The remote team outing toolkit

A remote team needs three kinds of outings: short virtual events that give people something to do besides watch a screen, local meetups wherever a few people live near each other, and an in-person gathering for the whole team once or twice a year. Each one does a different job, and most distributed teams lean too hard on the first. This toolkit gives you the formats, what each costs, how far ahead to plan, and a rule for picking a time when the team spans several time zones.

If you're still making the case for travel money, start with why remote teams need in-person outings. If only part of your team is remote, planning an outing when half the team is remote covers that mix.

The three formats at a glance

The ranges below are our guidance for US teams, based on typical prices for meal kits, restaurant dinners and domestic travel. Your city and season will move them.

Format	Best when	Cost per person (our guidance)	Plan ahead (our guidance)	How often
Virtual event	Everyone is remote, or the team spans 4+ time zones	$0 to $25 with no kit; $35 to $75 with a shipped kit	1 week; 3 to 4 weeks with a kit	Monthly or every 6 weeks
Local meetup	3 or more people live within an hour of each other	$40 to $80 for dinner or an activity	2 to 3 weeks	Quarterly
Full-team gathering	You can fund travel and give it 2 to 3 days	$1,500 to $3,000 for a domestic trip with flights, two hotel nights, meals and one group activity	3 to 4 months	Once or twice a year

Virtual events: keep them short and give people a task

Video wears people out in a specific way. In a 2021 paper in Technology, Mind, and Behavior, Stanford researcher Jeremy Bailenson laid out why: close-up eye contact for long stretches, staring at your own face, being stuck in one spot, and the extra effort of sending and reading body language through a camera. A two-hour video happy hour asks people to do all of that after a full day of video meetings.

The virtual events that hold up share two traits. They have an end time under an hour, and they give people something to do with their hands or their attention.

• A cooking or tasting session where everyone follows the same instructor with the same ingredients
• Trivia in small teams, with breakout rooms between rounds
• A short show-and-tell: one object from your desk, your street, or a hobby, two minutes each
• A build-along (a puzzle, a kit, a recipe) where the talking happens while hands are busy

Put people in breakout rooms of four. Conversation groups tend to split once they pass about four people, according to observational research published in Human Nature in 1995, and on video the fifth and sixth person usually just stop talking. Our guidance: 45 minutes, breakouts of three or four, and the full group together only for the start and the finish.

Local meetups: use the map you already have

List where everyone lives. Any city or region with three or more people within about an hour of each other is a hub; that threshold is our guidance, low enough to catch small clusters and high enough to feel like a group. Most remote teams have more hubs than they expect.

Run the hubs on the same day, with the same kind of activity if you can, so there's something shared to talk about the next morning. A five-minute video call between hubs at the start is enough of a link. Don't try to keep a call open all evening.

For people who don't live near any hub, offer something on the same day rather than nothing. A meal on the company with a short video call to the hubs is a common choice. If you hand out gift cards or meal-delivery credits, check with payroll first: IRS Publication 15-B says cash and cash equivalents such as gift cards are never excludable as a de minimis benefit, "no matter how little," so they may count as taxable wages.

The full-team gathering

This is the expensive one, and the one that the other two formats lean on. Our guidance for the shape of it:

• Three days. Day one for travel and a welcome dinner, day two for working sessions in the morning and a group activity in the afternoon, day three for a short closing session and travel home.
• Pick a place close to the middle of where people live, with a large airport, so total travel time stays reasonable.
• Leave the evenings mostly open. A shared dinner the first night, then free time.
• Avoid the weeks around major holidays and school breaks, when travel costs more and people want to be home.

Build the budget line by line (flights, hotel, meals, venue, activity, ground transport) rather than starting from a per-person guess. The team outing budget guide has ranges for the meal and activity lines.

A rule for time zones

Our guidance for picking a time for a virtual event:

1. Find the window where everyone is between 8 am and 7 pm local time. If it exists and is at least an hour, schedule inside it.
2. If it doesn't exist, run the same event twice, in two time slots, rather than asking one region to join at 11 pm. Two smaller groups beat one big group with half the people exhausted.
3. Rotate which region gets the less convenient slot each time.

Say your team is spread between San Francisco and Berlin, nine hours apart. 8 am in San Francisco is 5 pm in Berlin, which leaves a two-hour window that works for both. Add someone in Sydney and no shared window exists, so you run it twice.

Kit-shipping timeline

When the event needs a physical kit, the deadlines are set by shipping, not by the event. Our guidance, counting back from the event date:

Keep addresses, sizes and food restrictions in one private place that only the organizer can see, and delete what you no longer need after the event. Ask about food allergies before you order anything edible.

Where TeamOutings fits

TeamOutings works for each piece of this. Create a team per hub alongside the automatic "Everyone" team, and post each hub's outing to that team with its own place, time and RSVPs. Use a poll to choose between two time slots or two activities, and keep each outing's questions in its own chat. After the event, each hub can add photos to the outing's album, so the whole team sees what the others did.

It doesn't collect shipping addresses or dietary needs, and it doesn't send calendar invites or reminders, so keep those in your own form and calendar.