Every year, Compass puts on an amazing retreat where everyone from our team, including us remote folks, come together for a recap meeting of the past year and a fun - and always entertaining - bonding exercise. This year’s destination was the Berkshire Mountains on the border of Connecticut and Massachusetts. 

Nearly six hours in the car and two Red Bulls later, I had arrived. Pulling up the long driveway I came upon a nearly 10,000 square foot team-building oasis. It was time for the annual Compass retreat. 

One of the two houses we had for the weekend 

Stepping Away From the Desk

While all of the employees look forward to this trip, there is always a little added excitement for me. This is because I am a home-based employee from Buffalo, NY. While I'm in constant communication with our team on a daily basis, I look forward to meeting our new employees face-to-face and catching up with old colleagues. Having both the Stamford and Quincy offices along with those who work remotely come together in a central location allows us to share our thoughts and ideas outside of the normal work environment, where great ideas can often get buried in the daily routine. Also, as we always say, we're like a family so it's even more special to us each year! 

And the fun begins...  

This year’s retreat provided me with the opportunity to discuss work in an informal setting, where ideas could be freely shared without the demands of the daily tasks. The many activities we did also helped us as a team to strengthen our existing relationships to achieve the goal of providing the best guest service possible. A great example of this was our guest speaker, who spoke to us about accountability. Since we are such a small company, all the departments need to work closely together in order to provide exceptional service to our guests. To do this successfully, we need to hold each other and ourselves accountable and ask each other for help when needed.

Our guest speaker inspiring us all 

Team Building Activities

We also did many team building activities with the amazing team from Adventure Activities USA, such as building a raft, ax throwing, and archery. These activities taught us how to identify a challenge and find a solution to achieve a team goal. 

I have taken with me the conversations and ideas from the retreat on the long ride back to Buffalo. As I log in to my computer each morning and pick up the phone each day I look forward to applying the shared knowledge I have learned. Oh, and I look forward to marking the calendar with the Compass retreat in 2019!