This is an article I wrote for LinkedIn in September 2025, published here for posterity.
A colleague of mine who was also part of a highly distributed team – working on the same product, but very different parts of it – told me that he was planning a workshop for his team in a few months. They were going to travel to meet up and spend two days in workshops to knowledge share, brainstorm and plan a major upcoming milestone. Staying overnight, they would have some time to hang out in the evening.
I had been mulling over the idea of a workshop with my team and I decided then and there we would do it on the same dates, at the same hotel. “Sure” my colleague replied, “There’ll be plenty of space for all. But why, though? It’s not like your team and mine would have shared sessions, but we could do dinner and drinks.” “Perfect” I said, “I think there might be opportunities for shared sessions too, but even if it’s just the social side of it, that’s good enough.”
Some people don’t see the value of corporate social events. I’ve had colleagues who avoid them like the plague. I believe they’re missing out on amazing opportunities to foster connections, build camaraderie across teams and functions, share knowledge and boost company culture. The kind of positive and inclusive environment created by getting together with your colleagues in person is extremely difficult to achieve through other means.
On this app, I sometimes see return-to-office mandates being framed as attempts to get people to voluntarily quit, exercises in managerial ego-stroking, or to justify prior spending on office real estate. I’m not saying that’s never the case, but it strikes me as rather cynical. My own experience is very different as I’ve had the good fortune to work for companies that understand the value of meeting in person, having social events. I’ve organized quite a few of them myself.
However, it’s not really a question of RTO or not, because even as a highly distributed team we often simply need to seize the opportunities for in-person interaction that appear before us. Often, like with the workshops that my colleague and I helped set up, they’re low-hanging fruits. Sometimes you have to push a little – the value of an event like this can be hard to measure. As an organizer, I must be able to effectively justify the expense.
Think about how you would create an inclusive and positive environment in your distributed team and how you would like to structure in-person events for the best possible result.