Review of Giving What We Can staff retreat

In Feb 2016, the Giving What We Can staff did a week long retreat, aimed predominantly at bonding us as a team and getting everyone on the same page about the aims and strategy of GWWC, following a couple of new staff joining us. This is a review of how it went, whether it was worth it, and what we should do differently next time, because this was the first time we did a retreat like this. I thought others in the EA community might be interested in what we learned from it, and might find it useful if their org considers doing something similar.

Aims (bullet points set and shared beforehand):

- Getting to know and trust each other well (see this video on team dynamics)

- Getting on the same page about the aims / plans / focuses of GWWC

- Understanding each other’s jobs really well so that we can all explain well what the whole org does (eg how we do research, how we start up chapters)

- Being able to do activities that it would be useful for all of us to be able to (eg use the website, follow up as usefully as possible with people to find out how they heard about gwwc / nudge them to get more involved as Marinella does).

Reasons for doing it now:

Over the last few months we’ve had 3 new staff join us. That made it an important time to get on the same page and getting to know each other. We’ve also moved from one management level to two, which is a time many businesses struggle, and when it’s particularly important to concentrate on organisational culture.

Costs:

Time:

During—full week for all staff = 8 person-weeks

Before—probably 4 hours from other staff, up to 3 days from me.

Monetary cost:

Accommodation was free (stayed at Michelle’s parents’ house). Only spending was on food, which was fairly minimal because cooked our own food (office would have been providing lunches for everyone anyway).

Therefore monetary cost negligible compared to the time cost.

Description of retreat:

All and only Giving What We Can staff went
It was a work retreat. We all worked together all week, focusing on a different area each day: individual outreach, chapters, research and communications.
Each area’s work was a mixture of discussing high level strategy questions for that area (particularly ones that are important but not urgent and so don’t get much time devoted to them in normal work flow) and learning how to do each other’s roles. For example, the individual outreach day looked like this.
We also did a couple of sessions on broad strategy questions like what gwwc culture should be like.
We socialised in the evening (played board games and chatted), and we went for a few walks.
We stayed in a self-catered house for 5 days
We all worked in one room and shared bedrooms

Examples of work we did:

We did various exercises, for example

Putting research that was previously just on our blog, or in reports for individuals into report format for the website, such as this one on micronutrient deficiency. This both gave everyone in the team experience in manipulating the website, and improved the content on there.
Reaching out to people who had clicked ‘attending’ on our Dec/Jan pledge event, but hadn’t actually joined, to see if they had any questions or concerns we might be able to help with. This kind of individual outreach is something that Marinella and Alison do on a regular basis, and it was useful for the rest of us to see what kinds of messages they send, how they record their time spent etc.
Summarising Giving What We Can in one sentence. A couple of the ones people came up with were:
- A community committed to using evidence, reason and compassion to do the most good we can.
- An organisation which identifies the most effective charities and encourages people to donate 10% of their income (to them).

We discussed strategy questions such as

What is the overall aim of Giving What We Can? A couple of responses people had:
- Improve the world as much as possible. Measured in money counterfactually moved to effective charities
- To make it the default for people in rich nations to donate at least 10% of their income to the organisations which most effectively improve the lives of others. The reason we’re doing that is to increase the wellbeing of others.
How does your area feed into that aim? One response (for the birds and table flipping, I blame Jon!):
- <(“) (“)> Marine¬la <(^_^)> (> ‘ ‘ )> <( ‘ ’ <) ༼ノಠل͟ಠ༽ノ-︵-┻━┻ : individual outreach is a way to engage with people who have already heard about GWWC and encourage them along the way to membership, by answering questions they might have about the organization, addressing misconceptions, nudge them to get more involved and, in the end, commit to giving.

Feedback:

At the end of the week I asked for feedback on how people had found the week, the results of which are here. 7 of the 8 of us filled it in. On a scale of 1 to 10 of usefulness of the week, where 5 is as useful as ordinary work, 1 is barely useful and 10 is way more useful than normal work, the average score was 7.4.

Unsurprisingly, it was more useful for people whose roles overlap a lot with others (like working on the blog) than ones that don’t (like research).

Benefits:

The most significant benefits from the week seemed to be:

Everyone getting a better sense of what GWWC’s overall goals and plans are, as well as what particular individuals’ views of that are (whether of strategy in particular areas or overall
People getting to know each other, and be comfortable discussing and disagreeing.

People varied as to whether they found it more useful having the team concentrate on their area, or learning about other people’s area. Most seemed to find both somewhat useful.

Should we do this again?

It seems definitely worth doing another retreat if we get a large number of new staff, and might be worth doing in some form yearly even if don’t get new staff.

What we would change next time:

Stricter on timing: we didn’t tend to start on time in the morning, and a lot of the sessions ran over. I was unwilling to nag people too much to be on time because the week was about bonding as much as working. But in fact the feedback showed people would have preferred if we had kept better time.
More preparation: although we all meant to prepare our sessions before the week, many of us didn’t end up doing that. If we wrote more briefs before the week, we could have each thought about them and be more prepared to discuss them.
Shorter: by the end of the week we were all pretty tired. It might be better to just do a 3 day retreat next time.
Alot time to do ordinary work: we didn’t have time to answer every day emails, which meant some were distracted by them during the day and others felt overwhelmed by them when we got back. Probably next time we should have at least half an hour a day set aside for keeping on top of our inboxes.
Catered food for some of the meals: we spent quite a lot of time cooking. Cooking seems quite a good way to bond, but in future it might be good to go somewhere where some of the meals are provided.
Explicit action points at the end of each session: we mostly kept track of action points as we went along, and then had a session on the last day for noting down all our action points. Rather than that last session, we might have done better to have 5 minutes at the end of each session in which we explicitly thought about and noted down action points.
Clearer expectations: Although we discussed the aims of the week at the start, we could have done more to discuss what was not expected from the week. Since the aim was to get on the same page, I did not expect we would feel as productive as we do on normal work days, but I did not make that adequately clear, so some people felt guilty that we weren’t working full days. It was also significant that we were trying to understand each other better, rather than make many decisions, since usually large groups around one table aren’t the best way to reach decisions.

Something we might want to incorporate into our every day:

People seemed to appreciate having some time set aside to discuss strategic questions with the whole team. We will aim to have team dinners approximately once a month to do this.