Beyond LocatioN: Factor 3
Feel Fresh
If you’re in charge of planning your team’s offsite, then I’ve got news for you: you work in experience design. Selecting the right space for your team’s offsite is step one in designing the optimal experience to get to the best outcomes for your organization. Here we offer four critical factors to think about—Focus, Flow, Fresh & Fun—to design an offsite experience that will help ensure success.
In this article we’ll look at how we can feel fresh when designing an optimal offsite experience.
Factor 3:
Feel Fresh
If flow is about managing transitions while reducing friction, keeping things fresh is about using space that promotes a sustainable level of energy and pace.
High ceilings, floor-to-ceiling windows with full light-control, writable and movable walls and whiteboards, controlled, adjustable sound and complementary, adjacent spaces for private conversation, team breakout work, shared meals and celebrations as well as micro oases for personal downtime all do a lot to help keep the emotional register of your event at the right level for your team: openly engaged, positively contributing, and playing well with others long after the icebreaker has melted.
Whether your team’s moving from forming-to-performing or is driving-and-thriving, keeping the emotional energy where it needs to be is very much a function of the space you choose, and the features of that space, as outlined above. The bunker-like feeling of your typical conference room with baffled sound from stucco-ceilings and short-pile carpets may work for third weddings and open-bar office parties, but they will suck the energy of your high potential workshops long before the last cup of coffee is cold.
We like our space like we like our coffee: fresh.
“Beyond the room itself, when it comes to energy, you’ll want to choose a location that can provide a support team that best suits your needs.”
Beyond the room itself, when it comes to energy, you’ll want to choose a location that can provide a support team that best suits your needs. If the event space you choose does most of its business in bar mitzvahs and birthday parties, then choose them for your next birthday, but know that they may not have the needed empathy or expertise in-house to help you successfully facilitate your organization’s workshops.
Choose an event space—a business studio—that’s dedicated to helping organizations and teams like yours. Choose to work with people who are deeply and directly experienced with tackling the very challenges you’re addressing, who have hands-on expertise in helping companies and teams create the future, and choose a place that’s purpose-built to support teams like yours with the tools, process, facilitation, coaching and the coffee you may need to keep things fresh.
