Reinforcing the Fabric of Your Team

In today’s professional life, where remote work and virtual connections are the norm, gathering in a single place feels novel and a bit old-fashioned. In our increasingly digital and distanced world, an in-person meeting feels like a luxury—superfluous, ineffective, or downright risky.

Yet, Markentum, a marketing agency that uses high-velocity technology to connect senior living communities and vendors with their ideal prospects every day, held an all-company, in-person corporate rendezvous. This meeting wasn’t just about sharing strategies and business milestones; it was about fostering a sense of community and creating a foundation of shared experiences and camaraderie.

Stay with me and I will share why we decided a two-day, in-person meeting was the right strategy over two separate posts…

FOSTERING CROSS-TEAM GROWTH IN A SHARED SPACE

I have never been quiet about my preference for in-person interactions over fully remote setups. Brainstorming thrives face-to-face; quick decisions stem from casual hallway chats; and relationships flourish over shared coffee breaks, lunches, and happy hours. While creative virtual meetings have their perks, nothing beats in-person connections.

Our meeting proved that. Seat assignments, group activities, and a fun, competitive dinner at Oil & Vinegar Daytona Beach fostered team bonding. Throughout the meeting, team members had the opportunity to explore different leadership and conversational styles and gain new perspectives. They also created new collaborative teams that have already improved performance!

ENABLING PERSONAL GROWTH AND PROFESSIONAL FULFILLMENT

A successful meeting helps people learn more about themselves. Our first lesson came from Ginger Atwood, who shared the challenges that senior living marketing and sales executives face today. While she was very forthcoming about her own company’s goals, Ginger celebrated the successes we jointly achieved last year.

A highlight of the meeting was when Ginger invited us to tour one of her communities and experience the delicious dining for which the community is known. Team members learned as much from that experience as they did from the rest of the meeting!

Our second learning opportunity came from Anna Hall, who shared the PurposeEquation and helped each team member identify and activate their personal values and superpowers both personally and professionally. Anna even expertly guided the team in imagining how to tie their personal and Markentum values!

It was a four-hour session designed to help the team think about how to drive innovation, foster creativity, collaborate with each other, adapt to change, and make a meaningful impact every day. Anna even helped each team member understand how to hashtag #joyfuel so that their personal engines are always full.

BUILDING A CONTAGIOUS EXCITEMENT FOR GROWTH

The anticipation of a shared future is often all that’s needed to create a sense of contagious excitement. Our all-company meeting provided the foundation to make our corporate vision both heard and felt.

By unveiling our 2024 business plan at the meeting, we injected team insights and aspirations. By sharing our strategies, we ignited a palpable excitement for the coming year as team members started to truly own their purpose and passion. This ownership can’t be replicated in any virtual conference or distributed document.

CELEBRATING SUCCESS IS MORE THAN JUST CEREMONY

Acknowledgment is the lifeblood of motivation, and this all-company meeting created the perfect forum to recognize individual achievement and encourage the possibility to scale to even greater peaks. Congratulations to Krizzel Aldama, Rachelle Ransom, Heather Madden, Kyle McCurry, and Katrina Burns, who all earned individual awards. You’ll see more about those awards in the coming weeks.

As a team, we also celebrated five team victories—two Golds and three Silvers for brand, print, and website work—at the Daytona Beach ADDY Awards Dinner. A shared sense of pride and accomplishment reverberated off the walls as the team celebrated.

CREATING NEW NORMS

The value of an in-person, all-company meeting is about fostering the very ideas, collaborations, and team ownership that will take us through a successful year. The question is not, ‘Can we afford the luxury of an in-person rendezvous?’ It is ‘Can we afford to miss the opportunity it presents for our team?’

If it sounds like I am excited about our company meeting, I am. Not because I want to brag about its success (humility is my number two superpower), but because I want every leader to realize the opportunity to ignite your team. It is time to bring back in-person meetings and transform the way we think about business planning. Oh, and if you haven’t guessed, the purpose that Anna Hall helped me put words to is to Transform Norms. This team meeting is one of many steps in my quest to help transform senior living marketing.