How to design the perfect high performance away day
A 4-step guide to making the most out of 24 hours away with your team.
Whether you work for an elite sports organisation or something more run of the mill, an ‘away day’ – or at least siginficant time away from the routine as a team – has proven benefits for groups looking to affect some kind of change, or eke out performance benefits. Whether you’re taking time out to prepare for a big game, to shake things up during the mid-season grind, to come together as a team following key personnel changes, or to refocus on a new set of goals, or simply because you haven’t done it for a while, there are many reasons to take organised time away from the day-to-day. Here’s 4-step guide to getting elite results out of whatever away day you decide to do.
1. Proper planning and preparation
As the old alliterative idiom has it, ‘proper planning and preparation prevents poor peformance’. Most of the below is common sense, but forethought on all of them goes a long way.
- Purpose of the away day; and desired outcomes;
- Timings; when, and for how long (should the event be; and should programmed sessions be);
- Location;
- Participants; who, precisely, needs to be in the room;
- Communication;
- Logistics;
- Contingencies
“The main thing in the planning is understanding what you want as an outcome,” explains Tim Cox, Managing Director of Management Futures, coaching specialists who have been designing and delivering team events for dozens of top-level organisations in different sectors – from Nissan automotive to Saracens rugby team – for the last ten years. Consultation amongst a leadership group and with the intended participants is helpful in arriving at a set of intended outcomes that everyone can buy into."
“It’s all about prep, prep, prep,” agrees Danny Pecorelli, Managing Director of Exclusive Collection, a family business of six hotels across the UK, two spas, a golf course, a cookery school and a pub that together form a wide variety of different hospitality spaces and experiences. What’s the purpose of this gathering? Is it to host a board meeting? To encourage a creative ideas session? To prepare your team for an upcoming challenge? To take your team out of a hectic environment and into a space of physical and mental tranquility?"
“You also need to think about the timing; when it happens in a season or in a work schedule; but also timing as in giving people enough time for micro activities,” says Pecorelli. “If you’re having a coffee break, is there intentionality about how you set it up? Is it a 5 minute break? Or is it a 10 minute break and then we are going out for a 5 minute walk. It’s those micro activities that make sure that when you get them back in the room, they are back in the room.”
“Not just that,” says Cox, “but it’s also important to ask yourself how much time you’ve got in the schedule for social time. It’s really important; the building of social capital, both formally and informally.”
“Your planning is critical,” says Frank Ponissi, General Manager, Football at the Melbourne Storm NRL team. “You don’t double-check, you triple-check in terms of all your bookings and your timings. Part of your planning is having contingencies for when things go wrong. And in terms of anything to do with travel, there’s always something that seems to go wrong. I think the mindset and attitude of your players and staff when travelling is critical for two reasons because developing a resilience and a mindset that things will go wrong and if they cope with them well I think that that’s important and that’s part of your contingency instead of panic."
Wellness watch
In the planning phase, consider participants’ schedules and time away from families. Allow people scheduled time to check in with home; scheduled time to relax; and allow them to go home if necessary. To ensure a true diversity of potential needs are accounted for, get input from as many of the participants as possible in the planning phase.
2. Consider the physical environment
Once you’ve done the work to establish the ‘why’, the ‘who’, and the ‘when’ of the gathering, you can turn your attention to the detail that comes with the ‘where’. Some questions to consider:
- Where does this away day need to be geographically?
- Should it be secluded and rural, or connected and metropolitan?
- How accessible does it need to be for participants? And for potentially unwanted visitors?
- What facilities do you need? What equipment is already onsite?
- What does the physical space you’ve chosen say about your intention for the team?
- How much space do you need? And how should that space be set up?
“Surroundings are really important,” explains Management Futures’ Tim Cox. “The venue that you’re using will immediately speak to the team about some level of value. It doesn’t need to be opulent, but if the space is thought through, bright and comfortable, if the food and beverages are good, that says that you are valued. Ideally you want to be able to open your room out or have easy access to outside. It’s no good if you’ve got to walk ten minutes through the building to try to find some outside space."
“Ideally there’s access to smaller breakout rooms or the potential to partition off the rooms because you get a hell of a lot more done in twos and threes and fours than you will in plenary."
“I think you also want to seriously consider any barriers to people. Consider how you’re using tables and chairs. How big is the team? How much writing do they really need to do? Maybe just get rid of any tables to just have comfortable chairs so it’s easier to move around. You’ve also got to consider line of sight.”
The Austrian national women’s football team stayed at one of the Exclusive Collection venues for the duration of their stay in England for the European Championships this summer. Pecorelli explains that the hotel management and the squad consulted on various bespoke spaces that were created for the team. One of the things they wanted as a group was a player-only space. “They wanted it with a fairly basic set-up with table tennis,” says Pecorelli, “but the management would not go in that space at all.”
Pennyhill Park, which is part of the Exclusive Collection group, was built, for the most part, to accommodate the England rugby team. The team has a 20-year contract to stay at the venue during Test weeks; and the facilities are top of the range and equipped for elite sports organisations. The pitch, which has been upgraded four times since the venue opened, is an exact replica of the playing surface at Twickenham; and there’s also a 40 x 40 4G indoor pitch, for teams to be able to practise away from prying eyes.
But for Pecorelli, the detail is in the hospitality side of things. “We deliberately have long driveways at our venues for two reasons,” he explains, “A) there’s a sense of arrival. And B) you’re taking people away. You’re intentionally taking them out of their home environment; it’s a message: ‘this is a new environment’. If you hold a meeting in your offices, you’re going to get distracted; it feels familiar, it’s not going to stimulate a different thought process. There needs to be a sense of arrival, a sense that this is a high performance environment, and we’re away to think differently.
