5 Reasons Off-Site Meetings Fail

Skift

a day ago

Dr. Joe Allen, professor of industrial and organizational psychology at the University of Utah and director of the Center for Meeting Effectiveness at the Rocky Mountain Center for Occupational and Environmental Health, believes that a major reason many off-sites fall short is there's not enough education at the college level.
'I always challenge people to find me a course on meetings at a business school, and no one has ever found one for me.
'We do not train people on how to attend meetings and how to lead meetings. And yet, 75% of people's time is spent on meeting related activities if they're a manager or higher up in larger organizations — either attending, leading, or preparing for meetings.'
Allen, who has written 200 articles in academic publications, several books including Running Effective Meetings for Dummies, and is involved in the planning of academic conferences ranging from 200 to 5,000 people, keeps seeing the same common mistakes — and offers some solutions.
1. They Don't Have a Mission for the Meeting
'You need to start with a particular goal or goals at the outset of planning,' Allen said. 'What are you trying to accomplish? Before you make decisions, you should go back to the goals you listed and say, 'Okay, how will this help us accomplish that?' and use that as a litmus test for all the different activities, all the different meetings, all the different talks — basically everything on the program.'
2. They Focus Too Heavily on Logistics
'With off-sites in particular, the focus is always on things like getting people to the location or making sure there's the right food,' he said. 'In my interviews and research, the post-meeting comments are always about the destination and the experiences people had. They often talk about how the meeting was great, but it really didn't accomplish a whole lot.'
Among the questions he suggests meeting organizers ask from the start: What is the structure of the meeting? Who are you going to put in a room together, or assign to work on a process together? And how exactly are you going to do that?
3. They View Speakers as Entertainment
'When you're bringing in outside speakers, are you doing so for the right reasons?' he asks. 'I've advised people who are about to drop a good amount of money that the speaker might be a really big name and you'll hear some cool stuff, but how is it going to help their business?'
4. They Don't Connect Teambuilding to the Work Environment
'Teambuilding often misses the mark because the further it is away from what you actually do day to day, the harder it is to transfer that to the real world workplace,' Allen said. 'Take something like Space Camp [which does custom corporate training programs]. Doing collaborative activities together in that environment, it's going to be really tough for people cognitively to transition what they have learned.'
There's one thing that helps, he says: 'If you immediately go from that to a setting right on site where you can discuss what you did there and how it translates into your work environment, you can get some of the benefits.'
5. The Networking is Not Intentional or Inclusive
'When it comes to traditional networking, there's a bias in favor of people of a certain personality type. When you've got an open bar and people are mingling around, the people who are generally more extroverted are going to be more capable of introducing themselves and making new connections. People who are a little more introverted are going to struggle with that.
'What we have found is that structuring networking by giving people different tasks to do elevates the experience for the introverts. It forces them to be a little bit uncomfortable, which they don't like, but also helps them to be more engaged, and to participate and meet new people.'