Every January it is custom at Upward to do a short break away from the day to day operations of the company and take a look at the big picture. Our annual winter retreat has been an awesome way for us to come together as a company and do some lasting work that goes towards better service for our customers.

 We spent the two days of the retreat at the beautiful Black Butte Ranch in Central Oregon near Sisters. If you haven’t yet visited this part of Oregon it is highly recommended. Great any time of the year!

Our retreat had two main focuses:

-Better defining our Mission.

-Revisiting and improving our new employee training process.

As we grow it is important for us to have an underlying goal for the entire company that we can point the reason we come to work every day.

We’re excited to share the results of what we came up with on our Mission Statement and posting it on our office walls and website!

We also wanted to take another look at our training process and rework how we teach what we teach, how we train, and how we bring a brand new hire up to speed.

It was a worthwhile exercise to go through and we’re hoping that the brand new teaching syllabus we came up with will have lasting results!

We also, of course, had a little time to play in the snow.

Photo credits go to Brett Mustard