MBA1894 Was Our Virtual Team Retreat a Flop? Lessons Learned.

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Hey oh. Welcome to the $100 MBA Show. A better business is just 10 minutes away every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and in today's episode you will learn Was our virtual team retreat a flop? I mentioned a few weeks ago on the podcast that we decided to do a virtual team retreat at our company. We're all grounded because of COVID It's incredibly hard for our global team around the world to meet in one location. So we decided let's do our team retreat this year virtually. And in today's lesson I want to share with you all the takeaways after it's all done and dusted and how you could do the same for your team. If you're looking for a way to get your team together together, celebrate your wins and get excited about the future of your company. So let's get into it.

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Like I mentioned, we run a fully remote team across four continents. So our annual physical team retreat is something that we not only look forward, but it's something that we found add so much value to our growing team. Our Last retreat was in Bali, and it was a great opportunity for all of us to get to know each other, work together, and, frankly, just enjoy each other's company. Those who are on that retreat are a whole lot closer on the team than those who joined after that retreat. So we wanted to create a similar experience, even though we're not able to travel, but virtually at our homes on our desktops. So we decided to run a virtual team retreat this year. And let me tell you that when this idea was first surfaced a few months ago, I'm not gonna lie, we had some reservations. Feelings that were voiced were like, it's not gonna be the same. And that the whole team is really fatigued from all these virtual meetings. And of course, there's that idea that maybe this is gonna be cheesy, should we do it? But we decided to do one anyway, and we just wrapped up our team retreat last week. From the time I'm recording this, and I wanna share with you my immediate takeaways. Takeaway number one is that any retreat is better than no retreat. There is no doubt that meeting all in person as a team would have been amazing, and it would have been an incredible, memorable experience. More of a memorable experience than a virtual retreat, of course. But what's the alternative that we had? Not doing one. And we thought, well, not doing one is also not that great. And really what pushed us over the edge was, you know what? The team has done an incredible job this year. I really want to celebrate our team. I really want to come together and give them a moment of celebration, allow them to feel proud of themselves and also have some fun in the process. I was also aware of the fact that there were a lot of new team members since the last retreat. So I wanted to give them a chance to get to know each other a little bit on a personal level and just appreciate each other's company. Now, the elephant in the room. The biggest challenge that we had, of course, was time zones. When you're trying to run a retreat or several meetings across a week, it's really, really hard when literally everybody is spread out. For example, in Sydney, when people start their day in New York at 8am People are literally going to bed at night. So it's literally the opposite. So when we planned our retreat, we thought, okay, how can we do this with the time zones? And the bottom line is, is that for some sessions, everybody's going to have to attend an inconvenient session time. So the way we planned out our virtual retreat or retreat week, as we called it. We had three days in the week, and each day there was a block of a few hours where we met. Basically, we split up each day to be suitable for at least two time zones, which means that one of the days it's going to be inconvenient for everybody. Okay, so your inconvenient day might be Monday, or it might be Friday, or it might be Wednesday. But two out of the three days, it's going to be at a normal time for you. And it was just one of those things that we just couldn't get around. And actually, it was one of those challenges that brought the team together, brought kind of the team spirit out of all of us, because we had some people attending, you know, some fun and engaging sessions at 2am, but they were smiling and having a blast. Anyway, one of the activities that we had was called Webinar Ninjas Got Talent, which was basically a talent show competition between four groups. We split our team into four groups. And what was really cool about this session was that the session itself on retreat week was watching a video that each team has prepared to showcase their talent. And we got some outside judges to judge based on a criteria that we came up with. And it was fun to kind of do this kind of game show atmosphere with some outside judges and some commenting on each video. And it was awesome to see the hidden talents amongst all our teammates. Things I never knew our teammates can do. We had some amazing singers, great musicians, incredible acting, comedy, so much more. And it made me realize, wow, our team is capable of a lot of creativity. What was really cool about this activity, Webinar Ninja's Got Talent, was that it wasn't just something that we worked on or did during retreat week. Each team was working on their video for weeks beforehand. So each team was kind of working together. And there was a lot of team building there. There was a lot of conversations. I know in my team, we were trying to sort out, what are we good? How can we showcase our best talents? Who can sing here? Who can dance? What about comedy? Who's good at acting? Who wants to do this part? Who wants to do that part? Who wants to be project manager? It just got us going and got us working together. And it was a ton of fun. And one of the biggest pieces of feedback we got from our survey at the end of the retreat was Webinar Angels Got Talent was a lot of fun even before the retreat week. So one of my biggest takeaways is have some sort of team building activity. That's fun. That's a little silly, really, you know, and I remember doing it, and I was like, this is kind of silly. But it was so much fun to watch all the different videos and just to be silly for a little bit with your teammates and not be so serious every single day of the year. As Steve Jobs said, stay foolish. Another great takeaway was when we started thinking about doing this virtual team retreat. Nicole, my co founder and I, we thought, you know what? Last retreat, we did all the planning, we did all the work. It took a lot of our time and a lot of our effort. And I started to question, maybe we're not the best people for this job. Maybe we have better people on the team to plan a retreat. So we decided to call for a retreat planning committee. We asked the team who wants a volunteer to be part of this committee, and we got a whole bunch of volunteers, and they basically steered the ship. I basically told them what our goals are for this retreat. This is kind of what we want to get done. Kind of like, you know, we want to talk about the future, but we also want to have a lot of fun and team build activities, and we want to celebrate. I gave him a budget, and I told them, you know, this is the dates that we kind of looking at. And they ran with it. They met every week, they did dress rehearsals, they planned every bit of it. The schedule they did, the invites, they ordered, the swag and the goody baskets and everything. And what I realized is that, you know, when you empower other people to do something else, it may not be exactly the way you would do it, but the end result is going to be really good. It's probably going to be better than what you could have done, just different. And that was a huge lesson for me as a founder, as a leader, that, hey, this is their retreat, not my retreat. So let them plan their own retreat. And that was really cool to see our team come together and make it all happen. I mentioned gift baskets and swag, but we also had, you know, silly awards, competitions, meme contests. And even though these are very little things, maybe some people might consider them insignificant things, they actually go a long way with your team. It's really just a token of appreciation. It's showing that you actually try or care enough to think about them and to reward them with something. So even if you're on a tight budget, a little something to your team, even if it doesn't cost you anything, even if it's just certificates with silly awards like best dressed and early bird to the meeting, like, we had one of those. It just means something to the team that you thought of them. Another huge takeaway was we had a session for each department to just have time to be creative, a huge brainstorming session. In this brainstorming session, we basically suspended all disbelief and all limitations and said, hey, what can we do? Let's say, for example, in the marketing department, to improve our traffic, to get more leads, to get more sales, to get more listeners to the podcast, whatever it is. And to warm up for this exercise, we actually borrowed an exercise from cj, our customer service manager, who did this exercise with her team, which was warming up with let's have fun and spend 10 minutes dumping the worst ideas ever. The purpose of this 10 minute game is just think of the worst marketing ideas in this example you can think of. And they could be funny, they could be silly, they could be outrageous. The point here is that when you're just putting down ideas, you're getting the creative juices flowing and there are no wrong answers. Actually, the wrong answers are the right answers. So then once you get that out of your system and you do 10 minutes of that, it's so much easier to then think, okay, so what are some good ideas? What are some great things that we can do? Even if they seem really expensive or really out of reach, you can just write them down. Because later on you could say, okay, so what's the minimal viable version of that idea? How can we get started with that idea? And the point I'm trying to make here is, you know, just spending an hour is what we did. This is one hour. Brainstorming session went a long way. There were so much creative ideas that came out of that session. We had a lot of fun. And most of all, we all left those sessions feeling energized. We're all ready to kind of go for it. Let's pick one of these ideas and run with it. And we actually did. We were starting to implement some of the ideas that came out of those sessions.

