How to Get the Most Out of Your Strategic Planning Sessions

Strategic planning season is upon us, and if you are planning to host several 6+ hour long meeting marathons in the same conference room, please stop or delete all those meeting invites! Your team and your future self will thank you.

Sticking everyone in the same room, in the same building with all of their daily distractions, is not a recipe for success. However, hosting an offsite meeting is the most effective way to get the full value of gathering all of your organization's great minds together. Offsite meetings lead to fewer distractions, more creativity, and more camaraderie among attendees.

Selecting an offsite location, booking the same meeting, and slapping a golf outing on top of the meeting isn’t going to cut it. To truly realize the full potential of your group you need a well-designed offsite plan. And while it may be a little more work upfront, the payoff is far greater.

More Productivity, More Fun

Hosting a meeting offsite can make a huge difference in the engagement levels of your attendees. The difference is so striking that the majority of meeting planners agree that off-site meetings are more productive than meetings that take place at the office.

Best of all, having your session offsite gives your staff a breather from the rigors of the everyday, offering all these benefits:

• Innovation — getting out of your comfort zone fosters creativity.
• Morale boost — at an offsite meeting, participants can share new ideas and offer opinions in a neutral site where they can feel more confident.
• Fresh outlook — they’ll get exposure to new ideas and different thoughts with a change of scenery, giving them an expanded perspective.
• New memories — group activities in a new environment give people who might not interact much a new way to bond — and strengthens existing bonds.
• Increased productivity — all of these benefits give way to improved results for the company.

Better Venue, Better Outcomes

When it comes to selecting your venue budget and availability are of course top of your list; but you should also consider getting away from distractions. Being able to fully plug into the strategic planning session you are designing will yield more creativity from each participant than you may have previously thought possible.

Yes, it’s all at our Ideation Center.

Why not get ahead of the game for next year, and schedule your 2024 planning session here in sunny Chandler, Arizona at our Ideation Center?

A Fresh Outlook On Planning

Having your session at an offsite location literally gets your team out of their shell. Creativity flows more freely, the normal humdrum and team dynamics change for the better. Now, we obviously recommend our Ideation Center as your location of choice because it kills two birds with one stone: you get to stage your strategic planning session in a new, beautiful location, while also learning about and seeing the latest in design-build, digital signage, and banking technologies. Not to mention, we are located in sunny Arizona, a tourist’s dream! Great food, plenty of sun, and you can even slap a golf outing on top of your trip—or just have some team-building fun in our golf simulator!

Known as the Banker's Playground, this is an interactive “branch of the future” where financial leaders start their journey toward branch and headquarter transformation.

Have Resources on Hand

It's important to factor in external resources you will need access to outside of your core team for specific decisions. This may mean adding in a virtual component for parts of the planning session or inviting speakers and experts.

At the Ideation Center, project teams can learn, strategize, and create with award-winning designers, engineers, and technology experts one-on-one and hands-on. If you have specific questions on transformation topics, we can customize your visit with sessions led by our in-house staff.

• Marketing Audit | We can audit your current online marketing and provide recommendations to make it even better!
• Branch Transformation | Have a transformation strategist analyze your current and planned branch floor plans to identify barriers to effective service
• Understanding the Market | 45% of FI plan to add branches in the next few years (2022 DBSI Strategic Planning Survey).  Ask experts about the changes in the construction market, trends in banking, and technology and how it all can impact your strategy
  
• Micro Branch | Did you know 3% of FIs plan to downsize some of their branches to better fulfill their market’s need? (DBSI Survey) See what a modular micro branch looks like in person and how you can use it as a tool to test hyper-local markets with virtually NO RISK! 

Even if you’ve been to the Ideation Center before, you should come again, because we are constantly innovating, with the latest furnishings, digital signage and technology. In fact, our Ideation Center is quickly approaching a major renovation — get the first look! Everything a financial leader should know about for a transformation!

To make the Ideation Center even more enticing, if you visit, you can also take a slide down our Batpole. What other meeting venue offers this unique opportunity?

Why Visit? 

• 1000+ banks and credit unions started their transformation efforts at the Ideation Center.
• 10/10 banking executives recommend a trip to the Ideation Center when starting a new project.
• 1 day at the Ideation Center can save you and your team months of expensive planning and re-planning.