Checked In with Splash
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Checked In with Splash
How to Host Effective Offsites with Jared Kleinert
In this episode of Checked In, host Camille Arnold sits down with Jared Kleinert.
Jared is the Founder and CEO of Offsite, a company that helps businesses save time, money, and stress when planning team retreats.
In addition to leading Offsite, Jared is also a TED speaker, 3x award-winning author, and USA Today's "Most Connected Millennial" who has helped organize hundreds of events for over 30,000 attendees. His insights on entrepreneurship, networking, remote work, and offsites have been featured in major media such as Forbes, TIME, Harvard Business Review, Fortune, NPR, Entrepreneur, Mashable, Fox Business, The Hustle, Bloomberg, and more.
Tune in to this episode to hear him discuss:
- The impact offsites have on employee retention and business growth
- Frameworks for creating cost-effective and engaging experiences for your team
- How frequently you should host offsites
- Best practices for organizing team gatherings that align leadership goals with employee needs
- The one thing businesses get wrong about offsites
- Metrics for measuring the success of your offsites
...and more.
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If you enjoyed today's episode, let us know. Support our show by subscribing and leaving us a rating. If you want to get in touch with our team or be a guest on our show, email us at podcast@splashthat.com. We'd love to hear from you.
Learn more about Splash: https://splashthat.com/
Follow Splash on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/splashthat-com
Connect with Jared: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jaredkleinert/
Check out Offsite: https://www.offsite.com/
This is Checked In with Splash. Hey y'all, welcome back to another episode of Checked In. I'm your host, camille Arnold. Ever wonder what it takes to absolutely nail a team or company-wide offsite? In this episode, I sit down with Jared Kleinert, founder and CEO of a company called Offsite. In our chat, jared shares why he was motivated to start his company, the importance of offsites for every organization, tips for planning them, ways to measure success and what not to do when it comes to investing in offsites for a team or entire company. Let's go ahead and get checked in with Jared. Jared, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to be connecting with you. Thanks for joining me. How are you today?
Jared Kleinert:I'm doing well. We're recording post-July 4th holiday. Everyone's back with energy, so I feel more motivated than ever to be here, and thanks for the time and invitation. Thanks for the time and invitation.
Camille Arnold:Amazing. Well, thank you for giving me the time. I want to make the most of our time together, because I'm sure you are very busy. Talk to me a little bit about your career journey to date. I'd love to hear what you were doing previously and then how you decided to start Offsite and tell our listeners a little bit about what your company, offsite, does, what you're all about.
Jared Kleinert:Yeah, so offsite. com, I'm the founder CEO. We've been around for about three and a half years. We're the go-to platform for all things Offsite team retreat, even conference planning and we have sort of an Airbnb style marketplace where you can book your room, block meeting space, food and beverage et. With offsite venues directly through us and save time and money in the process. Or we do end-to-end offsite planning as a service, kind of like a wedding planner, and we've done that with hundreds of companies, lots of VC-backed startups, remote and hybrid teams Got there after a decade of seemingly random experiences related to planning offsites getting offsites, attending offsites, going into the pandemic, and then during the pandemic I was betting that every company was going remote or hybrid at some point.
Jared Kleinert:I was betting they'd all plan offsites and then thought that software should be around to make that planning process easier, kind of like Splash has done for event planning and event management. We're doing for offsites because that's just a very niche event type that is so important for employee engagement retention, alignment that it deserves its own set of tools and it's also something that a marketplace should exist to help people planning offsites get deals with hotels and have the hotels know about this new client set. But I only found out about all this through accident. I started my career in tech when I was 16 years old Wow, I was technically 15. I started my first business at 15. But it was not really a business, it was more of a project. I didn't get off the ground, bought the t-shirt and the business cards before I ever had a website or before I had a client, which I didn't do this time around. I got a t-shirt a year in.
Camille Arnold:Still impressive. I don't know I wasn't doing that at age 15 or 16.
Jared Kleinert:Thinking about business at 15 is impressive seemingly, but I sent a cold email when I was 16 to this guy, David. He is the founder and now former CEO of a company called 15five. He's still the chairman of the board, but 15five is like Lattice or CultureAmp for those that don't have the name recognition of 15.5. But they're one of the leading employee engagement and performance management software platforms. But I cold emailed when they were in stealth, ended up being employee seven there after being an unpaid intern and then getting on payroll and spending a couple years there and I got to work remotely. I grew up in South Florida. They were San Francisco based but had a remote team, and I didn't intend to work in SaaS or in startups. I really just wanted to work for David and read about him in Forbes. He was called like the most connected man you don't know in Silicon Valley. He threw all these like crazy dinner parties and all these events where, like the Tim Ferriss's of the world would show up and like PayPal co-founders would show up. But he wasn't a household name himself and so I was just really drawn to him as a community builder, someone that brought people together. And then it turns out he's a really good entrepreneur. He was at the beginning stages of building a really successful company. So I got to experience that. And when I was there I got to attend off-sites as an employee. So that was my first foray into remote work, into attending off-sites and employee. So that was sort of my first foray into remote work, into attending off-sites.