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My final takeaway from our virtual team retreat that we just wrapped up is sort of a personal one. You know, as I look back at it, it was a very good experience for me as a founder, as the CEO, as a leader of the company. My biggest takeaway is that we have some incredible people on our team. I built a newfound respect for what they are able to do, what they're able to contribute to our future. It got me excited about who we have and who we've become. I feel like the company's in good hands, that we have what we need to go where we want to go. And in fact, that is enough of a takeaway, that is enough of an ROI to make this all worth it. Because now I feel like, okay, let's go. Let's improve in this area. And I know we can do it because I saw you guys in action. Let's improve in that area. Let's grow this perspective or this part of the company. And it really made our mission really a tangible reality. And we talked a lot about that in the retreat, what we're striving to do for the next few years. So moving forward, we're all singing from the same song sheet, regardless of what department we work in. I really had a lot of fun in our virtual team retreat. Of course we would love next year to be all together in a physical location retreat, but who knows what's going to happen? We don't know what's going to be possible. So for sure, we will have a retreat of some kind next year. Thanks so much for listening. If you love what you hear, leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts. We'd love to hear what you think of the show. We read every single review and it helps other people find our show. And it's kind of one of the best things you could do to support the show. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the things a team retreat does is that it kind of allows us to shift gears a little bit. It allows us to pause working a little bit, don't work so hard that week allows us to get perspective, allows us to kind of step back for a moment and understand why we're doing all this in the first place so that when we get back to work the following week, we're kind of energized and ready to go. I really feel that effect now that we're in the next week. After the retreat, everybody's kind of like, excited to do what they have to do to get to where we want to go and meet our goals or short term and long term goals. So if you're worried about people missing out on work or hours, it's well, well worth it. You're going to get a more energized, focused, dedicated team. Thanks so much for listening and I'll see you in tomorrow's episode Q and A Wednesday. I'll see you then. Take care. Of.

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