Wyoming Call Center combines professional, business conference facilities with all the recreational joys of camping in an idyllic setting in the beautiful mountains of Wyoming.

We provide a convenient escape from the hectic world of everyday business, a place where purposes become clearer and direction more focused. Individuals and relationships grow. Business becomes more fun and productive. With extensive meeting facilities, charming accommodations, acres of geological wonders, mountain lakes and streams, we have all of the components for fun and adventure,

Executive and Corporate Retreats ~ How to get the most out of them:
Whether you arrive with the entire company or a small team, you'll have absolutely everything you'll need for a successful company retreat or meeting. With a large conference room and several excellent restaurants, it will probably feel more like a vacation than work. When a management team, staff, or executive team holds a corporate retreat or offsite business meeting, the investment of time is significant. The question is how to make the most of this limited and extremely valuable time.

Management and Corporate Retreat Planning Best Practices

1. Make sure you have the right people -- no more and no less.
2. Have a tightly focused agenda and be very clear about what you want to accomplish during your retreat.
3. Don't let discussions and presentations ramble on; use effective meeting tools.
4. Make good use of pre-work.
5. Make sure that action items are "checkable" and describe who will do what by when.
6. Ensure that follow-up is part of the process.

7. Consider using a neutral retreat facilitator so that you can focus on the content of the retreat while someone else takes care of the meeting facilitation process.

A more detailed explanation of each item follows:

The right people
If you don't have the right people, the whole thing will fall apart either during the retreat or, even worse, when you get back to the office. Typically you will want to have an intact management team present at your retreat. If there are other key staff members within the organization with an in-depth knowledge of the issues at hand, or who will be responsible for executing the strategy, consider adding them as well. You may wish to add them for only part of the agenda, or you may wish to get their input either before or after the retreat. Never use a corporate retreat to "reward" someone; this is a time for serious business and should only include the people needed to get the work done.

The right agenda
Agendas that are unfocused, overloaded, and don't have specific outcomes stated are an invitation to failure. These agendas try to cover too much in too little time, with the end result being that nothing gets done properly. The lack of focus makes it all too easy for discussions to get "off-track." Before designing a corporate retreat agenda, be very clear about the following:

• "What has to happen for us to consider this session a success?"

• "What specific issues do we want to deal with?"

• "What tangible things do we want in our hands at the end of each discussion?"

• "What is not on the table?"

• "If we don't have enough time to cover everything, which things on our list can wait for a future session?"

The right process
Sometimes it isn't what you do, but rather how you do it. For example, many groups will choose to do a SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats) analysis as part of a strategic planning process. Often, if you ask an organization to describe their strengths you will get a predictable list of "generic" strengths with no particular evidence to support them. On the other hand, if you ask people one at a time to relate a "success story" about a significant accomplishment over the past two to three years and then engage the entire group in identifying the strengths that contributed to this success, you will get a list of specific strengths that can be directly related to the organization.

The right pre-work
We find pre-work to be of tremendous assistance in getting the most out of people's time. We also find that how the pre-work task is defined will have a major effect as to how valuable it is. Asking someone to read a book or article is far more effective if they are also asked to think about what part of it gave them hope or made them worry. Asking them to think about how the author's observations and prescriptions relate to their company will prepare people for a discussion at the corporate retreat of how to apply what they have learned.

Pre-work that involves brainstorming can be particularly effective if the results are collected in advance by phone and tabulated for discussion at the meeting. Having one person collect the results provides a far more usable list than the ones that we typically see if people are asked to "email" their thoughts. The brainstormed list at the meeting can then be used for discussion and priority ranking.

Action planning
Sometimes clients provide notes from a previous retreat. It is amazing to see what is (or rather is not) documented in the action plans. An action plan has to describe who does what by when. Ideally the action is described by the person who is going to be carrying it out. This will always be someone in the room. Finally, the action item has to be "checkable" -- that is, it has to be described in such a way that it would be easy for anyone present to check it off their "to-do" list and anyone who was affected would know it was done.

Follow-up
Without some form of scheduled follow-up, many action items do not get completed. We encourage clients to define during the corporate retreat the date, time, and location of a follow-up session. This meeting may be specific to the off-site or it may be a simple agreement to put the executive retreat's action items into a regularly scheduled management meeting. (We also actively encourage people in the retreat to not make commitments around things that are not priorities. It is far better to have a team committed to one or two actions that it successfully completes than it is to have a list of thirty things that never get done.)

Teambuilding
For youth groups, business groups, marriage encounters, church groups, etc. We offer a complete array of experiential team building programs, meeting design and facilitation services, collaboration skill support and team learning resources that focus on the elements of teamwork in today's organization.

Additional activities
We have horseback riding, fishing, skeet/archery/pistol shooting, skiing/snowboarding, snowmobiling, rock climbing, ropes courses, dinosaur fossil hunting, wildlife/nature viewing, hiking, biking, backpacking and river float trips. Half-day and full-day rates available.

Use a meeting facilitator
An independent, neutral  facilitator can help you with all of the above, and can help you get the most out of your corporate retreat/team building planning. We find that many of our best clients understand meeting facilitation and have excellent meeting facilitation skills. However, they like to use a neutral outsider because they find it difficult to be both a participant and a facilitator.

If you would like to discuss using a facilitator at your next corporate retreat or would like a customized teambuilding consultation, please call us at 1-866-475-1091 or email info@wyomingcallcenter.com. The initial consultation is always free.