How we planned and hosted our leadership offsite

- Hans Pfister, Cayuga Collection

December 29, 2022

As a hospitality leader, one of the ways you can help your teams provide great hospitality is by creating environments where people can share ideas and learn from each other.

Yesterday, Hans Pfister shared his experience doing this at Cayuga Collection - and today he's sharing how he planned and hosted their leadership offsite. I think you'll find the practical details and logistics as interesting and inspiring as I did.

🎧 Listen to our 3-minute episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify

"We started off by asking ourselves what we wanted to achieve"

Part of what we were planning was to reward our team – but we also wanted to provide leadership training. And we wanted to provide this training to a diverse team of people that might not typically get it.

Hans Pfister

To do this, we brought in several guest speakers. One of those was a firefighter. Who better to talk about being ready and prepared and alert and everything else important for hospitality? Jorge, our vice president of operations, has a father who used to be a fireman. His brother is a volunteer fireman. We looked for connections like this and brought people in to fill out our agenda.

We had to be careful not to load the agenda too much. Our first draft of the agenda had one thing after another. We realized we needed to give our team space between sessions to talk to each other to connect and just relax.

And running a great offsite isn't just about planning it well. Hans did one specific thing early on in the offsite that made the rest of the event productive.

What happens at the beginning is teams from each hotel come and of course, all stick together because they don’t know each other. So at our first meal, I walked around the room and mixed people up so they would get to know new people from the start. After that – especially after we had some beers, it started to happen a bit more organically! They already had a little more confidence and started to mingle and share their stories.

How can you encourage your teams to share ideas and best practices? An offsite is a great way to do this, but are there other things you can do this week?

Hospitality Daily is brought to you this month by Sojern, whom I've been working with to help hospitality providers understand how to use data to better serve and communicate with their guests.

Download our research on how hotels are using data to drive revenue and build stronger relationships or watch our broadcast with Jacquelyn DiStasi at Wyndham on how they are doing this.