Inside the magic of a Mana FLD Retreat
As many of you know, a major company value at Mana FLD is maintaining a healthy work-life balance. Part of encompassing and living that value means giving ourselves the opportunity to go on a company retreat once per year. We always come back from these trips feeling more refreshed, grounded and motivated to improve our day to day operations, and on this week’s blog we wanted to briefly share with our readers a bit on how that magic happens. In the following post, Madison our UX Researcher, outlines our typical schedule of activities and lessons learned during our retreats, using our most recent trip to Panama as an example.
Before the retreat
As with all events, much of the success of our retreat is determined ahead of time through in depth planning. This typically starts about two months before the travel date, where we begin to brainstorm topics of interest and goals for the time together. This year, we wanted to focus especially on how to serve our clients better by optimizing our schedules and syncing our calendars. We allow the first couple weeks of discussions about these topics to be loose and open, and we don’t commit to any specific topics until we give everyone a chance to do some generative thinking and revisit their ideas. Eventually, we port these thoughts into a document where we match topical themes to desired outcomes, which helps us begin to think about the structure of the retreat itself.
Crucially, during this planning stage we also explore the possibilities for fun and relaxation at our destination! We make a list of restaurants, sightseeing activities and experiences that we are interested in trying. All of this goes into the same spreadsheet as the work topics so it can eventually be organized into a calendar of events.
One or two weeks before we leave for the retreat, we formalize the calendar in a spreadsheet with a detailed view of each activity (including small details about our travel plans, meal times, etc.) so we have a clear roadmap and understanding of how we will spend our time together. Of course, this calendar must be somewhat flexible since you can’t exactly predict how each day will go, so we leave margins for error around the timing of certain activities.
The day of arrival
Once we arrive at our destination, we typically take the first day to settle in, relax and acclimate. This year, we took a red eye flight from LA to Panama City, followed by a puddle hopper to Bocas Town, and finally a short boat ride and golf cart ride to our villa. Travel was smooth, but still fairly tiring, so it was nice to give ourselves some R&R time right away and give our brains a chance to recharge. Typically, the only work activity we do on the first day is a visioning exercise where each team member shares their hopes/goals/desired outcomes for the retreat and we align on the key problems/pain points in our business that we want to explore during the week.
Although it can be tempting to overschedule your first day of a company retreat to maximize time together, we highly recommend resisting that urge. It tends to pay off when you allow employees to get rest and bring their A game to day 2.
Work days during the retreat
Day 1
After a good night’s rest, we all wake up refreshed and ready to engage on the second day. This year, we had some client work that needed to be completed during the retreat, so we took time to make breakfast together and finish those tasks independently before digging into retreat tasks around 10am. We started with an open discussion/reflection on how things have been going with the business, once again ensuring to validate our key pain points and areas of curiosity in person together. We did an independent writing activity where each employee reflected on their vision for an ideal future, the strength they bring to achieving that vision, and how our processes need to change or grow to help us get there. Sharing these reflections and discussing them quickly shed light on the fact that our schedules have been extremely busy and that optimizing our calendars and meetings would be the main focus of the retreat.
Which brings us to another recommendation: pick one major issue to solve, and dive deep. Another retreat pitfall can be listing out a bunch of small or big problems and losing track of which to tackle, or not having enough time to solve them all. Every company will have a multitude of things that can be improved, but it’s unrealistic to engage with all of them successfully in a short period of time. It can also be overwhelming and unproductive. Instead, we like to leave our retreat knowing that we are working on a concrete solution to a key issue that will yield measurable improvement in our business. Keep these specific goals in mind as you pick the most important issue to focus on: the issue should be well-defined, possible to measure, possible to improve and the impact of that solution should be clear to everyone. It’s worth spending the time to align on this ahead of working on it.
Once we knew that our problem solving would be focused on our schedules, we felt ready to take a lunch break. We visited a local restaurant and enjoyed a couple hours of pool and ocean swimming together. Once again, reminding ourselves that the relaxation element of retreats is critical!
