Many find remote work to be more transactional than in-person work. You Slack someone when you need something, and otherwise stare at your own screen in your own home. Managers see off-sites as a way to make remote work feel more personal.
Laura Burkhauser, a product manager at Twitter in San Francisco, planned a hybrid off-site in January to help her team build what she called “that elusive rapport.” In May 2020, Twitter told its employees that they could continue to work from home permanently. Ms. Burkhauser, whose team included workers in London and New York, said “off-sites are more important than ever in a time of virtual work” because it is easier to trust and communicate with remote co-workers when you actually know them.
If many tech workers and executives agree that there’s some value in off-site retreats, even when they are held remotely, how to execute them is much more tricky.
Jeremy Bailenson, the founding director of Stanford’s Virtual Human Interaction Lab and the co-founder of Strivr, a virtual reality start-up, called the idea of doing a multiday retreat with back to back meetings “insanity — and I’m going to use that word not lightly.” He added, “You can’t just talk at someone for 36 hours and expect the brain to absorb it.” He recently published a paper on Zoom fatigue, and he said that “Zoom is like a fire hose. You’re getting flooded with nonverbal cues.”
Then there’s the question of how to actually spend your time together on an off-site. Ms. Wu said her start-up’s recent off-site in Napa, Calif., which the Offsite Company planned, was mainly social. She knows that in-demand software engineers, in particular, can easily quit and take different jobs. “So,” she said, “you want to really create an environment where people are stoked to be there, believe in the company, like the people they work with and aren’t just going to jump ship.”
Meghana Reddy, a human resources executive in Oakland, Calif., said that while off-sites used to be “nice to have,” during the pandemic they became “a must-have.” She said that for tech companies that want to attract talent, investing in off-sites “will be a better use of money than trying to get people back in the office.” Some companies are already giving up their offices and diverting facilities budgets into off-sites. Hunter Block, the founder of Offsiter, said he knew of a large company that is planning over 600 off-sites a year for smaller teams of employees.
Mr. Bailenson, who wrote on Zoom fatigue, would advise that, whatever companies do to amp up their off-site plans, they should not lean too heavily on video chats.
For all the latest business News Click Here
