McElroy Corporate Retreat

This August marked the third annual retreat for McElroy Translation staff members at the Crossings, a green-minded facility tranquilly sequestered in the Balcones Canyonlands Preserve in the Texas Hill Country near Austin. A stay at the Crossings is restorative as guests experience nature and nurture. It is the perfect place for networking with colleagues in a setting very different from the office. Once again it was a year of rewarding work and productive "play." The atmosphere at the Crossings is conducive to resourcefulness and creativity in the scheduled work sessions.

This year's retreat agenda included a workshop with Chris Douglas of Quest Leadership Consulting http://www.quest-seminars.com. The group engaged in two "games" and faced mentally challenging tasks that revealed existing team patterns and communication styles. This foundation of group behavior analysis and discussion set the stage for the real work that ensued—presentations by volunteer task teams.

These task team presentations were the culmination of several months of employee self-directed work. To kick-start the process in June, mandatory focus group sessions were professionally led to elicit opinions, concerns, and satisfaction with the work environment, strategic, and organizational initiatives at McElroy. The next step was a 100 percent employee driven process as task teams organized to recommend solutions for issues identified by the focus groups. The task teams tackled the following broad areas:

Communication
E-mail
Recruitment
Training
Workflow & Processes

The retreat concept is built on a "Fun Friday" that opens minds and builds relationships to make Saturday morning work more productive. It went according to plan. The task team presentations Saturday were well prepared and elicited lively discussion. Most important, each will lead to action based on the recommendations. In many cases the ideas were a validation of solutions that were already planned or in process. It is reassuring to realize that management team direction matches employee analysis of needs in many cases. In other instances, the teams and the discussion produced new ideas—that is equally exciting.