The Real ROI of Company Offsites: Turning Connection into Strategy
When I say “team building” or “company offsite,” where does your mind go?
Maybe you rolled your eyes or shrugged. Maybe you imagined trust falls, or the phantom taste of those stale deli-meat sandwiches that always get catered. Those are fair reactions, especially when offsites focus only on KPIs, pipelines, or forced “bonding.”
But what if I told you that -- done right -- offsites can be essential to a team’s long-term success?
I’ve had the pleasure of leading two in the past month, and both showed how powerful it can be to align not just on what the team needs to achieve, but how they’ll do it and why it matters.
Case Study A
My first client is a small-but-mighty team of ten, all recently hired during a rapid growth phase to help shape the company’s direction. Leadership wanted to use the offsite to align on strategic R&D priorities and connect the team’s work to the broader biotech market and patient impact.
What made this session especially effective was the CSO’s early recognition that the team needed to examine strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) not only across the R&D pipeline but also within their own collective skill sets and capabilities.
With some prep work, we spent the first half of the day reviewing the outcomes of a team StrengthsFinder assessment, which became the foundation for the SWOT analysis. The team came away with several clear insights. One that resonated most: their shared analytical and aspirational strengths make them exceptional scientists, but that same thoroughness could sometimes lead to indecision. They agreed that, as the team continues to grow, adding people with more directive energy could bring valuable balance.
During the second half of the day, the team aligned on strategic priorities with their SWOT analysis hanging front and center. They left with not only clear scientific objectives, but also clarity on how they’d get there and which additional skills would strengthen their execution.
Key Takeaway: Get your team in a room long enough to do a collective SWOT analysis on themselves -- what they’re great at, what trips them up, where blind spots hide, and what kind of people they’ll need next to fill the gaps. That clarity directly informs how you hire, how you collaborate, and how you lead.
Case Study B
My second client is a medtech company transitioning from an R&D organization to a commercial-stage company. The next twelve months were set to be some of the most critical in its evolution as the team moved toward production and verification of its first instruments. During times of rapid change like this, maintaining alignment and engagement becomes essential and their CEO approached Compass to design an offsite that would help the team strengthen a “one team, one goal” mentality.
In partnership with a trusted external facilitator, we crafted a full-day agenda centered on the Discovery Insights Assessment and a working session to develop the company’s first set of values.
The Discovery Insights exercises were not only fun -- yes, offsites are allowed to be fun! -- but, more importantly, they gave the team a shared language for culture and collaboration. The CEO noticed that the “color energies” he most naturally leads from -- decisive and future-minded -- differed slightly from the team’s dominant energies, which leaned more iterative and analytical. This sparked a thoughtful conversation about the strengths of both approaches and how company objectives could be translated and understood across the team.
The values work was equally impactful. Through a series of facilitated exercises, the team identified six core attributes that reflect how they operate at their best: growth mindset, collaboration, candid communication, pride in their work, drive, and problem solving. Together, we refined and personalized each to capture the company’s distinct culture.
One of my favorite moments in these sessions is when culture stops being an HR deliverable and starts becoming a shared responsibility. In that moment, the team was both decisive and iterative, analytical and future-minded. They left with a renewed sense of ownership and accountability. One team with one goal.
Key Takeaway: When people co-create values, they actually own them. Suddenly “culture” isn’t a slide deck or a quarterly survey, it’s how decisions get made, how meetings run, and how much people genuinely care about their work.
So here’s the truth: when done right, team building is strategy disguised as connection.
Most offsites only focus on what the team needs to achieve -- pipeline, product milestones, technical roadmaps. Real strategy happens when you also define how you work together, why it matters, when you’re at your best, and how you can keep getting better.