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Even with management support, employees can be squeamish about offsites. The corporate retreat from hell was memorialized on an episode of The Simpsons, in which Homer and the other workers at Springfield's nuclear-power plant head up snow-covered Mount Useful in pairs, competing to be first to reach a cabin at the top. The boss cheats, the employees just want free sandwiches, and an avalanche sabotages the whole thing. In the real world, climbing a mountain or learning to handle a kayak with someone you've barely met or, even worse, someone you see at the office every day can be just as lame. Toss in the fear of tackling physically challenging tasks and the potentially corny kum-bay-ya-ness of it all, and you've got the makings of a disaster.
That's why Bassi suggests launching a company's first offsite with employee volunteers. They will be open-minded, and are more likely to rave about the program when they return to work. If an offsite is mandatory, organizers should let workers know what to expect. It has to be made clear that "this is not a game," says Drury's Zimmerer. "What we are trying to do is increase productivity and performance. We are trying to help you all become better at doing your jobs."
Try picturing a tougher management bind than this one: half your valuable people have quit over concerns about the future direction of the company. They've taken some of your most important material assets with them, and it looks as if their departure will bring the whole place down soon. How do you handle it? The short answer might be: Make a great speech. Inspire your still-loyal workers. At least that's what Abe Lincoln would have done.
In fact, the Tigrett Corp. of Arlington, Va., in a program called Leadership Lessons from History, gives participants a chance to commune hypothetically with Honest Abe and other great leaders. The sessions are billed as metaphors for dealing with contemporary management problems. Tigrett's most popular program, at about $1,000 a person, is a workshop at the Civil War battlefields in Gettysburg, Pa. On the fields that saw 51,000 men killed or wounded, groups of executives listen to a Lincoln impersonator, clad in black and wearing a stovepipe hat, field questions about his critical decisions.
Attending this program, James Fugitte, president of an electronic-payments-processing company in Elizabethtown, Ky., was fascinated by "how, with such clarity, Lincoln articulated the role the government should take to win the war." Fugitte could see how the actions of a captain of industry at the dawn of the 21st century, while not as dramatic as Lincoln's, are remarkably relevant. For any offsite to be effective, relevance is key. Participants, says Zimmerer, must go back to work and say, "I see what I learned, and I can transfer it to what I do every day."
"T-minus two minutes and counting!" bellows a counselor.