Let’s face it. Team strategy offsite meetings are expensive and time-consuming. While these events can provide a great environment for team building and alignment, such benefits can be short-lived and easily lost when team members move back into their day-to-day operations.

For the past 20 years, my team and I have worked closely with CEOs to plan and facilitate annual strategic planning offsites for executive teams. With facilitating these meetings, comes the responsibility to drive sustained results. We’ve learned what it takes to make offsites “sticky” — meaning that the outcomes team members walk away with have an ongoing impact on their business.

Whether you are running a small executive team offsite, or one for a larger group, here are six tips to make sure your next event has a lasting impact:

1) Be crystal clear about your objectives. Before the offsite, make sure you and your team are clear on what you hope to achieve during the event, as well as how you will measure success after it. Your objectives might include:

• Working together to develop a clear set of strategic priorities and desired measurable outcomes that the team fully commits to.
• Developing a plan for follow-through and accountability with respect to achieving these goals after the event.
• Facilitating a structured and thoughtful discussion on how the team can improve performance.

As you craft your objectives, consider the following questions: What do you want the participants to understand, agree to, rally around, and ultimately act on? How do you want them to feel after the meeting, and what can you do to drive that?

Sticky tip: Complete the following statement, “I’d be really happy if, by the end of our offsite, we [fill in objectives here]. This clarity will help you set expectations with your team when you discuss the objectives of the offsite beforehand. It will also strengthen their confidence and increase their engagement by allowing them to prepare for the discussion.