Retreats offer getaway from the everyday.

• Author: Quesnel, Joseph
• Position: Special Report: Corporate Gifts & Event Planning - Northern Lights Credit Union

For CEO Doug Robinson, the secret of success for any corporate retreat is to lock the boardroom door after the meeting sessions begin.

Robinson, the chief executive officer and president of Dryden-based Northern Lights Credit Union, says that his company has tried many different approaches and locations for corporate retreats before settling on one that he says works for his company. Officials at Northern Lights Credit Union have settled on holding their retreat at Quetico Centre, a secluded conference centre in the northwestern Ontario Town of Atitokan, as their getaway from the everyday.

According to Robinson, the choice was mainly one of finding a place with minimal distractions.

"We had originally used our boardroom at our head office in Dryden," Robinson says. "It really wasn't a setting that lent itself to this activity. This is an environment where you are accustomed to work, not brainstorm."

The company then chose to hold meetings in hotel conference rooms within the region. The problem, says Robinson, was the fact that the hotels were usually in areas where board and management members lived. Thus, too often these people would go home in the evening to their families and would miss many of the after-hour strategic sessions where a lot of the thinking and planning was done. He also found that once these employees went home, they would forget what had been discussed the day before, having stopped to focus on family matters.

"You tend to accomplish more at these after-hour discussions than at the organized brainstorming sessions," he adds.

What company executives found works, he states, is finding a retreat location that is isolated from the company's place of work. In the case of Northern Lights Credit Union, this was avoiding all seven branches of the credit union scattered across Northern Ontario. Finally settling on Atitokan, Robinson says they have found the seclusion necessary to achieve results.

"We've found that it doesn't work if you don't go into the right environment," he says.

Boasting convenient conference rooms accommodating 25 to 100 people, and complete with bedrooms with high-speed Internet and audio-visual equipment, the Quetico Centre, Robinson says, met the company's needs and was located in a picturesque, natural setting.

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Besides environment, Robinson says, the crucial aspect for the retreat is to clearly delineate between corporate strategy time and recreational time. For Robinson, this...