We exist in a dynamic environment and continue to evolve as individuals, adding to the challenge and importance of answering these questions effectively. To ensure we do, we need mechanisms that allow us to self-reflect and adjust.

For us, company-wide offsites provide an effective way to do this. At a high level, our offsites strive to align the company’s vision and the team. We hold two offsites per year using a tick-tock approach where one offsite (tick) communicates the company’s vision to the team and the second offsite (tock) draws input about the vision from our individual team members. We just held the “tock” version of our offsite which was also our first-ever virtual offsite. The theme was “sharpening.” 

Today, our mission, “a more perfect experience for ourselves and our partners,” reflects a company that knows itself and what it’s good at. We know that the personal relationship we build with clients is our strength. We wanted to lean into this and elevate it, hence the “sharpening” theme for this offsite, which we applied specifically to the ways we interact, collaborate, and partner with our clients.

To prepare for the offsite, our team read and discussed the book, “The Power of Moments -  Why Certain Experiences Have Extraordinary Impact,” by Chip Heath and Dan Heath. The book illustrates why certain moments in our lives are particularly memorable which inspired us to think about where in our process and client interactions we could create elevated moments like these. This connected directly to the offsite activities which included re-imagining our clients as persona mandalas, defining our client journeys, and then brainstorming opportunities to create elevated moments for each persona and journey.

We’re always looking for ways to improve our client experience, but these exercises helped us drill down to a more specific level of context and come up with ideas that were both realistic and potential difference makers. I was excited to see how every individual on our team has truly internalized our mission and believes in elevating our client-partner relationships.

Going forward, we’ll be implementing some ideas immediately and diving deeper into the others. I look forward to seeing how they improve clients’ experiences.  More importantly, we’ll continue to come together as a team to self-reflect, evolve and move towards our ever-changing North Star.