What to include in your team's offsite action plan when everyone works remotely
For remote teams, a virtual offsite is a great way to fight boredom and help employees feel less lonely. It offers employees the opportunity to brainstorm new ideas while making sure everyone feels respected, appreciated, and heard. But you can’t achieve this level of success without a laid-down action plan. In this article, we take you through the most important elements when creating an action plan for a virtual offsite for your team.
Offsite goals and objectives
A basic element, without which your action plan will be incomplete, is your goal for the virtual offsite. Together with your team, brainstorm on the goals you want to achieve through this event and the specific objectives and tasks to get there. This can be to gather ideas on a new project, build relationships, or do both. Your goals don’t have to be huge, but they should genuinely reflect the needs and challenges of your remote company. Setting clear goals and objectives also help the team to map out the logistics, level of commitment, and tasks needed to achieve success.
An offsite agenda
An agenda should be an important part of your action plan to help direct the flow of activities. Your agenda should have start and end times for each activity, moderators, speakers, and roles of all participants. It should be ready and made available to every member of your team beforehand so that they know what to expect and how to prepare for each event.
A well-planned budget
How many resources are you willing to commit to the event? This is what the budgeting part of your action plan should answer. Your budget should include how much financial resources you will spend on the venue (in this case, Zoom), internet data, buying and mailing snacks to remote employees to use during the event, and other miscellaneous expenditures that could come up during the offsite. It won’t be as expensive as an on-site event, but your virtual team offsite still needs some level of financial commitment.
Participant roles and responsibilities
Whether your offsite event is going to be a single-day get-together or a week-long activity, it’s never something that a single person can pull off. For team members volunteer to help with moderation, chats, and support, you need to include them in the action plan. It’s an excellent way to host a smooth virtual offsite and helps participants know who to contact whenever they are stuck.
An evaluation strategy
How did the team brainstorm ideas? How effective were the various activities? Did we meet our goals? What do we need to improve to make a future offsite successful? These and many other questions should come once you’re done with your event. But even before that, a strategy to evaluate your team offsite and how to collect and process participant feedback should all be part of your action plan. It makes feedback simple and helps teams understand how and where to send their comments and grievances if any.
From your goals, objectives, and budget to team roles and evaluation strategies, there are a lot of things to include in a team offsite when everyone works remotely. Making an action plan is the best way to put all these pieces together for a successful event.