“You’ve got the elite sport bit here, but then you’ve got the bit we’re responsible for which is great quality sleep, great quality nutrition, creating an environment that enables them when they need to switch off or have a team meeting. We store the England players’ mattresses here and set them out for them whenever they’re here, for example.”
For Frank Ponissi’s Melbourne Storm, the facilities at Geelong Grammar School offer them everything they need for a pre-season fitness building and team bonding trip. “It’s one of the leading schools not only in Melbourne, Victoria, but also in Australia,” says Ponissi. “It is a boarding school with outstanding facilities. Now, it’s in the middle of the school holidays so all the boarding houses are available and onsite is everything that we need, besides being able to stay there, and have all meals there. There’s our training pitch there, it’s got an outstanding gym, pool, recovery; it’s got team meeting rooms. It’s got everything we need in one spot so we don’t have to travel. It allows us to train Monday-Friday, players and staff can go home at the weekend and come back again Monday-Friday; and we pack as much as we can into those two weeks.”
Wellness watch
Think about calm environments, access to nature, greenery, fresh air and open skies. Also consider locations that offer wellness-focused activities. Trends in away day activities have changed. Where once Exclusive Collection venues found their clay pigeon shooting, archery and HIIT class offerings to be the most popular with teams, now the tree bathing, nature walks, meditation and yoga classes are being sought out. “ What being outside brings is a definite departure from the norm,” explains Cox. “It will feel very different. According to Attention Restoration Theory, if you have a 90-minute session looking at a really big, important team goal, and you put a lot of energy into it, to be able to then get outside for a 30-minute walk or just be out in nature will be more restorative than if you didn’t do that, than if you just stayed inside and took a 30-minute break. There’s a lot of evidence that says if you go for a walk in a wood, that’s going to be a lot better for you than if you go for a walk around the streets of London. You’re recharging.”
3. Work with trusted partners who fully understand needs
From event planners to facilitators, transport and logistics providers, chefs and nutritionists to security operators and venue managers, there are a whole host of contractors available to ensure your away day runs as smoothly as it needs to. Consider the following:
- Privacy and security;
- Administrative and logisitcal efficiency;
- Consultation on programme design and facilitation;
- Nutritionists, chefs and caterers
The Melbourne Storm benefit from a league-wide deal the NRL has with the Accor hotel group in Australia. The deal is now in its tenth year, and the benefits of that long-term association are being felt. “You’re never going to a hotel that’s not used to catering for teams,” explains the Storm’s GM, Football, Frank Ponissi. “That can be security, access, that can be menus, quantity and quality of food. If you just did your own booking and it was based on commercial rates or something our commercial team did, that might be good from a commercial point of view for the club, but would it satisfy our performance needs? There’s a chance it wouldn’t. When a team arrives on the bus, you’ve got anywhere between 30 and 40 people all coming in at once. The last thing you want is lining up and checking in; it takes half an hour, 45 minutes to get people to their rooms. But the way they do it, everything is set up, keys are ready, and the players grab their envelope and they get to know where the team room is straight away and they get their keys and it’s an easy process.”
At Exclusive Collection, Danny Pecorelli and his team are now so ingrained in the England Rugby set-up that they are invited to join post-World Cup review sessions. Meanwhile, and perhaps unsurprisingly, Management Futures’ Tim Cox espouses the use of a third party to run the away day. “You don’t necessarily need an external facilitator to run it,” he says, “but I think it’s a very good idea. Not least for the sanity of the team leader!”
Independent facilitators will help to guide the planning process, provide a neutral focal point for the team and augment that sense of this being a different environment from the day-to-day; take administrative pressure off the team leader and allow them to join in as part of the team; and usually come armed with a trove of tricks for maximising engagement within the group.
Wellness watch
If the primary objective of an away day is to work – or to relax – time taken stressing over problems with rooms or long queues at check in or dietary requirments or any of the other myriad micro-issues that can accompany travelling can really detract from the experience for individuals and therefore the team. Minimise stress by being planned, and working with operators who understand your team and your priorities.
4. Have tangible outputs, measurement, next steps, and reviews
Like any effective meeting, the purpose, desired outcome, content and format of a well run away day should all be prepared beforehand. And like any effective meeting, a record, a set of outputs and actions, and a clear mechanism for reviewing how it all went are paramount.
For Pecorelli and his team at Exclusive Collection, an outcome-focused approach is central to how they build programmes of activity together with their clients.
“My real gauge on the success of an away day is has it been helpful?” says Cox. “Have we delivered at the end of it what they needed? There’s a big balance between it being enjoyable, which it shold be, but then equally the tangible actions or shifts in insight that people have taken from it. And I think the golden rule with the content is that less is more. Be kind in terms of start times. It’s a false economy to start at 8.30 in the morning and power through til 5.30 in the afternoon without significant breaks along the way.”
Ponissi agrees, adding that built-in ‘down time’ is critical for the effectiveness of a training camp away from home for elite sports teams. “In those early Geelong camps we probably didn’t have enough free time for the players,” he concedes. “Just a little bit more recovery time between sessions and between meetings; that’s important in terms of being at your best for the next session whether that’s an indoor meeting or an outdoor field session, you want your players as fresh as possible. The importance of mingling together and getting together and just generically coming up with it, rather than forced activities, they come together generically, that’s important.”
Wellness watch
Outputs, outcomes, actions, next steps and follow-ups might seem officious if the primary objective of an away day is to relax or to bond as a team, but they help to avoid any progress or success being lost upon the team’s return to the day-to-day – a scenario that could foster a feeling of frustration about time having been wasted. As ever, writing things down helps to lock in the learning.