If you are planning a training session, or perhaps an entire day of training, for your team, you may be wondering whether to use a meeting room in your premises or look into training room hire.
Although many companies will dismiss training room hire as an unnecessary cost, there is evidence that taking your team offsite for a training day could improve the outcomes and help them be both more creative and more engaged.
We are going to explore the three main benefits to taking your training days offsite when possible. Broadly, these benefits are:
- Reducing distractions
- Boosting creativity
- Encouraging equal participation
1. Reducing distractions
This benefit is probably the one you would think of first. Modern office environments are far from distraction-free zones. In fact, one survey found that 67 per cent of UK workers find themselves feeling distracted during the working day.
In office environments, the biggest distractions during a typical working day are the sound of colleagues speaking in the background, talking to colleagues and interruptions.
When you stay in your usual office building for a training day, many of those distractions remain, even if you are in a separate meeting room.
By going offsite, you show everyone that their full attention is required and reduce the likelihood that they will get dragged into their day-to-day work during a coffee break.
2. Boosting creativity
Many parts of our brains are involved in creative thinking, but two of the most prominent are the temporal lobe, which is typically associated with processing emotions and memories, and the parietal lobe.
It is the parietal lobe that is likely to be most affected, in a positive way, by a change of scenery because this part of the brain deals with sensory input.
The break from routine and being in a new location often benefits our creativity and engagement in general, while being somewhere new can stimulate the parts of the brain most associated with creative thinking.
If you want your team to come up with new ideas to tackle existing issues within your business, it is often beneficial to lift them out of the day-to-day environment and give them some breathing space to do so.
3. Encouraging equal participation
An offsite training room is a neutral space in the sense that it isn’t part of your usual workplace, so doesn’t have any of the associations with your office and it doesn’t come with any barriers to participation.
You can usually request that the room is set up however best suits you and the needs of your team, which means you can ensure it is able to facilitate periods of open discussion and creative thinking.
It is also a place where the hierarchy within your team may feel less acute, because the atmosphere is different to what you would experience if you were in the office.
While offsite training isn’t appropriate in every situation, it can be a valuable way to motivate your team, encourage fresh creativity and remove barriers to communication and participation that may exist in your office.
