information pages by email. I’m not sure if they will be useful but we’ll see! natalie@balsamiq.com

2. I don’t know that we would do much differently for that May retreat — we were all in a strange place emotionally, so the choices I think were right for that time. But one small change for the upcoming Social Mini Retreat is we are emphasizing more that no project or team meetings should be scheduled during the retreat days. This upcoming retreat is social only, and most activities will still be optional, so some people may chose to do individual work (and some jobs like support, can’t really be put on hold). However, during the May virtual retreat, some project teams scheduled meetings during the week even though we suggested they not. Having meetings scheduled made some people feel pressed to do more regular work than was absolutely necessary, and felt they couldn’t relax and focus on the retreat.

3. We use both assigned and random groups depending on the session and the desired outcomes. The random assigning by Zoom is very easy, so we’re using that now for many discussions. However there are times we want to make sure we have diverse representation in each group. We often will look to have representation from different areas of the company, from different locations, try to pay attention to things like the number of extroverts in a group, or how long people have been in the company. Most of the time groups are all doing the same activity and we bring back the results for everyone to see (usually this is written notes, but it could be a report or presentation). Last year at our 2019 retreat we did have three work groups doing different topics because we were trying to maximize brainstorming time. If you don’t have a mechanism like zoom to do the random selection for you, assigning in advance can also be a nice time saver. We chose last year to assign many things to make sure no one was left out, people didn’t have to spend time figuring out a group, and so that people didn’t always chose people they already knew because it was easy!

I hope this helps, but do reach out by email if you would like some examples of what we did.

Natalie

Thank you so much for sharing this! We’ve been thinking of various ways to conduct our virtual retreat…our small team is spread across 5 time-zones.

I wanted to know 3 things (continuing your tradition :-p )

1) How much time and effort did it take to organise this retreat? do you have any shareable content on plans and templates?

2) In hindsight, is there anything that you’d definitely not do or could have done differently?

3) Can you please share some more details on how did your organise the assigned groups session? How was it assigned, what was discussed in each group? was it the same content? how did to assemble and then share with the rest of the team.

Thank you so very much for this transparency and insight into your processes.

Best
Shilpa

Hi Nicole! We didn’t really set up the activities and recordings to be for public viewing, however I’m more than happy to share additional details about particular activities. Just let me know which ones you are interested in. And if it easier, my email is natalie@balsamiq.com