Extended face-to-face meetings are way better than off-site team meetings. Ditch the rafting and the bungee jumps.
Let’s go canyoning together.
Let’s build a raft as a team.
let’s cook dinner together.
And of course, let’s party hard.
Heard such ideas before? I have always had reservations regarding the usefulness of such team-building gatherings. After all, just because you can build a raft or cook dinner as a team, it doesn’t mean you understand each other in a technical discussion. And just because you share the love to dance, it doesn’t mean you have the grit to close that sprint on time.
Furthermore, activities such as river rafting, canyoning, and bungee jumping carry an (unnecessary) risk — as a co-founder & CEO of a growth company, I’m good with all the inherent risks that growing a business brings, I don’t need to create additional risks. By the way, I know what I am talking about. I led the air rescue operations of a rafting accident in the Armed Forces at the tender age of 26.
Nothing against a little fun with your work colleagues, I truly enjoy our regular team dinners with the Yonder team, the B2B SaaS company I co-founded.
Let me introduce you to a different kind of off-site meeting. It goes by the name of “Extended”, short for “Extended Face-to-Face Meeting”. My co-founder and I started holding such off-site meetings a long time ago, usually to discuss strategic topics which are better discussed on a hike than in front of a whiteboard or a Zoom screen.
Extended meetings are super-productive, and we plan them if and when needed. Here is the generic concept of our extended meetings.
An extended meeting is always a 2-day activity with a clear, yet high-level agenda. On the first day, we hike and discuss, usually jumping topics back and forth hundreds of times, meandering towards and away from the agenda at the same time. No laptops, no phone calls.
In the evening, there is nothing wrong with having a few beers and a good meal together (being truly Swiss, an extended dinner normally includes a Raclette, even in mid-summer).
The second day is usually more work-like. We usually consolidate our discussions from the previous day in a configurable Excel model. In this way, we can play around with the parameters, returning to the meandering of ideas from the previous day in a more structured way. Last but not least, we finish up the work so that we return home without lengthy to-do lists.
Because extended meetings are such a productive and efficient way of getting stuff done, I have started to do them with several people in our company. The concept is always the same, but the topics are different. No matter if you improve your go-to-market strategy, discuss all the pros and cons of merging two teams, plan your product roadmap, or work intensely on a customer project, the two days for an extended meeting are always well invested.