Jared Kleinert:And then when I left 15five, I took a seven-year speaker, author, consultant turn to my career where I skipped college altogether, started a marketing consulting firm to pay my bills and my first client was Keith Ferrazzi who wrote the book Never Eat Alone. I sought him out and sent another cold email because I just wanted to learn from New York Times bestselling authors about how to sell lots of books, because I was in the middle of publishing my first book and wanted to get the insider secrets. I ended up building a little bit of a consulting firm because when you have a New York Times bestselling author as your first client, it's easier to get other New York Times bestselling authors and people like that or aspiring authors as clients. And so I then found myself speaking once my book came out and did keynotes, including at off sites and conferences. Then I was brought in as a facilitator for executive team retreats.
Jared Kleinert:Then, right before the pandemic, I hosted summits for entrepreneurs where I was bringing together 20 to 40 people every three months for about four years. I'm doing all the planning. I would then facilitate the sessions and so I was basically planning an offsite for many years every quarter. And so pandemic hit, that business took a big hit as well. But I was then thinking about that last decade of experiences and it's like maybe this offsite thing is the way to go and it really aligned with my value system. I saw a venture backable opportunity and had always wanted to start a venture backable company, not just solopreneur ventures, and so I went for it. And now we're VC-backed ourselves. We got 10 people full-time, hundreds of clients trying to run on the VC hamster wheel, much like Splash has and become kind of that category-defining company that you guys have become, or that 15.5 and Lattice have become.
Camille Arnold:So exciting times, wow, yeah, I mean I just have to just stop and pause for a second and acknowledge that is an incredible story of how you've come to where you are today. And also I'm noticing a trend in the cold emails. So I feel like I'm like, hmm, I would love to like see what were the cold emails one day. Maybe you'll share them with me, because clearly you have a knack for absolutely nailing cold emails. Very impressed, and I think a lot of people could probably learn from you today. You could probably make money just off of that. I'm sure you already have through all of your consulting work.
Camille Arnold:Okay, so you touched on something that I want to dig into a little bit more with you, which is talking about the importance of off-sites for employee engagement and retention. But I'd love for you to and I should say I am a big believer in off-sites, investing in employee-first experiences in general. Before I was in my current role at Splash, I worked really closely with our former CEO and kind of led the planning for all of our internal employee events. But for anyone listening in who maybe is on the fence, or maybe they just haven't had great experiences with off-sites before so they haven't benefited from kind of receiving that value firsthand. I'd love for you to just explain why offsites are so critical to business success and why companies should invest in offsites for their employees.
Jared Kleinert:Well, if you work at a startup, if you are managing a team, if you're a founder listening to this, you know that running a company is really hard and managing people is really hard. And so, for all the benefits of remote and hybrid work being able to give people exceptional flexibility in how they manage their schedule and hopefully giving them a better quality of life, maybe allowing their money to go farther because they can move where they live to like less expensive places you have to be more intentional and strategic planning. You can hire from better or like less expensive cities and have a more affordable payroll. There's so many benefits to run hybrid work, but there are a few downsides as well, in that if you're not particularly great at management, it's even harder to run your team if they're remote or hybrid than if they were in an office. And even if you are a good manager, there are still challenges that come with a remote or hybrid workforce, whether it's people feeling lonely or disengaged on harder days, whether it's just getting on the same page and aligning on a decision, on a strategic vision. And so all the pioneering remote-first companies, like 15.5, like Automatic, which owns WordPress, like GitLab they had to face these problems and they all came to the same conclusion that off-sites would be one of the tools in their toolkit for solving some of these problems. And so they realized as we have, as Splash has, and now lots of companies are realizing that regularly scheduling team retreats and off-sites give you an opportunity to build deep and meaningful relationships with your colleagues, especially if you're very intentional about how you set your agenda, facilitate the experience, but then you can allow people to go back to their more productive setups. You have a certain setup at home. You have a certain schedule and how you like to run your life. You probably get a lot done because of that, but you rely on all the relationship equity you're building at things like offsites or if you ever are in person with colleagues and can really invest in those relationships.
