Beer, wine, a buffet, and a quiz. For a long time, that was enough. Get everyone in a room, add alcohol, and hope the good vibes carry over into Monday.
Teams have moved on. The agencies and in-house teams we work with want more from a day together. They want to get to know each other. They want to learn something. They want to leave with more than a vague memory of the pub quiz tiebreaker.
The best away days we’ve been part of recently have had three things in common: they were built around the team’s real challenges, they gave people something they could use the next day, and they were genuinely fun. Not forced fun. Good fun.
Here’s a flavour of some of the away days we’ve been brought in to support.
A mini festival with a skills agenda
Bubble Agency didn’t want a team day. They wanted a festival. So that’s what they got.
Bubblefest brought the whole agency together – US and UK teams, some meeting in person for the first time – for a day that felt nothing like a standard offsite. We were brought in to run the skills sessions: people pitched random objects to a room full of colleagues, stood up and delivered their thing in sixty seconds, and debated live topics that matter in a PR agency today – with the room voting on who changed minds.
Every exercise was built around the skills Bubble’s team wanted to work on: how to land a message quickly, how to hold your ground when someone pushes back, how to show up as yourself rather than a polished version of what you think a PR person should sound like.
Then we left – and the DJ lessons began. The team learnt how to DJ and danced into the night. Sadie Groom, Bubble Founder and CEO, put it best:
“Boring company kickoffs are no longer a thing.”
We hard agree.
Strategy, but make it Lego
100 people. A table full of Lego.
We were brought in to facilitate a Lego Serious Play session for Hastoe Group, using the methodology to help the team think through strategy in a way that got everyone involved – not just the loudest voices in the room.
It works because it changes how people think. Building something with your hands before you talk about it slows the conversation down in the best way. Ideas that might have stayed in someone’s head end up on the table – visible and tangible, which makes them easier to discuss, challenge, and build on.
For a group of 100, getting genuine participation from everyone is no small thing. By the end of the day, the team had worked through some big strategic questions together and left with shared thinking they’d all had a hand in shaping.
The half-day that changed how the team sells
The IHG sales team were already good. The question was how to help them be more consistent, take more ownership, and stretch their commercial conversations further.
We ran a half-day session at the Kimpton Fitzroy London, built entirely around the situations the team face. No generic training. No hypotheticals.
The session covered personal impact, team dynamics, and commercial confidence – specifically how to spot opportunities earlier and keep conversations going rather than closing them down too quickly. The team left with a clearer sense of their own strengths, a shared language around ownership and challenge, and ways to handle pushback without losing their thread.
The best offsites do more than one thing
They connect people. They build skills. They give teams a moment to step back from the day-to-day and look at how they’re working together. And if they’re done well, they carry forward – not just as a good memory, but as a shift in how the team operates.
We get brought in for all kinds of moments: celebrating milestones and wanting to bottle what makes a culture great before it gets diluted by growth; values work that gets off the walls and into the room; sessions on giving better feedback, handling difficult conversations, and what to do when people are promoted without being properly prepared.
And sometimes it’s a talk. How to scale without losing your soul. Why most teams aren’t short of opinions – they’re just short of the conversations that share them. What distinctly human leadership looks like as AI takes on more of the work.
What ties it all together isn’t the format. It’s the intention. The teams that get the most from an offsite are the ones who come in knowing what they want to shift – not just what they want to do.
Culture and communication aren’t separate from the away day. They’re the point of it.
If you’re planning something and want to talk through what good could look like, we’d love to hear from you.
At HappyHQ, we help agencies and in-house teams build strong cultures and the leaders and teams who sustain them. Find out more about how we work at happyhq.co.uk/what-we-do, or say hello at hello@happyhq.co.uk