Company growth is an essential aspect of achieving ongoing success. As your team grows, your needs may not be the same as when you first started, which is why it’s important to assess your team’s processes continually.

Here at HeadsUp, we like to take a look at our goals and achievements at the end of every quarter, making sure the whole team is on the same page. We refer to this process as “offsite,” during which we engage in a few activities to bond and improve our overall performance:

Encouraging Creativity

Getting those creative juices flowing is a great way to get everyone involved, so we like to jump-start our offsite process with a small project. This quarter, Mari Miller, our Creative Director and resident artist, brought in cardboard cutouts of everyone’s first initial for us to decorate.

Mari even brought information on the meanings behind different colors and shades so we could customize our letters to our personalities. Many of us opted for whatever designs caught our eye, a great lesson in flexibility.

Getting to Know Each Other

HeadsUp firmly believes that to successfully function as a team we first need to know how we operate individually. Reading from “Working Together: A Personality-Centered Approach to Management,” each team member chooses three working styles that they feel accurately describes them based on their Myers-Briggs type and reads those aloud to the rest of the team.

This sharing of workplace styles helps us learn the best ways to support and interact with each other as individuals to create a safe work environment for all types of learners.

Analyzing Our Company

Every voice matters equally when it comes to company concerns, which is why it’s important for everyone to have the same platform for expressing their thoughts on company performance. Though it’s necessary to take a look at things that could be improved, it’s as beneficial to acknowledge which processes are doing well, which is why we split up our topics of conversation for this retrospective into four categories: what’s working, what’s not working, unclear, and missing.

We then title a large poster for each category and have everyone write down their observations on each one to later discuss as a team. Having these points all written down is a good way to make sure conversation stays on track, as well as to help visualize which aspects stand out more often than others.

Choosing a Focus

After analyzing the current strengths and weaknesses, it’s time to pick a specific theme for the quarter so that we can tailor our efforts toward a common and measurable goal.

Keeping the previous discussion in mind, every team member decides which overarching theme they find essential to achieving success, and then gives a brief pitch on how they have reached that decision. Once everyone has presented their ideas, it’s time to discuss what makes the most sense for the company as a whole and a vote on where our focus for the quarter should lie.

Offsite is a special combination of problem-solving, brainstorming, fun, and collaboration. With these exercises, we can take a look at ourselves as individuals to better focus together as a team.

Every quarter brings new challenges and goals to strive for, so we find that reevaluating our goals and practices throughout the year helps us keep moving in the right direction.

How does your team work together to stay on track? Tell us in the comments below!