Mana’s 2024 Retreat Reflections
At Mana, we’re a small company with fully-remote employees. All of us cherish and thrive under many elements of the work-from-home lifestyle, but we also find incredible value in coming together once a year to do intensive work on our business at large. We love using this business need as an opportunity to travel together once per year. We always come back from these trips feeling more grounded and inspired, with a clearer vision on how to improve our day to day operations. Of course, we do some relaxing and team bonding on these trips, but we always put in lots of valuable time for work each day, all of which is facilitated by our User Experience Specialist, Madison Elliott. In today’s short post, we want to highlight some of our discoveries and two key reflections from this year’s retreat in Nicaragua.
Reflection 1: Spend time on the right things.
We frequently use retreats to reflect on how we are spending our time at Mana, to ensure that we are operating in line with our company values, and to ensure that we are optimizing our days. This year, we started using software to track tasks and analyze our calendars, which offered a more granular and specific breakdown of where our quarterly hours are being spent at a team and individual level. The first part of our retreat was focused deeply on looking at this data. Our team did pre-work to look at their own hours and do a writing reflection on time sinks, stressors, big wins, surprises, and opportunities for change. We then shared these reflections with each other after reviewing team-level data.
We discovered that we are all spending a healthy majority of work hours engaging with client needs, and generally optimizing, understanding and executing on their financial life plans and investments. We were excited to identify ways to shift our allocations and allow even greater focus on investment opportunities. Investment strategies can be deeply personal, and we noted in our data that we have increasingly been asked by clients for creative investment management approaches to support major life changes like inheritance and divorce, or to align with ethical or personal goals. We love serving this need and look forward to having more business time allocated to it.
Reflection 2: Role definitions are key.
As a small team, it’s easy for the lines of who does what to become blurred as we all tend to have a hand in each other’s work. We love this close-knit collaboration and deep shared knowledge, but we also recognize that it’s crucial to ensure that each role at Mana is clearly defined. Retreats are a great time to do this kind of reflection and job definition, to identify things that are going well and places where we can improve. We also took this reflection opportunity to allow each employee to define their own role and give feedback on each other’s mission statements.
Something that we learned in this working session that we loved and wanted to share, was how well each of our roles fit in with our broader life values. There was definitely a widely shared theme of finding joy and love in helping others grow and achieve. Additionally, we found that our employees share collective values in community and excellence in life. Multiple employees used the phrase, “how you do anything is how you do everything” to describe their missions. Finally, taking care of our own physical, mental and emotional well-being through sustainable behaviors was mentioned by all. We know that many of these values are also shared by our clients, and we are excited to acknowledge them within our team to continue focusing our business on helping everyone live their best lives.
Putting reflections into action
Our task mapping exercise: clustering and organizing business processes together!
Later in the retreat, we did a full business process analysis, where we listed and mapped our full set of operations and tasks. This is an exercise that we did for the first time 5 years ago, and we enjoyed revisiting it to see how the business has continued growing and thriving. We found much greater complexity than in those early days, but also much more clarity and coherence in our systems and processes. We clustered the results into various categories, and used those to reassess our role definitions and understand where efficiencies can be gained.
Our capstone exercise involved redistributing tasks and ensuring that everyone felt excited about their process ownership. All together, we believe that this will make our company an even better oiled machine and help us focus even more effort on serving clients in the best way possible.
Following the retreat, we always take a week to continue reflecting on our activities and begin making changes to our business operations. We’re happy to say that this year’s work won’t be resulting in any dramatic client-facing changes, but that the internal improvements we’re making will give us all more time to do the things we excel at, ultimately benefiting our entire Mana client family. We hope this post illuminates some of the learning that we gain from these retreats, and maybe offers some inspiration to those of you thinking of planning your own!
Follow our Instagram for personal finance tips and inspiration.
Madison Elliott is a UX Researcher at Google. Madison consults on data engineering and usability at Mana Financial Life Design (FLD). Mana FLD provides comprehensive financial planning and investment management services to help clients grow and protect their wealth throughout life’s journey. Mana FLD specializes in advising ambitious professionals who seek financial knowledge and want to implement creative budgeting, savings, proactive planning and powerful investment strategies. Madison brings her combined background in cognitive science, computer science and clinical psychology with her professional UX design and engineering experience to optimize workflows at Mana FLD and improve people’s lives.