Jared Kleinert:So offsites are these amazing opportunities to build trust and intimacy, to work through cross-department challenges, to have these memorable experiences and artifacts in your time as an employee at a company, and for an employer it's a great opportunity to keep people retained longer, because if you're dangling this really exciting trip, you know three months out, six months out, like people are going to think twice about leaving and they're going to build relationships at the off sites that make them want to stay longer. It's also just a great way to energize people. So, whether it's after a riff or if it's just this sales kickoff or, like you know, beginning of your kickoff, or it's like midway through the year and you just need another bolt of energy, offsites can provide that, and so there's just lots of reasons to have offsites to just invest in your culture over time, give people greater trust with each other and then use the time in person very intentionally for strategic planning, for problem solving, for brainstorming or whatever your offsite calls for. So for marketing team offsite, it might be creative brainstorming around new campaigns you want to run.
Jared Kleinert:For product and engineering team, it might be aligning their product roadmap and doing time estimates on what they're building in the future. Sales team it might be a sales kickoff or a president's club if you're trying to celebrate after having a great year. There's all these different reasons to have an offsite, but the companies that invest in that are keeping their employees longer. They're keeping them more engaged and getting higher ROI from their team. Everyone's aligned. So then there's like less need for meetings on a day-to-day basis lots of benefits.
Camille Arnold:You just ran through so many different goals and outcomes that you would either set or expect from all these various types of offsites that you mentioned. I'm curious of offsites that you mentioned. I'm curious, like if you've kind of observed what is an appropriate cadence, like how often should you be kind of planning to bring either a team or an entire company together? I was going to ask you like what's your definition of a successful offsite? But I feel like you just gave me all the possible definitions of how to think through that and we'll dig into.
Camille Arnold:I have some more questions around measuring success, because I'm sure people are really interested in not only why they should invest but how they can know that their off-site can be deemed successful or not. But before we get there and we'll also get into the nitty-gritty of planning an off-site right which is like it's not going to be successful if you don't invest enough on the planning front, which can be a lot, which is not so shameless plug why your company exists right or one of the reasons why. But I'd love to again just back up and it's like how often should you be thinking about prioritizing, bringing your people together? Have you noticed kind of like a sweet spot or an appropriate pocket Is it like, based on the size of your team or company? Or I'm just curious what your thoughts are there.
Jared Kleinert:Yeah, definitely based on the team that you're managing, the size of the company, things like that. I would say minimum viable dose is one all hands meeting per year.
Jared Kleinert:And a lot of our clients do that in Q3 or Q4. Once you get to, or I guess when you're smaller, you can actually get away with two to four off sites per year, sort of all hands, and we were doing quarterly team retreats up until about 10 people. Now we do two all-hands meetings per year ourselves and then we do the other two quarters. Just the leadership team will meet. I think at any size your leadership team would benefit from meeting quarterly, and so the investment for 5 to 10 people to get together is small relative to the ROI if they're setting the vision for the company and actually managing everyone else.
Jared Kleinert:Yeah, so I think that should be non-negotiable, but it's not. Sometimes companies delay that even and then, based on the team, I would say there could be anywhere from another 1 to 3 meetings per year, based on the kind of team that's meeting and how that team operates. So for product and engineering teams, some are very asynchronous and have built their culture around that, and so they prefer to just have time to code and not have to travel. Others are much more collaborative and benefit tremendously from meeting two to four times a year in addition to some sort of all-hands meeting. Same with marketing If you happen to be in more of an execution mode, then maybe you don't have to meet as much. But if it requires more creative brainstorming or celebrating or you're doing customer-facing events which we help some clients with, then you might do those more regularly.
Jared Kleinert:Sales is the team that probably meets stereotypically the most often outside of just like an all-hands meeting and an executive team or leadership team meeting.
Jared Kleinert:Sales will generally have some sort of sales kickoff at the beginning of the year. Larger sales teams might have a president's club that meets in April or May to celebrate the previous year's success and then they can typically squeeze in another one in Q3 or early Q4 around some sort of conference where a lot of people are traveling and just like, all right, let's just do training, let's do some sort of gathering. So it really depends on the company. And then some companies will centralize their planning and it's one person even, or one small team that'll manage everything across the board and sort of under the direction of like a chief people officer or head of people, chief of staff. And then others are very decentralized in how they plan offsites, particularly if they're larger companies, where they'll kind of create a playbook internally how to manage your offsite and then kind of let teams self-organize up to a certain size and certain budget. And then if it becomes sort of a multi-department offsite or a larger company meeting, then it goes back to C-suite and a central planning body, if you will.
Camille Arnold:Yeah, I have one more kind of off-the-cuff question. So thank you for walking me through the different ways to think about like what's the appropriate cadence for your team or your business. I think it's a really helpful way of just kind of understanding how to make those decisions you know. Besides, like cadence and timing of year, I'm also curious how you for offsite, but also for all of your clients that you work with how do you pick locations? I could see the case for maybe it's where, if you do have some sort of physical headquarter office, opting for that location or that market, maybe even to kind of save on budget. But I also think if you're a fully distributed or remote organization, there's a lot of incentive that you can provide in picking different destinations. So I'd love to hear how you kind of think about that or how you kind of coach some of your clients on why they should pick different destinations or cities or countries. Even. Yeah, what are your thoughts there?
