How often do you get together in-person with your team?

How do you know what to spend your team’s valuable time talking about?

How should you structure your time to make sure it’s fun and productive?

Here are our 3 top takeaways from our interview with retreat extraordinaire Chris Michael.

1. How often your team should get together when you’re remote

The short answer is, ‘it depends’. On budget, size of team, and other factors. But you should aim to get together in person as an organisation at least once per year, and sub teams within the organisation should meet in person once or twice per year too.

If you can’t get together regularly in person, try a ‘remote retreat’ with the same intentionality as an in-person retreat by blocking off your calendar and having dedicated time to connect as a team. Though be mindful of making remote adjustments. For example, don’t expect to spend more than 3 hours together in a day; mix up time spent on screens by pairing up and having an old fashioned phone call while on a walk; spread sessions out over more time to let things percolate and get time away from the computer.

2. What you should (and shouldn’t) cover

Here are three ideas for getting clarity that can be used together or individually depending on the time you have and your team size.

One, do a quantitive and qualitative survey of the team to surface critical conversations and dynamics that need to be addressed. Then share this data back with the team.

Two, get people who don’t often work together chatting in 2s and 3s in response to specific prompts, and then share back their highlights. This will help build rapport and normalise chatting about this stuff.

Three, have a team-wide conversation led by a facilitator to open up potential themes.

Be mindful, it’s easy to overstuff the agenda, but you’re far better off scaling back expectations into something you can reasonably cover. It is also great practice for creating the spaciousness we need to make remote work possible. Chris often cuts the 1st version of the agenda in half. But if you do this, make sure you’re transparent about why certain things ended up on the agenda and others didn’t.

3. Chris’s rule of two-thirds for engagement, inclusivity and reflection

2/3 of your agenda should be structured, 1/3 unstructured.

2/3 of your dinners/meals should be together as a team, 1/3 should be apart.

2/3 of your time should be spent in small groups or 1:1, 1/3 should be all together.

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Listen to the full episode here.