Do team outings reduce employee turnover? What the research says

We couldn't find a study showing that team outings, on their own, reduce employee turnover. What the research does show, consistently, is that people with more ties to their coworkers are less likely to quit, even after accounting for how much they like the job. Team outings are one inexpensive way to build those ties, so they can reasonably be part of a retention plan, alongside pay, workload and decent management rather than instead of them.

Here's what the evidence supports, where it stops, and how to plan outings with retention in mind.

People stay where they're connected

The strongest line of research is on what psychologists call job embeddedness: the web of things that keep someone in a job. In the 2001 study that introduced the idea, published in the Academy of Management Journal, Mitchell and colleagues measured three parts: links to other people and teams, fit with the job and organization, and what someone would have to give up by leaving. Embeddedness predicted both intent to leave and actual voluntary departures, and it added to the prediction beyond job satisfaction, commitment and job search.

A 2012 meta-analysis in the Journal of Applied Psychology by Jiang and colleagues pooled 65 samples covering 42,907 people. Embeddedness, both on the job and off it, was related to lower turnover intentions and lower actual turnover after controlling for satisfaction, commitment and job alternatives. Being embedded at work was the stronger of the two for predicting turnover.

Coworkers specifically show up too. A 2008 meta-analysis by Chiaburu and Harrison, covering 161 samples and 77,954 employees, found that support from coworkers was moderately associated with lower intentions to quit and more modestly associated with actual turnover.

Gallup's workplace surveys point the same way. In its 2022 survey of US employees, about two in ten said they have a best friend at work, and Gallup reports that the link between that friendship and outcomes including intent to leave has strengthened since the pandemic.

What the research doesn't show

None of these studies tested team outings. They measure relationships, support and sense of belonging, not whether a lunch or a bowling night created them. And most of the data is correlational: people who are already happy at work may be the ones who make friends there.

So the honest claim is narrower than the old version of this post made it. Outings plausibly help retention if they lead to real relationships, especially across teams, and they won't hold onto someone who is underpaid, overworked or reporting to a manager they can't stand. You'll also see confident before-and-after stories ("turnover fell from 35% to 19% after monthly lunches"). Without a comparison group, those can't separate the outings from everything else that changed that year.

The cost math, with real numbers

Turnover is expensive, though the commonly quoted figures vary widely. The most transparent estimate we found is a 2012 Center for American Progress review of 11 published studies: for most jobs (excluding executives and physicians), the typical cost of replacing an employee was 21% of annual salary. Estimates across jobs ranged from 5.8% to 213%, with highly paid and specialized roles at the top.

Here's a worked example using that median. The team size, salary and outing budget are hypothetical; the per-person budget is our guidance, not a benchmark.

	Hypothetical team
Team size	30 people
Average salary	$75,000
Typical cost of one departure (21%)	$15,750
Monthly outing at $40 per person (our guidance)	$1,200
Annual outing spend	$14,400
Departures that need to be avoided to break even	About 1 per year

The table shows the stakes, not a return. Nobody can tell you that a year of outings will prevent one resignation. What you can say to a budget holder is that the spend is roughly the cost of a single departure, and that the research consistently links coworker relationships to people staying. Our guide on building a business case for a team event budget covers how to frame that conversation, and team outing budget per person has our cost ranges.

Planning outings with retention in mind

If the mechanism is relationships, the events that matter are the ones that create them. Our guidance:

• Make it regular. A monthly lunch gives people repeated contact, which is how acquaintances turn into colleagues they'd miss. One big event a year doesn't.
• Hold it during work hours when possible. An evening event quietly excludes parents, caregivers and long commuters, who are often the people you least want to lose.
• Keep it voluntary and easy to say no to. Pressure to attend creates resentment, which works against the point.
• Mix teams sometimes. Embeddedness is about links, plural. A quarterly event that mixes departments gives people ties beyond their immediate team.
• Have managers show up and talk to people. We know of no study on manager attendance at outings specifically, but a manager who skips every event sends a clear message about whether they matter.
• Include new hires early. The first month is when connections form or don't. See why new hires need team outings in their first 30 days.

Listening is part of it

Outings also give you something surveys don't: informal time when people mention what's bothering them. If someone who used to come every month stops showing up, that's worth a private, friendly check-in. It may be nothing. It may be the first sign of someone looking elsewhere.

For more on what the broader research says about which kinds of team bonding hold up, see the data behind team bonding.

Where TeamOutings fits

TeamOutings keeps a regular rhythm easy to run: create an outing with a date, place and cost per person, invite a team or the automatic Everyone team, and collect Yes, No and Maybe replies with a live headcount. Polls let people choose the activity or date, and each outing has a chat and a shared photo album.

It doesn't send reminders or produce attendance reports, so noticing who has stopped coming is still something you do by looking at the headcounts yourself.