Why remote teams need in-person outings

Remote teams need in-person time because remote work changes who people talk to and how they feel about it. The research covered below, from Microsoft, Gallup and a field experiment published in Nature, points the same way: remote work shrinks people's networks toward the colleagues they already know, fully remote employees report more loneliness than people in an office, and coming up with new ideas together goes better face to face. A few well-planned in-person gatherings a year address all three without giving up remote work.

How many people this affects

Working from home is a normal part of the workweek for a large share of the US workforce. In the Bureau of Labor Statistics' American Time Use Survey for 2025, released in June 2026, 35% of employed people did some or all of their work at home on the days they worked. Some of them are home one or two days a week; others rarely share a room with their coworkers at all.

What changes when a team goes remote

Networks get smaller and more siloed

The clearest evidence comes from Microsoft. Researchers analyzed the emails, calendars, chats and calls of 61,182 US Microsoft employees over the first six months of 2020, when the company moved to remote work, and published the results in Nature Human Behaviour in 2022. Firm-wide remote work made collaboration networks more static and siloed, with fewer connections between different parts of the company, and shifted communication from live conversation toward asynchronous messages.

That study covers the sudden switch at the start of the pandemic, so it describes a company that went remote overnight rather than one designed for it. Even so, it shows what happens when nothing replaces the hallway: people keep working with the colleagues they already know, and the looser ties across teams fade.

Fully remote people report more loneliness

In its global workplace research, Gallup reported in June 2024 that 25% of fully remote employees worldwide said they had felt lonely a lot of the previous day, compared with 21% of hybrid employees and 16% of those fully on-site. Hybrid workers sat in between, which suggests that even some time together makes a difference.

Some work goes better in the same room

In experiments published in Nature in 2022, Melanie Brucks and Jonathan Levav found that pairs working over video generated fewer creative ideas than pairs working in person, in both a lab study and a field experiment with 1,490 engineers of a multinational company in five countries. Video pairs were not worse at choosing which idea to pursue. The authors linked the gap to video narrowing people's focus to the screen.

None of this says remote work fails. It says a remote team loses some things by default, and getting people together on purpose is one of the few ways to get them back.

How often to meet

There's no study that sets the right frequency for every team. This is our guidance, based on what the gatherings are for: meeting new colleagues, rebuilding ties across teams, and giving people a shared experience to refer back to.

Team setup	In-person gathering	Between gatherings
Fully remote, one country	Whole team once or twice a year, 2 to 3 days	Local meetups wherever 3+ people live nearby; a short virtual event monthly
Fully remote, several continents	Whole team once a year; regional meetups in between	Virtual events run twice in two time slots
Hybrid, some fully remote people	Bring remote people to the office once a quarter, with an outing on the visit	Everyone-on-screen events now and then so remote people aren't always the audience
New team or many new hires	Meet in person within the first few months	More frequent small meetups until people know each other

The remote team outing toolkit has formats, cost ranges and a time-zone rule for each of these. For teams that are partly in the office, see how to plan an outing when half your team is remote.

What to plan when you get together

The scheduled sessions matter less than the time around them. Plan the working sessions for mornings, keep one shared dinner, and leave real gaps: a walk between sessions, an evening with no plan, a slow breakfast before people fly home. Mix seating at meals so people from different teams end up next to each other, since cross-team ties are the ones that fade first.

Skip a packed agenda of presentations. Anything that would work just as well on video can stay on video.

Making the budget case

Travel is the line item finance asks about, so put it next to the cost it can help avoid. Gallup estimated in 2019 that replacing an employee costs between one-half and two times their annual salary, which it called a conservative estimate. That figure isn't a study of remote gatherings, and no one can promise a meetup prevents a resignation, but it gives a sense of scale.

A worksheet for the conversation, with hypothetical numbers you replace with your own:

Then ask for a fixed annual line rather than case-by-case approval. A budget that has to be justified each time tends to get cut each time. The guide to building a business case for your team event budget covers the full pitch, and the team outing budget guide has per-person ranges for the meals and activities.

Where TeamOutings fits

Once a gathering is approved, TeamOutings can hold the social side of it: an outing for the welcome dinner with Yes, No and Maybe replies and a live headcount, a poll to choose the group activity, a chat for "who's on the 6 pm flight," and a shared photo album afterward. It doesn't book travel, collect dietary needs or send reminders, so plan those separately.