
Retreat Planning Guide at Kettle and Fire
This doc is a guide for planning department retreats. After planning many marketing retreats, I’ve found a good structure that maximizes our time spent together. Below you’ll find details on my planning approach. As always, hit me up with any questions.
Preparing for Retreat
I view retreats as a great opportunity to empower the team to work through some of our hardest department challenges, come up with solutions, and own their execution. To accomplish this, it is critical to build a plan going into the retreat so that the team has clear expectations on what we’ll be discussing. Here’s how I do it.
Survey
I send a simple survey to team members two weeks ahead of the retreat dates. In the survey, I give folks an opportunity to request certain topics they’d like to discuss along with getting a pulse check on how everyone’s feeling - what’s working well, challenges. etc. The survey is super helpful in creating the retreat agenda since it gives me clarity on what’s on everyone’s mind.
Ideally the survey is filled out one week ahead of the retreat dates. Here’s a link to the last survey we sent out. You can also find the survey questions I ask below.
Survey Questions
What topics do you think we should discuss as a department?
- What topics would you like to discuss as a smaller group? (not the entire department)
- What are some things you think we should STOP doing as a marketing team?
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