HELPING YOUR EMPLOYEES FIND THEIR ‘WHY’

“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how. “

- Friedrich Nietzsche

One of the first problems we tackle with worker retention and overall job satisfaction is the employee experience of connection & belonging. People long to feel like they are a part of something bigger than themselves; like they have a unique role to play, and that their work has meaning.

Now we all know that work is not the sum total of a meaningful life, but we also spend such a significant amount of our waking hours working that it’s important to experience meaningful connections in the workplace. The good news is that meaning can be found in almost any profession, and in almost every task.

A great place to start is to focus on the level of connection and belonging people experience at work. Is your organization’s culture one that fosters kindness, encouragement, and gratitude? Do your workers have a sense of a bigger purpose to which their small daily tasks contribute? Do they know that they are valued as unique contributors to the larger value your company is offering to the world?

The truth is, there’s still a good amount of “daily grind” that comes with almost any job. No matter how exciting the bulk of our work is, we still need to check emails, sweep floors, fill out expense reports, or any number of other mundane tasks that can suck the life out of our workforce. In those moments Nietzche might be able to help—If I can recenter my work around a bigger “why” then perhaps I can weather the particular “how” to which I must now attend.

If you are a supervisor you can use this to your advantage. Think through the ebb and flow of your organization. Maybe it’s on a daily flow—you’re in customer service and the mornings are always crazy. Or maybe you’re on a seasonal flow and every Spring things become very intense for a few months. In those times you can verbally remind your team why they are there, why you appreciate their unique presence, and what their hard work will mean for your company and for the customers you get to impact.

At the Oaks, our mission is to provide exactly this kind of space. Our team takes great pride in the content, facilities, and care we give to companies during all of our corporate retreats. Whether you are 100% in-person, online, or in a hybrid situation, gathering your team for a concentrated off-site experience can significantly increase everyone’s sense of connection and belonging.

EXPLORE OUR CORPORATE RETREAT OPTIONS

SELECTING THE RIGHT VENUE FOR YOUR CORPORATE RETREAT

A lot goes into finding the perfect spot for your company retreat. You want your team to feel cared for, to find some relaxation and fun, and for the whole thing to add value to what you do the rest of the year. 

It’s essential to have a great facility and relaxing location. But even more than that, it’s important to think through the actual program. When creating a culture and investing in team building, it’s simply not enough to find a great location and not have any structure.

Sure, you could spend your own time creating and crafting a perfect program, recruiting the right speakers, and designing the material. But you didn’t get into the retreat planning business, did you? The great news is we did! We love coming alongside companies and crafting the perfect retreat that will help your team grow, find rest, and find their passion for your companies vision. 

We have excellent facilities with a whole range of activities and team-building venues. We also bring in excellent facilitators and guides to help lead your team so that you don’t have to do all the work yourself. We value personalization and work with all our business leaders to make sure each week is tailored to each company's vision and goals. 

That’s one thing we think sets The Oaks apart. We don’t just offer great venues (although we believe we have one of the best spots in the world!); we also curate excellent content to help guide teams toward growth and culture-making. 

The fact is, you’re about to commit significant time and resources to provide for your team an offsite experience, and we believe that should be an investment that gets paid back in fantastic team building, a cohesive vision, and a unified mission. That’s why we do all we can to provide a guided process to allow you to enter your retreat with peace of mind knowing that your investment is well worth it. 

Take a look at our article on planning backward…

Ideal planning for a corporate retreat

The worst thing you can do is go away for a corporate offsite without a plan or purpose in mind. 

It’s easy to fall into that trap, though. We hope that a company retreat will solidify our corporate culture, create bonding within our group, and provide that positive feedback loop that will exponentially grow our business and keep our workforce revitalized. 

But without a clear plan and some helpful guides, that retreat will not produce the outcome your company needs.  The truth is people like to be led toward a compelling vision. Offsites provide a uniquely structured space to develop your people, invite them into that clear vision, and create that bond that makes work more exciting and productive. This is why we tell everyone to remember to Plan Backwards. 

Think about it; you don’t go into any significant business venture blind. You visualize your goals, set your compass, and reverse engineer every step to ensure you hit that goal. The same thing works when you're dealing with your people. You want your company to be a great place to work, thrive in the marketplace, and have a culture that motivates people and keeps them rejuvenated day after day. 

This is why at The Oaks, we take care to work with you to make a plan for what your people and your company need out of an offsite. We have curated the best-facilitated content and facilities to help each group relax, connect, and refocus on why your company exists. We do more than offer a beautiful space to unwind (vacations are great, but they don’t make people excited to get back to work); we make sure to design the right path and content with each of our companies to your specific people are motivated and connected. 

We know that with the right plan, great facilities, and excellent guides, your company offsite can energize your people for the next year to come and establish the culture you desire.

Explore more articles on why you should host a corporate retreat…

Why Host a corporate retreat?

These days, it’s more important than ever to get away as a team. A corporate retreat is the perfect setting for many companies to build relationships, trust and solidify their culture. 

What is corporate culture, anyway?

