The On-Site Off-Site

Written by Mike Shapiro | | September 27, 2016

There’s a theory that it helps to get everyone away from the office so they’ll think different thoughts about work. Such efforts seem to offer a way to bring new solutions to problems because an off-site location is likely to:

  1. Give everyone a change of scenery.
  2. Drop the formality in communication.
  3. Free everyone from the constraints of titles and roles.
  4. Get away from the pressure of responding to urgent day-to-day demands.

Sometimes it works…at the conference center. But when they return to the office, people snap back to old behaviors. Why?

  1. The titles and roles, and the conventions, privileges and obligations attached to them, are still there waiting.
  2. They’re back in the office environment with its associated patterns and habits of interaction.
  3. Communication resumes its formality.
  4. People are back to responding to urgent day-to-day demands

So what do you do to capture the benefits of the offsite and make them stick when returning to the real world?

  • Use your lunch break to do a brown-bag meeting where you conduct your off-site ON-site.
  • Bring some case studies based on actual current problems people are struggling with.
  • Make sure people work in teams of 2 or 3, with different functional specialties (say sales and ops) represented on each team.

Have each of the small groups pick a couple of the case studies and apply this simple 3-step process:

STEP 1. Describe the solution state. How would things look from the point of view of each constituent or stakeholder if the problem were solved?

STEP 2: Define the actions to be taken and by whom. Who is the absolute best person to do each of the actions? Don’t be constrained by role, title or position. Focus strictly on proven capability.

STEP 3: Define your role. Have each person define the best use of his or her own skills and knowledge in each solution.

Let the small groups work on the problems for awhile and then share their proposed solutions with the larger group.

Repeat at least once per quarter.

A change of scenery is nice, but chances are it won’t help you resolve tough problems back at the office.

Try staying right where you are, but use case studies to change the dynamics of your group’s interaction habits, and see whether that makes a difference.