Jared Kleinert:Yeah, typically it's two routes Either someone has a vision for where they want to have the offsite, either because they have an office they want to do more of an onsite, or they have a certain place they want to travel to Because, like the CEO wants to bring everyone to Playa del Carmen, mexico Sounds great Because Ben wants to do it, but that happens, and so then you can just go on offsitecom, make a free account, search Airbnb and you could see the venues that we've recommended that we reviewed.
Jared Kleinert:Go that direction. We would also just further advise our end-to-end service clients from our past experiences like which of those venues we think would be best for their needs and budget and things like that. The other scenario that we see a lot is companies are asking us where they should go and then we're looking at their sort of employee census where people live. We're looking at a few different cities that we hypothesize would be best and then we're kind of running the numbers with them to see if there's any big differences in flying people to Denver versus Austin, versus Atlanta versus New York, and then we're also sending out requests to various properties in those cities to see if there's any substantial savings that we could get in one of those markets and then, between the quotes that we're getting from hotels and the flight estimates, we're making a decision that you can go to Denver and you'll save $10,000, or there is no real difference between New Orleans and Miami. So just pick one of the two based on your preference.
Jared Kleinert:And then we'll make decisions that way.
Camille Arnold:Yeah, I mean it is, as you're kind of describing the process, not too dissimilar if you were planning a big like brand summit or user conference of some sort. So that's helpful to hear that. Like that it's not too far off. So, for anyone listening in, if they're wanting to invest more, start planning more off-sites, and you're already doing kind of larger scale events for your customers or prospects you can kind of apply a lot of the same processes and kind of frameworks for decision making to planning your offsite. So that's why I wanted to ask about that.
Camille Arnold:Okay, so we're now getting into more of the planning of the offsite and I have to ask you a big question. I'm really curious how you're going to break it down for me. But how do you create a really engaging offsite? From your experience, which you've had so much with offsites like you said, from being basically a teenager starting your career in SaaS what are some of the key ingredients that people need to pay close attention to? That makes for a really great offsite and understanding you've already kind of walked us through there are so many different goals and or outcomes that you may be working towards. But regardless of the goals or the outcomes, what are those really essential ingredients or elements of an engaging offsite.
Jared Kleinert:Yeah, the meme comes to mind, like you know the bell curve meme, where it's like the Jedi master on one side and it's like complete idiot on the other side, and then it's just like the average person in the middle On both sides of the bell curve like just ask your team is the way to go. And then, of course, we have some like building blocks and things we'd recommend. But if you don't know where to start or you're trying to be super optimal for your unique culture, like I would ask your team. And so we always have clients send out a pre-offsite feedback form. At minimum you got to ask for dietary preferences, travel sensitivities, handicaps anything that would impact their experience from a logistics standpoint would impact their experience from a logistics standpoint. And then you can also add in questions like what kind of activities would you like to experience, what would you like to accomplish from this offsite, and you can ask lots of open-ended questions there. You can ask an employer, net promoter, score and other questions like that and start building some data offsite by offsite about how much engagement you're getting from these experiences or like connectedness to colleagues score. We have a few of those that we would give our clients and then you can just use whatever you currently use for employee engagement in a tool like Lattice or 15.5. So we do a pre-offsite feedback form At minimum. We're asking those logistic questions. Sometimes we're also having clients ask those activity-based or objective-based questions and then you could customize the experience from there.
Jared Kleinert:Just ask your team or the two ends of the bell curve In the middle. Most offsites. You need to think about time for traveling in to wherever you're traveling to and then travel out time, and so, especially if you're really dispersed, people are going to have lots of travel time and you have to account for the fact that there will be flight delays. There will be people that are stressed out. They might be leaving their families behind, maybe they haven't traveled in a while, they might be nervous about meeting new colleagues. So you need to give them ample time to get there physically and then to ease into the day.
Jared Kleinert:We typically have some sort of like welcome dinner that's casual and then maybe like a party at night or some sort of, you know, unstructured social time, but just like build the trust and intimacy to start the offsite and allow that space for traveling in and out. We always like to start each day with some sort of icebreaker, build up the energy and again create trust and intimacy in the group, or deepen it if it's an executive team that's just meeting quarterly, but keep adding something to the mix to further build those relationships. We add in lots of flex time throughout the agenda so that if you're going over on sessions you can go into certain coffee breaks or even just like after sessions before dinner, giving people two hours to get a workout in, call their family take a nap Again. Like people may not be used to the intensity of a two, three, four day action packed offsite, it might just be different from their normal work or they might be not as social as others. So you got to account for that.
