You’ve booked the date. It’s been in everyone’s diary for months. You feel organised. And then working life does what working life does, and suddenly you’re two weeks out, waking up at 3am thinking – oh. Right. The away day.
What follows is familiar. You haven’t thought about the venue – it feels expensive to hire a space, especially at such short notice – so you default to the boardroom. You think about getting someone external in to facilitate, but decent facilitators book up well in advance, and there’s no actual budget for the away day anyway. Plus according to the facilitators you’ve spoken to, two weeks is not well in advance. So someone internal runs it instead – probably you, or a collection of senior people each presenting their bit. They can add presenting at the away day to their ever-expanding list. Won’t take long.
The day happens. It’s fine. A bit like a very long meeting. We don’t stick to the agenda because a few people talk for too long and you’re not able to move the conversation on. People go home vaguely flat and slightly relieved it’s over.
I see this a lot.
Here’s what it actually costs when an away day doesn’t land. You’ve got a room full of people who’ve travelled, possibly stayed overnight, taken a full day out of already stretched schedules. The opportunity – to think clearly together, to make real decisions, to leave genuinely energised and aligned – is sitting right there. And it slips through because the day wasn’t properly designed or given the importance required.
A few things make the difference.
Get out of the office. If you hold your away day in the same place where people do their day-to-day work, their brains stay in the weeds. Someone will nip back to their desk. Someone else will be mentally composing emails. A different environment signals that this is different. It doesn’t have to be expensive – it just has to be somewhere that isn’t your normal setting. Natural light, decent transport links and somewhere to park help too.
Budget properly, from the start. Venue, refreshments, travel, and if people are coming from a distance, possibly accommodation. These aren’t nice-to-haves – they’re the infrastructure that makes the day work. Trying to retrofit a budget two weeks out is how you end up with mediocre sandwiches in the boardroom.
Get an external facilitator – and do it early. This one matters more than people realise. If you’re facilitating, you can’t genuinely participate. And if you’re part of the team, you can’t be truly impartial. A good facilitator holds the space, challenges assumptions, reads the room, and knows when to abandon the agenda and go somewhere more useful. That last bit – the ability to hold a plan lightly and pivot in the moment – only comes with experience and proper preparation. It also requires a decent brief, which takes time to develop. Two weeks is almost never enough. The facilitators worth having are usually booked long before that. Don’t assume your facilitator will just disappear after the day either – some will also offer invaluable support to implement what was agreed and keep the team accountable.
Be honest about what one day can do. Most people want ten things from an away day. In reality, you can go deep on three – possibly four if the group is experienced at working this way. Trying to cover everything produces a day that skims the surface of everything and resolves nothing – often at the expense of agreed actions, which means after the day, nothing changes.
A well-designed away day is not just a moment in time away from the work – it is the work. It leaves people connected to each other, clear on what matters, and with actions they actually want to take. That feeling is worth planning for.
If you’re bringing your team together and want someone to design and facilitate the day – get in touch. Ideally more than two weeks out. I’m also happy to get on a call if you’ve got questions and want to think it through first. Drop me an email to arrange – lucy@lucidity.org.uk.