Culture is the way things are- naturally and automatically. It’s how you operate together, treat one another, and how things are pre-determined to go. Culture is what we all believe to be right, true, and good- and how we act upon those beliefs. 

Culture is the foundation of your company, and it drives everything. It’s the expression of your company’s purpose and gives meaning to everything that happens. It determines how people speak to and interact with everyone around them. Culture is about your expectations and hopes. It’s about how you manage problems and anxieties. Culture is the single most critical feature in the life of a company. It determines how people feel about coming to work, it determines how your employees talk about your company, and most important, it determines what naturally happens in terms of your outcomes.

It’s tough to shape a company culture to be inclusive, collaborative, and resilient when most of you work remotely. Remote work is, for all intents and purposes, here to stay. So what will your company do to counteract the isolation, fatigue, and shallow depth of relationships that are inevitable from remote work?

The best place to build your corporate culture is together outside of your typical work setting over several days. In fact, a well-executed corporate retreat can supercharge your culture in ways that will pay dividends for years to come. Through shared experiences, time together, and content that shapes your conversations, the relationships built at a corporate retreat can help your team grow stronger, more efficient, and more effective. 

A corporate retreat offers you the opportunity to redefine how you operate together. You get to establish new traditions and a better understanding of who everyone is motivated, who motivates them, and who is beyond their work persona. A robust culture will help you handle complexity, risk, and uncertainty. It will enable your people to understand their role. 

That’s why we take such great care at the Oaks to design experiences that align with your values and goals for your corporate culture. By spending time in a beautiful, relaxed environment and offering facilitated content to guide your discussions, we partner with you to supercharge your culture when you get back to everyday work.

Integration in our Everyday

As a child, I remember going over to a family friend’s house that always had a puzzle out on the table. Every day, they would walk by that puzzle, pick up a piece, spin it as they studied it against the propped up box top, then gently tap it in place. If it didn’t fit, they’d set it back down and slowly walk away. The large puzzle with all its scattered pieces would sit unfinished for months, but eventually, 5 minutes at a time, the puzzle was complete.

Drove me nuts. I can remember even as a young kid wanting that puzzle to be finished immediately. But not my family friends. It was the daily satisfaction of one little piece finding its place that brought them joy, not the completion of the puzzle.

When it comes to integration, it’s taking all the pieces of us—our values, our people, our beliefs, our bodies, our responsibilities, our feelings, our stories, our disappointments, our successes—all of our little pieces—and fitting them together into this picture we call life. 

But here’s the problem. We are more overwhelmed than joyful most of the time. We don't want to take the time to spin the pieces. A puzzle is hard to put together when we keep running past it, and many days, running is easier than sitting. 

Slowing down to examine our life is worth it. As the wise words of French philosopher Socrates reminds us, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” Or as my dear friend, Elyse Snipes said on our Instagram LIVE, “an unprocessed life is lazy.”

Integration requires us to spin the pieces and see how they fit and lay some other ones aside. We begin by asking, like we do when putting a puzzle together, where are the corners? What things ground us? Then, where are the edges? We establish the boundaries that protect and shape us. Then we sort by likeness. One by one, day by day, as the full picture comes into view.

Life can be a bunch of overwhelming, scattered pieces or a beautiful process unfolding piece by piece, five minutes a day. Our choice. Let’s not miss the joy found in every piece. 

The Space In Between

Ever feel like you’ve reached or exceeded your limit?

That life, and all that comes with it, is a bit heavier these days?

If this resonates, you’re not alone.

Many of us are overloaded. It’s not a lack of anything, it’s actually too much of everything, even good things. Even though we may need to be less places these days, the weight of our world and its obligations have almost made it impossible to rest. As everything continues to bleed together, boundaries are harder to define and margin is harder to protect. 

Our world continues to bombard us with messages that “more” or “better” and “now” will satisfy, but all these well-intentioned messages can leave us overwhelmed and feeling like we are coming up short. You’d think with so many things to make our lives simpler, we’d have more margin, not less.

We understand margin is important in business profit. We use margin to frame words on a page or white space to highlight a picture, but we are hard pressed to let margin exist into our schedules. Rest feels unproductive. Idle feels boring. Slow feels lazy and open space on the schedule feels irresponsible. Silence feels scary. We crowd out and fill up every white space so that we don’t have to feel what the emptiness brings. 

But there is a different way of being. 

Margin, best defined by Dr. Swenson, is the “space between our load and our limits.” This month at The Oaks, we are talking about creating more margin in life. Margin isn’t a just a great idea or a self-help concept. It’s not a luxury. We are made for it. We need it now more than ever.   

Do you know what the difference is between a professional athlete and an olympian? An Olympian rests with the same discipline as they work. They understand rest is just as important as practice. Moments of intentional rest, or margin, allow us to become stronger, smarter, and ultimately better.

Margin creates space for peace, relationships, dreaming, love, time, breath, clarity, art, control, agency, and health. It’s goodness for goodness sake. Margin is the space we find what we’ve been chasing with overloading our life all along. 

So join us as we take a closer look at the idea of margin and create space for more margin this month.