The Secret to a Productive Team Day: Get Out of the Office

The team day held in the office boardroom is a team day in name only. Phones are two metres away. Someone gets pulled out for "just five minutes". The whiteboard still has last quarter's numbers on it. By eleven, half the room is doing their normal job with a slightly nicer lunch.

Distance is the point

The value of taking people somewhere else is not the scenery, though the scenery helps. It is that nobody can drift back to their desk. It is that the day is visibly different from every other day, so people behave differently in it. A thirty-minute drive out of town does more for the quality of the conversation than any agenda you could write.

What a good team day looks like

It starts a little later than a work day, because the drive is part of it. It has one real question at its centre — not six — and the morning is spent on that question with the phones in a basket. The break is long and outdoors. Lunch is unhurried. The afternoon is for deciding what changes on Monday, written down, with names next to it. It ends early enough that people drive home in daylight, still talking.

What it does not need

It does not need a facilitator with a lanyard, a trust fall, or a laminated set of values. It does not need to be expensive. It needs a room that is quiet and already set up, somewhere to walk at the break, and a leader willing to leave the laptop closed for the morning.

Where we come in

Hope Station is that room. Bright and quiet, projector and sound ready when you walk in, a boardroom for twenty or the main room for forty, and a garden with the Outeniqua at the end of it for when the conversation needs air. You bring the team and the coffee. We bring the reason nobody looks at their phone. Mornings are half price this spring while we open our doors — a good excuse to try it.

Planning one for your own team? Read about our strategy days, team days and boardroom hire in George.