Planning a corporate retreat can be a daunting affair, but we’ve put together some tips for you so that you can get the most out of your time together. By taking the time to strategically plan your company retreat it can be a great experience where collaboration is enhanced and powerful discoveries are made. Want to embed this infographic on your site? Check out the code below this image.

Did you know that if you were a prisoner up for parole, you’re more likely to be set free if your hearing is in the morning versus the afternoon? Well, it’s the truth and it’s due to a phenomenon called decision fatigue. See, deciding to let a criminal go who may re-commit a crime is difficult. It requires a lot of analysis and thought—it’s mentally taxing. As a judge, you want to make a good and fair decision, keeping in mind the rights of the prisoner and the safety of the public. The safe and easy decision is to say…

A story recently circulated around the office here at Adventure Associates about the completion of the NASA backed Hawaii Space Exploration Analog and Simulation (HI-SEAS). Basically, a team of six aspiring space voyagers spent eight months together in a 1000 square foot geodesic dome to simulate living in a habitat on Mars — the third group to do so in this series of experiments meant to prepare us for our eventual journey to the red planet.

It’s one of the most common — and annoying — interview questions you’ll encounter, “What are your weaknesses?” Gurus tell us to offer up obvious non-weaknesses like perfectionism, or dogged determination. It’s funny that we all possess weaknesses, but rarely are we allowed to admit it openly. And sometimes we don’t even admit it to ourselves. We’re taught to shore up our weaknesses from an early age. If we struggle with something like math or English, we might find ourselves in remedial classes, getting tutoring and spending an inordinate time on those areas of difficulty.

It’s official: despite what your whip-cracking boss might think, breaks actually correlate with productivity. At least that’s what a recent survey by productivity software company DeskTime found among the top ten percent of performers. To be absolutely specific, the study found that the optimal work and break intervals were fifty-two and seventeen minutes, respectively.

Open-office floorplans, those gleaming, spacious workspaces emblematic of Silicon Valley productivity and flat organizational hierarchies are no longer a radical, avant garde approach to structuring office spaces, but rather the norm. According to the International Facilities Management Association, an overwhelming 70% of offices across America have adopted this office setup. The reasons behind this shift were, for the most part, well intentioned.

As an adult, your first day on the job is about as close as you can get to re-living the first day of school. There are a bunch of new people to meet and procedures to learn. Some are obvious, some less so. This all begs the question, what’s the best way to orient new employees to their new job. Here at Adventure Associates, we have a particular methodology that we think works pretty well. Recently, we hired a talented new team member named Lacey Cope and we figured we’d get her fresh perspective on our process. Below you’ll find…

Huddling up isn’t just for sports teams, it works great in business, too. Here at Adventure Associates we have a morning huddle every day. For us it’s a quick, highly-directed stand-up meeting that allows us to check-in with the rest of the team on current activities and to keep abreast of any major happenings in the company. They’re a great way to get off on the right foot for the day, and even for those of you who are averse to meetings, you’ll likely find that they’re quite painless and actually helpful. Likewise, they also help develop camaraderie and a…

Meetings often feel like one of the ring’s in Dante’s infamous journey, a sort of business life purgatory fraught with Dilbert-esque absurdity and frustration. But whether you like it or not, they’re also an absolute necessity. So how do we get better at meetings? They don’t all have to be mind numbing rituals, I assure you. To make sure we’re getting the most from our meetings we need to be confident that they’re actually providing value to us. We’ve come up with a few questions for you to ask yourself before deciding whether your next meeting is actually worthwhile.

If you ever played sports or a musical instrument, then you know how much these endeavors revolve around practice. Hours and hours of practice. Despite the fact that tournament games and music recitals get all the attention, it’s the hours of practice and drilling that really underpin any successes in those fields. And regardless of how much you lamented the time spent honing your fundamentals – executing the basics over and over – you can’t deny the fact that it made you better.

Team building events, motivational books, communication classes — they all leave us with a wealth of information and excited about the things we’ve learned. Upon finishing with any of these trainings we’re brimming with enthusiasm and telling whomever will listen about how we’re going to change the way we do things at work and in our lives. At least that’s how it is for the first few days. Then things often slip back into their normal place, and all that great, juicy info we absorbed (and often paid for!) sinks back into the recesses of our minds. Just like your…

The concept of feedback is something that comes up often in our team building and corporate training programs, and nine time out of ten, participants say that they want their feedback one way — straight up. Don’t beat around the bush, use metaphors, or hem and haw, just give it to me straight, they say. Fire it off — I can take it. But what people say and what people want – or are ready to handle – are often quite different. I mean, if I were to write myself as a character in a crime novel, I’d be the…

Unless you’re in a tiny startup or mom ‘n pop small biz, large groups are the norm for most organizations. These might be departments, divisions, or teams — and if you’re like many organizations, you make sure these groups meet on a semi-regular basis. Often these meetings go very much the same way. The most vocal, outspoken, and extroverted individuals state their piece and the rest of the group nods along in semi-compliance. Meanwhile, as you don your manager hat, you may be wondering to yourself what the more soft-spoken or reflective members of the group have to say on…

Email has pervaded almost every moment of our working lives. If we’re not writing emails, we’re watching them stack up in our virtual inboxes, which are  full of messages ranging from the mundane to the five-alarm fire. And this is the problem.

We’re a species of walkers. Evolutionarily, we have spent the bulk of our development in nomadic tribes, walking the earth in search of resources, using our spatial reasoning skills to navigate our landscape. Today, we spend the bulk of our modern lives in wheeled office chairs and rely more on Google Maps for navigation and GrubHub for food foraging. This is a shame, though, because we were designed to move.