Building an Onsite

Ten weeks ago, a task landed in front of me. The 65-person (+ 1 dog) People team at Clio was going to be together for the first time since 2019. The challenge: What were we going to do?

There's never enough time to do everything you want at an onsite. This is a reflection on how and why we made agenda decisions. I'm hopeful this will be helpful for others, but I'm honestly doing it so that I don't forget 😅.

Step 1: Get clear on your goals (and don't deviate).

Much like instructional design, our onsite design process started by gathering the planning team to ideate on what our onsite should accomplish. I facilitated an open conversation that netted three key priorities, which we translated into goals:

1. Our team hadn't been together since 2019 and there were a lot of new faces since then (mine included), so we needed to create lots of connection space.

2. Our team structure has shifted significantly since then, so we needed to establish common knowledge of what each functions does and is responsible for.

3. With both these things in mind, we needed to create a safe-to-fail experience of working together on a People team problem.

Once we established and agreed on these two goals, we built out a framework of activities to accomplish them (more on that later). But more importantly, we also knew this meant other goals were NOT going to be a part of this event. It sped up our decision making a LOT.

This all ties back to Tuckman's Stages of Group Development theory. If your team is forming (like ours), don't load them up with context as though they were already performing.

Step 2: Build Goal-Oriented Activities

When we started brainstorming potential activities, I added a column to our list called Goal Orientation. It answered a simple question: did the proposed activities contribute towards any (or all) of our goals? This helped the planning team quickly whittle down the list to the most impactful activities. We landed on:

• Half a day with individual teams (i.e. Business Partners, Learning & Development, etc.) to build connections

• A group volunteering experience with the YWCA

• Panels representing all the People functions, talking about their role in helping Clio meet its goals

• A group volunteering experience serving lunch to staff at our headquarters

• A Business Case Study competition, where mixed-function teams pitched solutions to current business problems

• Social dinners, both inside and outside of the office

I have a request for you -- think of an onsite activity that's NOT on that list that would be super impactful.

Done? Good work. You found AT LEAST one. Probably more. That's because there's no end to the number of impactful activities you can run at an onsite! Staying goal oriented made it easier (read: faster) for us to say no.

Step 3: Involve the Group

I had an amazing planning committee working with me. But even with eight of us, executing against these activities (especially because we were building everything in house) would have been too much.

So we engaged with our people! Members of Learning & Development helped craft the Panel format and worked with presenters. Workplace Experience did all the room booking and meal organizing. Our directors crafted the case study and evaluation criteria. Team Leads built their own team time agendas.

Almost all my leads have told me that I tend to ask for help too late. I always want to look back on this as a case study for the benefits of asking early.

The Results?

We're still gathering feedback, but what I'm hearing early is that we hit the mark. People feel more connected, they enjoyed problem solving together, and they're excited to be more collaborative go-forward.

Our next onsite should look radically different from this one. Hopefully we'll be better Formed than we were at the beginning of this one, and can dig in more deeply on Performing together.