Jared Kleinert:You want to make sure you end your offsite on a high note and then each day on a high note. So parties at night, you know, celebrations, some sort of awards is really cool, and then any sort of like big activity you should put last day and then, you know, then have some brunch or send-off thing in the morning, but the thing that everyone's going to remember the off-site for, like renting the yacht or the big party or the big outing into nature. So there's also different session types you can run based on whether it's an all-hands meeting or marketing team meeting or whatever. You could do a State of the Union from the CEO to kickstart after your icebreakers on day one. You could do customer panels where you invite any local customers or investors to do a Q&A. We do hot seats at a lot of our off-sites where we present a pressing problem and then create multi-department groups to solve those problems and then share their ideas company-wide afterwards. So we got like a whole library of those. But that's the middle part of the meme.
Jared Kleinert:So, ask your team at the end of the day.
Camille Arnold:So okay, so ask your team what if your kind of the feedback or input you're getting from your team is just all over the place? How do you kind of balance the different kind of either needs or expectations that you're noticing from your employees? And what if leadership has already, like we know, we want to accomplish A, B and C and what you're hearing from your employees is just not really, at least holistically, seemingly lining up with what leadership has deemed as the necessary goals or outcomes of the offsite of like walk, that line of like making sure business needs and priorities are addressed and also the needs and priorities of your employees, which, again, they might align, but there also might be some differences. How do you navigate that?
Jared Kleinert:Yeah, this is where being skillful at planning comes into play, and it starts with having alignment on whoever the internal offsite planner is and the executive or the leadership team that is saying we need an offsite. So if it's like the chief marketing officer and their chief of staff, or a CMO and their EA, or a CMO and the head of people, the CMO should have a vision for what needs to happen at that offsite in order to deem it successful and have ROI. And it might be again. It might be like brainstorming various initiatives. It might be planning the next quarter.
Jared Kleinert:It might be that we need to celebrate these people because they're really working their butts off. They need to come up with those goals and then tell the offsite planner, internally and or externally, what those goals are. From there, you can then pick your venue accordingly, you can set your budget accordingly and you could tailor those pre-offsite feedback form questions to only ask for feedback where you want it. And so then, if it's a more relaxed offsite and it's really like we've been crushing it and we really just want to be celebratory, we really want to bring people together because they haven't met their colleagues, then you might be asking wider ranging questions about what objectives they want to accomplish at the offsite, or activities.
Jared Kleinert:If you have a vision for it, it might be more narrow to like, on a scale of one to 10, how active do you want the activities to be? Or it might just be we're thinking about these three activities, which ones do you want to do? Or it might be open ended questions to like. But it gives you a sense of how to manage that person in the weeks and months leading to the offsite, and then you can ask them afterwards if their opinions have changed for better or for worse, and then be able to manage after the offsite as well, because the offsites are really just a point in time. But you can think about the lead up to the offsite, the experience there, of course, and then the follow up, and those are equally, if not more, valuable than sort of what happens at the offsite.
Camille Arnold:Yeah, quick question for you Is there such a thing as an offsite that is too short or too long? You mentioned a lot of people have families, or even just like pets, and like how much time is too much time to ask them to step away from their day to day lives, and or how little time is just too short that you're just not going to be able to deliver a valuable experience?
Jared Kleinert:Yeah, I would recommend doing offsites during the week if they're internal team events and I would recommend doing no longer than a Monday through Friday. People might have to travel in on Sunday if they're coming in internationally, but you can give them that option. And so I would say 4 nights, 5 days is probably the max that you should be planning an offsite and 90% of our prospects and clients stick to that as a max. Like we've occasionally gotten a request to do like a two week long offsite. I'm like what are you doing? Like is everyone at your company 23 and single and in some cases they are, but for everyone else I think a week is the longest. I would recommend you also have to account for like that's a ton of employee time that is going into that experience and while I think it's a great use of time if you structure it correctly, there are other things you need to get done. So I would recommend that being the max.
Jared Kleinert:If it's an all-hands meeting once a year for 100 people, great, allocate that week. Shortest you can do a really for 100 people. Like great, allocate that week. Shortest. You can do a really packed one night, two days. If it's like an executive team meeting and people don't have to travel that far, Like maybe they're in the same city, like they're all in the San Francisco Bay Area and like they just need to drive in or take public transit in and you're giving them one night at a hotel or it's just like regional travel. You can probably make one night, two days work if travel goes your way. But I'd say most of the offsites we're planning are like two nights, three days at the shortest and then five days at the max.
Camille Arnold:Yeah, that sounds about right to me. And, yeah, anyone who's planning a two week off site. I'm just. I've so many questions.
