· 5 min read
Workation, retreat or offsite — which one do you actually want?
Three formats, sold with almost identical photography, that do completely different things to a week. Choosing the wrong one is the most common and most expensive mistake in this category.
The photography is the same in all three brochures: a laptop, a pool, a good-looking table, somebody laughing. Underneath, the formats are not remotely alike, and the difference is who owns the hours between nine and six.
Offsite
The company owns the week. There is an agenda, there are sessions, and the point is that a group of colleagues is in one place doing something together that is hard to do over video. Judge it on whether the agenda was worth the airfare.
Retreat
A facilitator owns the week. There is a programme — coaching, strategy, wellbeing, whatever the promise is — and you are there to be led through it. Judge it on the quality of the person leading and whether you wanted to be led.
Workation
You own the week. Nobody schedules anything on your behalf. Your work carries on unchanged and the organisation is aimed entirely at the surrounding conditions. Judge it on the room, the connection, the food and how little you had to think about logistics.
How to tell which one you are being sold
Read the timetable. If there is one, and your name is on it, it is not a workation. If the page talks more about what you will learn than about where you will work, it is not a workation either. Neither is a criticism — just be sure you booked the thing you wanted.
And if you want two of them
Plenty of people do a workation and add one deliberate, self-chosen thing to it — a weekend in the mountains, dinners with people they had not met. That works because they chose it. The moment somebody else chooses it for them, they are back in a programme.