How to plan a team outing when half your team is remote

When half your team is remote, don't plan an in-person outing and add a video call for everyone else. Pick a format where nobody watches from a screen: bring everyone to one place, run an event where everyone joins from their own screen (office people included), or run local events in each place during the same week. Which one fits depends on distance, budget and how many remote people live near each other, and the decision rule below sorts it out in a couple of minutes.

This is a common setup now. Gallup's hybrid work indicator found that as of May 2026, 52% of US employees with remote-capable jobs worked hybrid and 26% worked fully remote, so a team split between an office and several home desks is ordinary.

Why the laptop at the end of the table fails

The default plan is an in-person event with a video link: bowling plus a call, a happy hour plus a "virtual toast." The people in the room have side conversations, food and a shared space. The people on the call have a laptop microphone in a loud room, a view of someone's shoulder and no way to join a conversation that isn't aimed at the camera. They usually drop off early, and they're right to.

The fix is to choose the format first, based on where people are, and then choose the activity. Starting from the activity is how you end up with a remote audience.

Decision rule: which format to use

The thresholds here are our guidance, not research findings. Adjust them to your budget.

Your situation	Format	Why
Remote people live within about 3 hours' travel, or you have travel budget for a quarterly visit	Bring everyone together	Removes the split entirely
3 or more remote people live within an hour of each other	Parallel local events in the same week	Each group gets an in-person event
Remote people are scattered and travel isn't funded this quarter	Everyone on their own screen	Everyone gets the same view
A mix of the above	Parallel events, plus an everyone-on-screen event for the scattered few	Nobody is a spectator

Bring everyone together

If you can fund it, plan the outing around a visit. A day or two when remote teammates come to the office, with the outing on the evening of the first day, gives everyone the same experience. Make the trip worth the travel: some working time together, a shared meal, and free time. A day of meetings that could have happened on video is a poor reason to fly.

Everyone on their own screen

If some people are remote, make everyone remote for this one. Office staff join from their own desks with their own headphones instead of crowding around one conference room laptop. Now everyone has the same view, the same audio and the same chance to talk.

Pick activities designed for video: a cooking or tasting session with the same ingredients sent to everyone, trivia in small teams, or a short show-and-tell. Keep it under an hour. The remote team outing toolkit has formats, costs and a kit-shipping timeline.

Parallel local events

When remote people cluster, run the office's event and each cluster's event in the same week, with the same kind of activity and the same per-person budget. A short shared moment, such as a five-minute call between groups at the start, is enough of a link. Then share photos afterward so each group sees the others.

If you have to mix in-person and remote

Sometimes the event is fixed (a client dinner, a celebration at the office) and a couple of people can't be there. If you do mix, set it up so the remote people are participants, not viewers.

Give each remote person an in-person buddy who keeps them on a phone or tablet and brings them into conversations, instead of one shared laptop on a table.
Split into small groups of three or four, each with a remote person in it. Conversation groups tend to top out at about four people, according to observational research published in Human Nature in 1995, and a group of four can hear a phone speaker.
Use a speakerphone or conference microphone for any part meant for everyone. A laptop microphone in a restaurant picks up mostly the restaurant.
Keep the remote portion short. Being on camera for a long stretch is tiring in itself, a point Stanford researcher Jeremy Bailenson made in a 2021 paper in Technology, Mind, and Behavior. Thirty to forty-five minutes is our guidance.
Send the remote people the same food, or a meal budget, at the same time.

Avoid the audience setup

A video call pointed at an in-person event doesn't include remote people. It gives them a seat in the back row. If you can't design the mixed version properly, run two good events instead.

Rotate who gets the better deal

Over a year, keep track of which group got the in-person event and which got the screen. If the office always gets bowling and the remote people always get a video quiz, the remote people notice. Rotate, and use some of the budget to bring remote people in at least once or twice a year. The manager's guide to inclusive team outings covers fairness across times, places and budgets in more detail.

Getting replies from a split team takes the same things it does anywhere: a clear invite, a visible headcount and a personal follow-up. How to get employees to RSVP has templates.

Where TeamOutings fits

In TeamOutings, you can set up a team for the office and a team for each remote cluster, next to the automatic "Everyone" team, and post each parallel event to the right team. Run a poll on the activity or date so remote people have the same say as the office. Each outing has its own chat and a photo album that anyone on the team can add to from a phone or the web, which is how a parallel event stops feeling like two separate ones.

TeamOutings doesn't run video calls, ship kits or send calendar invites, so those stay in your usual tools.

Plan for the office and the home desks

Separate outings per location, one team-wide poll, and shared photos afterward.

See how it works

Researched and drafted with AI assistance, then edited and fact-checked by the TeamOutings team. Sources are linked in the text.