Jared Kleinert:What's the point? Like this we've done half-day requests and it's like what's the point of that? You're talking about a field trip.
Camille Arnold:Exactly.
Jared Kleinert:I mean, it's better than nothing, but you're not really going to get any meaningful output from that, in my opinion.
Camille Arnold:Yeah, I would love to talk a little bit more about measuring success with you. I was going to ask about, like, what's your process for collecting feedback effectively? I feel like we've already spoken to that. The surveys, as you said, like before and after right, sound like a great way. If you have any other tips on that, but I'm all ears. But I'm curious how you think about and or how you kind of coach your clients and customers to think about measuring the success of an offsite. You mentioned ENPS, employee net promoter score but besides that, how would you go about measuring or quantifying employee engagement? Obviously, retention is another metric that you could look at. That is easy to, it's very quantifiable. But I'm just curious, qualitatively and quantitatively, how do you advise people think about measuring success of an offsite?
Jared Kleinert:I would say today the best indicators are going to be qualitative. I hope that throughout Offsite's journey we can really nail the quantitative data and help companies better see that. From a qualitative standpoint, I think you need to look at the outcomes of the Offsite. So if there's sessions around strategic planning, did you set your OKRs for the upcoming quarter? Were they well-intentioned OKRs? Did people follow up on them? If it's a marketing team offsite, did you have any creative campaigns come out of it and how did those campaigns do against previous campaigns that were ideated not in the in-person intentional offsite setting?
Camille Arnold:Yeah.
Jared Kleinert:You can look at trust that people have in each other and like speed of decision-making, those sorts of things like starts to get into the quantitative of like activity on Slack, like how connected people feel to each other, and that is hard to track. I mean you can ask, like on a scale of one to 10, how much do you trust your colleagues before and after? But like you're not really going to get the best answers Connectedness to colleagues question you could get a one out of 10. Or like how much do you trust management's vision for the company? And like get a before and after sort of like a glass door style questions. So that starts to get you to some quantitative info. But I think it's really like using an offsite to solve one of those problems and then tracking it afterwards, like if you've had a reduction in force, like you need to rally the troops and get them hyped again like could be pretty evident that people are like lower morale.
Jared Kleinert:And then you have your offsite and people are pumped again Like that would be the perfect scenario or same, with something to celebrate at the end of the year, like you crushed it, but everyone's exhausted. Then you have the offsite everyone seems relaxed, like re-energized, for the next three to six months, like that would be qualitative, but you could probably see that. And then quantitative again, it's those employer net promoter scores. It's like you know the questions you're asking.
Jared Kleinert:Before and after off sites you can see maybe Slack activity, things like that. Or if you're doing like sprint management in linear, you could see are people cranking out work faster or getting more done in a short amount of time? And then I like in the future I want to really do like sentiment analysis through tools like Slack or 15.5, like Lattice, coltramp they all have varying sentiment analysis things that you could read. And so if we were able to plug that into Offsite and sort of give you even more metrics to look at afterwards, I think that'd be really cool, but not the highest thing on our product roadmap right now.
Camille Arnold:Listen, I get it and I think it's helpful. You've kind of given me and our listeners a few different things to think about and or places to kind of like look and mechanism Real quickly.
Jared Kleinert:is there anything you guys do or look for at Splash that I didn't mention in terms of how you track whether it's successful or not?
Camille Arnold:No, I think you hit on all the things that we're doing. I honestly think like we could probably be doing an even better job of we do an ENPS survey. I think we I'm going to bring this back to our people team and I think we do it quarterly. We do an ENPS survey quarterly, and I don't know that we're necessarily like tying that to our offsite though at all. So I think we could probably be doing a better job of measuring the success of our offsite. I mean, we hear anecdotally great feedback from people and a lot of the things that you kind of ask about. We ask those questions in our kind of standard ENPS survey, but we could probably take a page or two out of your book and practice some of these things, put some of these feedback mechanisms in place specifically around our all company offsite. And then I know we do departmental offsites. I'm actually in the midst of planning our upcoming marketing team offsite right now.
Jared Kleinert:So this conversation is perfect, yeah, I'd say just one other quick idea. I'd say, like the top 10% of companies, you can get like super geeky if you are committed to a regular cadence of offsites. You could start giving people quick pulse surveys on specific sessions and specific activities, places that you're staying, and sort of getting a sense calibrating, like what you do specific to your team or company. So you could give them like that State of the Union session and then, like, ask them afterwards scale of one to 10, how was it? And keep the highest performing session types in the future, get rid of the ones that suck. And same with locations. While we have reviews on our site for a lot of properties, over time we want to get even more detailed with, like here's the reviews on the amenities, here's the reviews on the meeting space itself. On the food we're not quite there yet, although that's the vision, but you can do that internally and just ask people what their experience was and then keep that data in mind as you plan the next offsites.
