Great question.
Flashback, it’s 2019 and you're walking down the hall at your office, you run into a colleague while grabbing a drink of water, and you end up chatting about life, swapping weekend highlights, and catching up on a project you’re currently working on. The interaction is fleeting but leaves a lasting impact. You walk away a little more connected to your coworker.
Now, these moments happen through a scheduled video meeting or — in many cases — don’t occur at all. This is where employee fatigue, loneliness, and anxiety come into play.
These small moments go a long way in fostering a happy work culture and a productive office environment. It’s completely normal for coworkers to have never met in person — especially with remote and hybrid work on the rise — but hosting an offsite event is a fun way to bring people together and build team connections.
Here are our top four reasons to have an offsite and why you need to invest in them.
It’s critical to have a mutual understanding of your coworkers, and nothing allows that understanding more than gathering in person.
There is something extraordinary about spending time together in person and away from your computer. Offsites provide great opportunities to connect with your colleagues in a meaningful way. When done right, they encourage team members to be more vulnerable, fostering connections that are difficult to recreate in an office environment, remote or not.
By having a unique shared experience through an offsite event, work teams can make space for empathy and understanding. And the more we understand and connect with our colleagues, the easier it is to collaborate, share ideas, and build a foundation of trust that is key to a productive team.
Offsites send a clear message to employees that you care about their time. It’s no small investment to take time away from day-to-day work to gather, but doing so allows employees to fully immerse themselves in the topics and activities of an offsite. This kind of investment goes a long way in telling employees that you care about them as people, beyond just their assigned job roles.
Offsites provide an opportunity to show that you care about the future of your employees, the state of the business, and your company culture.
Do I need to explain more?
Offsites boost team morale. They are a way to travel or try something new and can act as a break from an everyday routine. A well-designed offsite is a perfect way to let your company know that you value and prioritize your people. And what better way to do that than by showing them you know how to have fun!
Now more than ever before, people are leaving their jobs in search of greener pastures. That doesn’t mean they’re just looking for a bigger paycheck. Many are looking for the kind of culture that lets them live their best lives.
Why not use your offsites to remind your employees why they choose to work at your company in the first place? Carving out time for in-person events allows for deeper connections and helps to strengthen your company culture and its values.
Plus, it will give employee retention a boost.
Pro Tip
“CFO’s in the room, you know what an investment it is to not invest in your current team. The cost of hiring new employees pales in comparison to building on what you have now. So taking the time to create magic moments for your employees is key to having a successful team. Mission matters, personal agency matters, culture matters, and if you don't invest in those, you are not invested in your company.”
- Joe Strolz, VP of Core Operations, Shopify
Take a page out of Shopify’s internal events team and see how they completely transformed their offsite program to receive a 97% satisfaction rating from their employees — talk about retention.
