Producing a Successful Offsite Part 4/6: Warm Their Engines BEFORE They Arrive
Welcome to part 4 of Vayomar’s 6-part series on designing a winning company event. In previous posts, we reviewed the importance of clearly defining your offsite’s ROI, having a defining theme and leveraging the power of total immersion. Today, we will review the value of conducting pre-offsite activities that allow you to hit the ground running as soon as the offsite begins.
While 2-4 full days may seem like an eternity for the executives who need to temporarily close their calendars to attend, from a process perspective, this is a small amount of time to influence meaningful and lasting cognitive and behavioral change (even when seamlessly applying the concepts of total immersion and theme).
Once again, we are faced with the following efficiency questions:
- How can we make it so that people hit the ground running from the second they arrive at the offsite (as opposed to spending the first few hours of the offsite “warming their engines”)?
- How can we start impacting the participants even before the offsite formally begins and keynote speakers open their sessions?
Thankfully, we live in an era of digital transformation. A pre-offsite teaser campaign is all about effectively answering these questions. Much like the total immersion and theme components, this one also has the great added value of being “low cost – high impact.”
A teaser campaign can easily be run via emails, sent every few days, for several weeks before the offsite. These emails should contain cool pictures, quotes, links to related videos, etc.
Every email should be very SHORT AND CONCISE and include a theme-related teaser – nothing more. The idea is to pique your participants’ curiosity and drive employee engagement, while gradually introducing the offsite’s theme… without fully giving it away.
You can also incorporate teasers into team and management meetings that take place before the offsite – but like with the emails, they should not take longer than several minutes and should not give the entire theme away. The goals of the teaser campaign are to build awareness, positive expectations, and a latent foundation for the desired mindset this offsite is meant to cultivate. This, while remaining aligned to your company culture and corporate strategy, throughout.
Next, we will discuss the importance of a follow up campaign as a way of extending the short offsite’s impact, from days into weeks, thus dramatically improving the ROI.
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