Camille Arnold:Yeah, I am definitely going to implement that for our upcoming marketing team offsite, because I've noticed that we kind of, from an agenda planning point of view, it kind of feels like we're almost reinventing the wheel every time. It kind of feels like we're almost reinventing the wheel every time and I think it would help us, like you said, like let's do the most impactful sessions again at the next offsite if we really got a lot of value out of it as a team. So definitely gonna implement that one. And thank you also for the reminder of just like asking your team. I think, again, all of this really is super relevant to any kind of event organizer or planner.
Camille Arnold:I think, again, all of this really is super relevant to any kind of event organizer or planner because I think, especially pre pandemic, I feel like event marketers marketers in general were very used to just making a lot of assumptions about our target audience or attendees, whether you're focusing on internal events for your employees or external events for customers and prospects.
Camille Arnold:I think it was very normal to just like make a bunch of assumptions and then plan an experience based off those assumptions. And I think I was actually just talking to the VP of experiential at HubSpot, kat Tooley, who was kind of making this point that like we really can't or shouldn't just go off of assumptions anymore, we should really check in with the target attendees of any event or experience that we're planning and make sure that we're investing in the content and the activities and experiences that they want and desire, because that's going to lead to, you know, the most fruitful ROI. So I am making note of that and we have some time for our next team offsite, so I'm going to send out send out a survey before I lock things in and just make sure that you know it's so easy to do, it's so easy to ask your team, ask your employees.
Camille Arnold:So I thank you for that reminder, Jared. We're almost at time. But I have just a few more rapid fire questions to ask you and then I'll let you go. First question is what's one thing companies just, you see, consistently get wrong about offsites?
Jared Kleinert:Yeah, one thing companies get wrong about offsites consistently is they overpack the agenda so they try and do too many activities, they try and get too many sessions in rather than getting the most important things scheduled, providing more flex time and leaving time for very unstructured socializing bonding. Those are where the best conversations actually happen is when you don't have anything planned. So don't overbook your offsite.
Camille Arnold:I think I have to share this reminder with the rest of my marketing leadership team. Thank you for that. Okay, what is the best way to get people excited for an offsite or internal event?
Jared Kleinert:Best way to get people excited for an event is tell them about it early and often out it early, and often so months out. Show them where you're going. Tease out things you're going to do at the offsite, even parts of the agenda, so they can start thinking about what the experience will be like. And your pre-offsite feedback points might be part of that teasing as well.
Camille Arnold:Love it Again. Just a good pro tip for event marketing in general. Okay, favorite artist or playlist or movie to watch when traveling to an offsite? First of all, have you seen this trend of like people like raw dogging their airplane experience Like no electronics, no book, nothing Like. I'm curious, are you in that category of people or are you Okay, good, thank you.
Jared Kleinert:My favorite way to travel is like getting work done while traveling.
Camille Arnold:Fair.
Jared Kleinert:I'm super productive on airplanes if and when they have Wi-Fi, otherwise I'm completely useless. But yeah, the raw dogging like. For those that haven't seen that trend, it's just like sitting on a plane pulling up the map of where you're traveling to and then just like looking at the map for two, three, four, 10 hours, which is insane.
Jared Kleinert:Yeah good, good for 10 minutes and I go crazy, but what comes up for me is not my favorite playlist to listen to. But my head of sales, jake, is in love with t-pain and he starts every road trip with the song booty work by t-pain, which is not the like I'm so tickled by that yeah, and like jake's an amazing guy.
Jared Kleinert:He definitely colors within the lines when it comes to culture. But like, so you know, like he's not anywhere remotely close to doing anything remotely wrong, but it's like a few months into his employment, like years ago at this point, we're going to an offsite together and we had a drive to the location in upstate new york and like that's the song he's throwing on and like it ended up being a blast. But it's like like that's a little risk that you're taking here.
Camille Arnold:I love it.
Jared Kleinert:But it's so much fun. And then he's now developed this T-Pain methodology of sales and he has this whole mix that he has, so he's our go-to playlist creator at the company. And then we do incorporate karaoke at basically every offsite. Like my team is obsessed with karaoke Okay, and I do generally perform karaoke blindly. Like my team will give me a song A lot of times it's inappropriate, like Umbrella from Rihanna, and I will perform it. I don't know why I do this, but it's hilarious and, yeah, it's super fun. But we love karaoke as a team, so we do that at every offsite.
Camille Arnold:That is amazing. Your company culture sounds like a very fun culture. I love that. I also love that you're down to just be surprised and assigned a song Like. I respect that deeply, thank you, okay. Next question what's a question that you or your employees at Offsite get asked frequently about Offsites that you want companies to know more about?
