Team Retreat Week template (2 day workshops + 1 day Open Space)

• Come together as a team in a live environment to collectively recharge our batteries and strengthen connections
• Balance focused work on important projects with social time and emergent work
• Align on future direction and current progress as a team

When should you run this team retreat?

In our experience, team retreats follow a yearly or twice-a-year cadence. Having a regular, semi-scheduled event creates a good rhythm for project work and often gives the team something to look forward to and plan around. This cadence also allows our fully remote team to come together and recharge connections. When considering when to run one, I'd recommend thinking about:

• Your usual working structure. if your working year is organized into quarters, planning around kickoffs and retrospectives is smart. Sometimes, its helpful to start a new quarter or big project together in a focused way at a team retreat.
• quiet/busy periods for your business. Getting your whole team together to do things other than regular work during busy periods can add stress to proceedings. Think about quieter periods in your calendar where you can.

Who can facilitate this team retreat?

Team retreats can be a lot of work to put together both operationally and from a facilitation point of view.

For best results, we recommend having a primary facilitator responsible for the overall design of the event, an operational person responsible for things like meals and social events, and multiple people with some facilitation experience who can facilitate working sessions.

Depending on the scale of your event, you may need more people to help on the operational or facilitation side. It's also worth mentioning that for some topics or working sessions, external facilitators or experts can be helpful.