After our lunch break, we returned to the villa to do a deep dive into our calendars. We analyzed how each of our time is being spent during busy/rough weeks, and easy/ideal weeks, both doing actual calculations of hours as well as looking at the types of activities and meetings we engage in. This kind of hands-on exploration can be mentally strenuous, but is also extremely worth it to illuminate exactly how our operations are being handled. (Note: Obviously, this kind of analysis works best for small companies where there are few enough employees that these calculations can be made and discussed as a group). Our formal analysis used the following structure: Discover, Define, Develop, and Deliver. We first discovered the actual ways we were spending our time, we then defined how that time was matching or failing to match up with our goals and vision for the future, then we brainstormed and developed ways to improve our scheduling and finally focused on how to deliver those improvements with tangible changes to our operations. Going through this exercise helped us define the goals and activities for the following day as well.
Following our calendar deep dive, we got ready for drinks and dinner. We spent the rest of this evening relaxing together and enjoying La Rosa, which quickly became our favorite local restaurant on Isla Bastamientos.
Day 2
Once again, we knew we had to take two important client calls and do some associated planning on this day. We decided to schedule a long lunch at the resort to accommodate this (there was good wifi at our beach club that we knew we could use). We started our morning making breakfast together and doing some structured reflection on the progress made during Day 1. This helped us start to understand how to design better solutions for our scheduling, one of which we realized should be re-envisioning the purpose of money dates for our clients. We reflected on the fact that these money dates are sometimes much bigger than just a simple “date”, and can in fact end up shifting entire financial life plans or strategies for clients. This motivated us to plan an activity to operationalize the meaning of a money date, by first cataloging the taxonomy of possible topics for this type of meeting.
Our lunch work took several hours, and we enjoyed a meal together after the phone calls were over. Madison brought an iPad and we started recording the money date topics together while enjoying some food and drinks. This was a nice way to enjoy the beach and sunshine while still making progress towards our goals. We also made time for another ocean swim.
When we returned to the villa that afternoon, we performed another structured activity where we affinity mapped the money date topics, in order to understand what kinds of high level categories exist and how we should potentially think about grouping them together for clients. We considered the implications of each type of discussion on clients’ financial life plans or budgets, and had a discussion about how different kinds of financial events change these plans on different time scales. After a day of deep diving, we were convinced that our money date scheduling and intake forms should eventually evolve to better suit the needs of our clients (we’re still working on implementing these changes, but very excited to roll them out this quarter!).
Around 6pm we headed out on a boat ride to Bocas Town for another fun dinner together and some cocktails. Another day of balanced productivity and relaxation down.
Day 3
Our third day was primarily devoted to sightseeing. We made coffee together in the morning and took a couple hours to list out our learnings and action items that would lead to implementing the solutions we came up with, ensuring that we had all aligned on the impact of our improvement plans. We then spent the rest of the day cruising around on boats, visiting Bocas Town again for a meal, and heading to the beautiful Bird island and Starfish Island for some swimming and wildlife viewing. We returned to our villa that evening with full hearts, going for a final sunset swim in the ocean before a final dinner at La Rosa.
Ending the retreat with a day of relaxation is a great way to ensure that it feels like a vacation. Thanks to the recency effect, our memories hold on to these special moments more saliently than some of the more taxing activities.
Travel home and post-retreat
We reversed our arrival itinerary to travel back home on the final day, taking a golf cart to boat, to small plane to flights back to LA, SFO and Orlando. Stephanie and Cristina jetted straight to XYPN for the week in Denver, and all of us took time to reflect on our activities and make changes to our operations. After every retreat, we regroup after a couple weeks to revisit our action item tasks and map milestones for the quarter. We look forward to that meeting and to releasing some client-facing changes to our business soon! We hope this post illuminates some of the learning and joy that we gain from these retreats, and maybe offers some inspiration to those of you thinking of planning your own!
Madison Elliott is a UX Researcher at Google. Madison leads data engineering and usability at Mana Financial Life Design (FLD). Mana FLD provides comprehensive financial planning and investment management services to help clients grow and protect their wealth throughout life’s journey. Mana FLD specializes in advising ambitious professionals who seek financial knowledge and want to implement creative budgeting, savings, proactive planning and powerful investment strategies. Madison brings her combined background in cognitive science, computer science and clinical psychology with her professional UX design and engineering experience to optimize workflows at Mana FLD and improve people’s lives.