Jared Kleinert:We get asked about every question related to Offsites, and that's why I started the company in part, and why I thought it was the right time was because there is no thought leadership present on the right way to do an offsite, and so I think in many ways, we have a shot at being the category defining company, teaching people the right way to do an offsite, and even the pioneers like Automatic and GitLab and Zapier don't know how to do it properly 100% of the time. They're still experimenting and trying to figure it out, especially as they're scaling. So I think there are better ways than others to do offsite and we talked about some of them, but the fact that we're now helping hundreds of companies do them and connecting 1000s of people, I think it's giving us data over time to then teach everyone the right way to do offsites.
Camille Arnold:Yeah.
Jared Kleinert:And I've been a TED and TEDx speaker myself. I've been a facilitator for fortune 1000 executive teams. I've hired offsite planners that had their own freelance offsite planning and event planning companies that have joined us. So we've built a brain trust of hospitality experts internally and offsite experts internally that have now done this hundreds of times, and so we're coming across some best practices and we've talked about some of them today, but again, every company is different and there is no best way to do it all the time 100%.
Camille Arnold:That makes sense we get asked about travel.
Jared Kleinert:We get asked about should you bring plus ones or not?
Camille Arnold:And like answers oh, it depends. Okay, I was going to ask what's your we get asked about international versus local travel.
Jared Kleinert:It depends, yeah. We get asked by cadence, it depends, like everyone's favorite answer it depends.
Camille Arnold:Okay, that's fair. Last rapid fire question and then we'll close this out. Finish this sentence the best events blank.
Jared Kleinert:The best events are intentional. So knowing what you want to accomplish, structuring your agenda accordingly, thinking long and hard about what you want the employee experience to be or, if it's a marketing event, what you want your customers to walk away with. If you plan with intention, then you can decide who shows up, what experience to facilitate for them takeaways and can measure ROI accordingly.
Camille Arnold:I love it and I also could not agree. More Intentionality is key. All right, jared. Where can listeners connect with you and learn more about you, your work that you've done in the past and the work that you're doing with Offsite today?
Jared Kleinert:Yeah, email me, jared, at offsitecom. You can go to offsitecom and make a free account, and I'm most active on LinkedIn if we're talking about social media, so feel free to add me. Ideally, leave a little note as well that you heard me on this podcast and I'll potentially accept your connection requests. Oh, I will accept your connection requests, but if you don't add a note, I probably won't.
Camille Arnold:That's fair. I think that's a fair request, pun intended.
Jared Kleinert:I do want to check those. So please reach out via email, via LinkedIn. We'd love to help with your offsites. Of course, that can include customer-facing events, which we do all the time. The N10 service can be just using the free software, which is the future of our business, Anyways. So I'm happy if you reach out, if you use what we have. We have free templates as well on our blog.
Jared Kleinert:So, offsitesubstackcom, at least for now, and maybe we switched to Beehive at some point, but for now it's Substack, so you can check that out. And there's like budgeting agenda, pre and post, offsite feedback form templates, like all on the blog.
Camille Arnold:Love it, amazing. I'm definitely going to check out some of those resources. Thank you, jared. Any last final thoughts or advice, pearls of wisdom that you want to share with our audience.
Jared Kleinert:I'm pretty good. Yeah, don't. Don't roger your flights to anywhere.
Camille Arnold:Highly not recommended. Fair enough. Well, we covered so much ground today, so thank you so much for your time. Folks, if you enjoyed this episode on Checked In, let us know. Support us by subscribing on your preferred podcast platform and, while you're at it, leave us a rating. We love the feedback. We talked a lot about feedback today. We love feedback about the show. If you ever want to get in touch with us, you can email us at podcast@ splash tha t. com, or, better yet, join our Slack community where you can message me directly. You can also find me on LinkedIn like Jared, Camille White-Stern.
Camille Arnold:Last but certainly not least, if you are a marketer using events to help your business grow and want to learn how Splash's platform can take your events to the next level and help you unlock event-led growth, as we have for companies like TikTok and Zoom, Uber, amazon or OpenAI, visit our website at www. splashthat. com. Until next time, take care, all right, folks. That's it for today. If you enjoyed today's episode or are a fan of the podcast in general, please let us know. Support this show by subscribing on your preferred podcast platform and, while you're at it, leave us a rating. We so appreciate feedback we receive about the show. So if you ever want to get in touch, you can email us at podcast@ splashthat. com or, better yet, join our Slack community, where you can message me directly. Last but certainly not least, if you're a marketer using events to help your business grow and want to learn how Splash's platform can take your events to the next level, like we have for MongoDB, UCLA, Okta, Zendesk, visit our website at www. splashthat. com. Until next time, take care.