It’s becoming more and more common to take your team on a business trip. Pack your employees into a plane, touch down in a strong business center, and get to work building your company’s reputation, success, and profit.
However, when you pack a bunch of different people with different lives onto the same trip, you need to go all out. If you don’t, they’re less likely to enjoy the trip, which means they’re less likely to be effectively productive.
With that in mind, here are a few things to try when you’re all out on a work trip together.
Ensure Everyone Has Some Free Time
Don’t schedule the entire work schedule while you’re away. Not only will you get annoyed by how much work you have to do, but it can be bad for the brain to take the daily grind away with us. Everyone on the trip needs to get some time to themself, if only to have a nap if they need it or call home and talk to their family.
But really, the more time you can give your employees, the better those working hours in between will be. Sure, you’re here to focus on business and come home with results, but if their usual shifts are 8 hours when they’re in the office, they shouldn’t be made any longer here!
Plan Group Outings
You don’t want your team to be sat in their hotel rooms whenever they’re not on the clock! You want them to be able to spend time with each other, doing something fun and enriching that ensures a bit of team bonding and relaxation can go on.
That’s why you ought to plan some group outings and run the ideas for them by your team. Say you’re going to Detroit for business – ask if anyone wants to visit the Detroit Historical Museum on one of the days, or wants to go out for dinner together at the end of the trip.
Planning outings means you guarantee some off the clock time that gets people out of the working mindset. That isn’t something you want your team to be trained on at all times, as it can hamper productivity and cause burnout.
Don’t Expect Employees to Be on the Clock All Trip Long
Similar to the point above, if you come on the trip with the expectation that your employees will get up in the middle of the night if you need them, think again. Treat a shut hotel room door much like clocking out when you’re at home.
Once they’re off the clock, you can’t expect them to come back down to the hotel’s conference room for another hour. Don’t feel tempted to break convention here; work will resume again in the morning.
If you’re traveling with your team, be a responsible boss and act on tips like these. When the trip is both productive AND fun, you won’t have a hard time convincing them to do it again.
Photo by Mizuno K via Pexels.