Planning a Corporate Retreat

We can provide you with a wide variety of options for your next corporate retreat, depending on your team needs and budget.

o Half or full-day team building adventures, carefully designed to fit into your existing retreat theme,

o Half or full-day experiential workshops based on leadership, teamwork, communications or other professional development topics in support of your training initiatives,

o Complete facilitation of multi-day corporate retreats including team building adventures, corporate training workshops, team assessments, and strategic planning.

Adventure Associates’ streamlined planning process ensures that your team building adventure or corporate training workshop is well-suited to its environment, its participants and the retreat objectives. If it sounds “canned” or feels “off the shelf” to the participants, it won’t be as successful. Our corporate retreats are highly customized to fit your culture, your language and your corporate retreat theme.

Corporate retreats allow you to focus on the real work: strategic planning, visioning, priority setting, role clarification and decision-making.

Our clients report tremendous satisfaction with the retreat results and the decision-making process as well as the energy and enthusiasm that accompanies participants back to the workplace.

Planning a corporate retreat is a demanding process, however, with the right planning tools, and strategic partners, companies can successfully plan and execute retreats.

Planning a Retreat

Planning a retreat is a demanding process: agreeing upon the retreat objectives, choosing a venue, customizing the content for your company, coordinating logistics and travel. More and more often, these responsibilities are being handled by ad hoc committees and busy administrators. While we aren’t a meeting planner service, we do have vast experience and contacts from which our clients benefit. Download our retreat planning worksheet to make your job easier.

Retreat Planning Tips

Inclusivity
Our programs are designed for a wide variety of interests, ages, physical fitness levels and cultural backgrounds.

Meeting Location
If you have already decided on the site, we are happy to speak to your site contact so we can specify the meeting space appropriate for the team building program you select. If you have chosen your team building program, but are still looking for a site, we may be able to recommend some parks or conference centers near your team. Remember, we can go to the site of your choice, no matter where it is in the world.

Surprise or Not?
We have found that in most cases, the group participants prefer to have some advance notice as to what type of activity they will be participating in. You may choose to give them minimal information in order to keep them guessing or provide them with an information sheet (supplied by Adventure Associates) that describes the workshop.

What’s Included?
We include all supplies and equipment needed to lead your corporate team building program. Our average facilitator to participant ratio is 1:12 and the facilitator’s pre and post planning time is included except in some situations involving intensive needs assessment survey or interview work.

Meals and Snacks
Don’t forget about meals and snacks – group members appreciate bottled water on a warm afternoon or a thermos of coffee to start off a chilly morning. If we are meeting at an outdoor venue, we may be able to recommend a caterer in your area who delivers box lunches and beverages.

Starting Time
Often if the start of the corporate team building program coincides with the end of a meal or business session, we have a greater chance of beginning on time and not losing individuals as they check voicemail or take a short break. Please allow extra time if you are transporting people from a hotel to a different location for the team building.

Facility
Choosing a facility for your conference or retreat will be one of the most important decisions you make to assure the privacy, convenience and comfort you will need to make your meetings successful. The facility must be able to accommodate your planned agenda, but should also provide options for spontaneity.

Lead Time
While we prefer our clients to give us two to three months notice to plan large programs, we are flexible. Our national network of facilitators and wide array of team building adventures and corporate training modules allow us to accommodate programs as close as two weeks out. We understand that our clients occasionally have “emergencies.”