The Away Day – love it or loathe it, it’s an essential element of collective working, but if it’s not properly planned and well facilitated it can undermine all your efforts to work together effectively as a team.
It can be a jolly, a social get together, a chance to stand back, review progress over the last year and plan for next year, or a look at the longer term. It can be an opportunity to review organisational structure, or a space for looking at the way you work together – at processes rather than tasks. But not all at once! It can be tempting to try to cram as much as possible in to the day, but that’s a mistake. When people are taking time out from day to day operations to look at issues in more depth, it’s a frustrating waste of time if important topics can only be touched on briefly.
This is a precious time – after all if there are say 10 of you out of the office or warehouse or shop for a whole day that is a cost of 10 person-days to the co-operative. So make sure you spend that time wisely.
In our experience there are a variety of ways in which it can go wrong:
- Lack of consultation with members about aims & content (people will not feel ownership, so will not engage)
- Agenda with too many aims &/or lack of prioritisation
- Lack of planning
- Wrong venue (too small, not enough wall space, inadequate seating, too dark, no outside space)
- Too many presentations, not enough discussion (does not encourage participation, boring)
- Too much time spent in whole group discussion (ditto)
- Pointless ‘team building’ exercises or inadequate exercise de-briefing
- Lack of a final feedback session (missed opportunity to learn which sessions worked well and which did not)
- Running over time (cardinal sin, people have got lives, and other commitments)
HOW TO DO IT
Ideally the Away Day will be a regular event, so that over time you will learn for yourselves what works and what doesn’t, but first of all you need to agree what you want to achieve:
- Do you want to involve all your members in thinking about the future?
- or celebrate the achievements and identify the challenges of the past year and share members’ expectations, hopes (and maybe fears) for the coming year?
- or find out if the structure is working effectively? Are people clear about who has what authority to take decisions, where one role ends and another one begins, member rights and responsibilities?
- or discover if your appraisal or peer support system is working effectively? Do members feel supported? Are you missing opportunities for people to share their training needs or ambitions for career development?
- or review policies and procedures, for example is there an effective mechanism for dealing with conflict when it arises?
As we said above, if you try to do all these things you will end up feeling rushed or disappointed that there are topics which have not been properly explored and discussed, so it’s important to focus and identify those issues that need to be addressed as a priority.
5 ways to ensure that your strategy day doesn’t go wrong
- AIMS: Decide and prioritise what you want from the day, involving all the members in agreeing Away Day Aims. What is your priority right now?
- Team building
- Strategy development
- Policy development
- Review progress in previous year
- Review processes – the way you work together
Don’t try to cram too much in.
- VENUE: Find a venue which is accessible, big enough for you all to sit in a circle, with space for smaller group work, with an outside space you can use (weather permitting), with a kitchen and an urn for making hot drinks; order lunch and cake (cake is essential) from a local co-op or social enterprise .
- PLAN: Make a plan, starting with start and end times, including 15 minutes morning & afternoon breaks & at least 45 minutes lunch break. Also a 15 minute feedback session at the end of the day. This will give you an idea of how much time you will have to achieve your aims, probably around 5 to 6 hours. Develop a timed Agenda and circulate in advance. Write up on a flip chart so that everyone can see how much time there is for each topic.
- PARTICIPATION: Plan the day so that you alternate high-participation activities with less participative ones. High participation = small group discussions, exercises; Less participative = presentations, whole group discussions.
- FLEXIBILITY: Be prepared to drop an exercise if you can see or are told it isn’t working; have alternative ideas up your sleeve, be prepared to let a discussion go on longer than anticipated in the plan if it appears to be exploring something important or if people are saying we need more time for this. Remind people of the Agenda, more time on this topic means less time for the next one!
WHO SHOULD COME?
We think this is such a great opportunity for people to work together in a very different way to the day to day operational tasks, so it’s important to invite all the stakeholders. If there are probationers or volunteers who are willing to put in the time then they should be there. If there are Board members or Directors who are not involved in the day to day work they should be invited too. It should be made clear that this is not a decision-making forum, but that decisions arising out of the Away Day will be taken at the next members meeting or AGM as appropriate.
A well planned, inclusive, participative and well facilitated Away Day will provide a strong foundation for your work together. Members will be motivated, communications between different departments or teams will be more effective, working practices will be improved, decision-making will be more efficient and the co-operative or social enterprise business will benefit.
We have run Away Days for co-operatives and social enterprises many times, and we’d love to help you run yours! We are experienced at planning, facilitating and evaluating Away Days, ensuring that they are effective, participative and fun.
Contact kate@cooperantics.co.uk or nathan@cooperantics.co.uk
and we will get back to you for a chat about your needs.