10 Years of company retreats: Our recipe
Last week I spent an amazing couple of days with almost the whole Heja team down in Greece and wanted to share some insights of doing these types of trips for quite a while now.
Me and my co-founder Johan have been building companies in Sweden for a long time (celebrating 20 years now) and back in 2013 we decided to create our first real company retreat abroad. It was for one of our previous companies, laget.se. This continued each year and this recent one became our eighth trip (paused during the pandemic). While we have fine-tuned things over the years, the concept has remained unchanged. This is our recipe:
📆 Time of year
Find a time of the year when people need some warm weather and are not directly connected to summertime. For us that is (April/May or Sep/Oct)
✈️ Travel & location
Finding affordable flight tickets that also have reasonable arrival times. E.g. make sure we travel early (but not to early) so we have a whole evening together on-site on the first day. For us being based in Sweden, it makes sense to focus on destinations around the Mediterranean. We spend a lot of time researching this as ticket prices easily become a big part of the budget. Price is always more important than the choice of airline here. We usually end up with Norwegian or Ryanair as we rather spend that money on housing and food.
🌍 Gather people
With the remote-friendly setup at Heja, it’s also quite the puzzle to arrange travels that work from (currently) 4 different countries. But that seems to always work out in the end. We always start our ticket research with Sweden as we have more than half of the team in Sweden.
😴 Length and time of week
We usually overlap some with a weekend to minimize some of the time taken from the normal work week. E.g. this year we went from Wednesday to Saturday. Everyone needs to pitch in some of their free time. We’ve found three nights away to be the perfect balance. Enough to really feel like you have time together but short enough to make it work for most people. E.g. having kids might make it harder to be away for a longer period.
🏰 Housing
Find a house/mansion/castle that really adds something unique. Also make sure we have it for ourselves, which is super important as this adds to the we-feeling. Focus on places with great common areas, such as having a nice pool, great dining area, relaxation spots etc. We focus less on room arrangements. People need to agree to share rooms and bathrooms. We usually find our locations on Airbnb. We usually look for a place close to a city but not too close. We want people to spend time together at the house and not take off to a nightclub.
🥗 Food
Making sure we are getting not just good but GREAT food is a must. The food experience is such an essential part of a memorable trip together. This year we had a private chef with staff (cooking at the house) on the first and last evenings while heading to a nearby restaurant on the second evening. Also to create some variation.
💡 Work sessions
Each day involves work sessions. We always try and find topics that utilize the rare opportunities of having the entire team at the same place. We also try not to have sessions that are department based but instead make people spend time with team members they usually don’t interact with. How much time we spend on work sessions on each trip has varied quite a lot. We’ve found that people will always have different ideas of what’s too little or too much.
🏟 Activities
We’ve tried with more or fewer scheduled non-work activities on the schedule. What we’ve ended up with is that one larger activity is enough for the length of this type of trip. We usually spend around 4–5 hours getting away from the house and doing something that resonates with where we are. E.g. this year we stayed right next to the ocean, so we arranged a kayaking tour which was super fun.
Some of the places we’ve stayed at
- Greece https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/84236
- Italy https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/5661353
- Spain https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/21262285
- Greece https://www.airbnb.com/rooms/2669356 (where we went this year)
The budget varies some each year, but we usually end up around 700–800 Euros per person with everything included (travel, housing, food, drinks etc). Johan and I have mainly built bootstrapped companies over the years, and we’ve always been very conscious about costs. I believe this has created a mindset of trying to find ways to cut costs and be mindful of where we do decide to spend while at the same time making sure we create a memorable trip.
Some might argue that it costs a lot of money… I would rather say that it’s saving us a bunch. While this is mainly about showing that we care about the team and want to give back for a lot of hard work throughout the year, it’s also about creating a culture where we have fun and create memories together. I am confident that our culture (where our trips are one piece of the puzzle) plays an essential part in the individual’s decision to stay at Heja. Spending time, money and internal focus on building a team for the long run is a no-brainer for me.
We are currently 22 people at Heja, which of course makes things easier than being e.g. +100 people. I understand that this needs to evolve as we grow, but I sincerely hope we find ways to continue creating these amazing memories together for many years to come.
Mikael Blix
CEO & Co-founder @Heja
