What do you do when an announcement about an “offsite” hits your work inbox? Chances are you might sigh and begrudgingly add the event to your calendar.
These events, also called retreats, bring colleagues together for a mix of structured activities and free time – freeing them from their regular work obligations. For one or two days, employees take a mandatory break from their normal routines at work and at home. Participants spend a lot of that time making small talk with colleagues, as well as engaging in structured interactions that may include awkward icebreakers.
Although networking is one of these events’ main purposes, some people find that networking for the purpose of meeting professional goals can feel transactional, uncomfortable or even dirty. Unsure about whether it will be worth the time and effort, you might ask: What’s in it for me?
We are management professors who study how professional networks help information and resources move across organizations and create opportunities. Our research findings suggest participating in an offsite could be well worth the time and hassle.
And it might quietly reshape your working relationships in unexpected ways.
Taking time and costing money
While these gatherings have become relatively common, we were surprised to learn how little research there is on whether they work. In particular, few scholars have dug into their effectiveness in helping people forge new connections.
Offsites can help with strategic planning, team development and goal setting. They’re often held once or twice a year. The timing varies from one employer to the next. But the period from December through March is becoming more popular.
They tend to bring people together who rarely interact through their work – particularly at large employers with offices spread across the country or even the world, and in organizations with remote-first work arrangements.
Retreats help people get better acquainted in many informal ways, whether it’s sharing meals, exchanging ideas or chatting in hallways. Those interactions and the more structured ones, such as brainstorming exercises conducted in previously assigned groups, make it easier to connect with colleagues.
After years of remote work when people mainly gathered over Zoom, employers continue to look for ways to rebuild connections and to address a surge in disengagement.
These retreats for professionals have apparently become more popular following the COVID-19 pandemic, as part of the larger rebound in business-related travel. A survey of 2,000 full-time employees from a range of industries found that the percentage of companies hosting no offsites at all fell to 4% in 2024, from 16% in 2019.
Further, many companies are allocating larger budgets for offsites and budgeting more time during off-site retreats for social purposes, the same survey found.
Mapping a law firm’s networking patterns
When we spoke with managers from several large firms about their off-site practices, we were surprised that they simply assumed collaboration was an inevitable outcome.
To test whether that was true, we studied the working relationships of more than 700 partners in a large U.S. law firm, which we agreed not to name to access its data. Over eight years, from 2005 to 2012, these partners attended – or skipped – the firm’s annual retreats.
We tracked the partners’ attendance and their collaborative work for the firm’s clients before and after the offsites. Because lawyers at this firm – and elsewhere – record their work in 6-minute increments, it was possible to analyze billing records for the partners’ collaboration on client projects.
The results of this mapping exercise surprised us. And they may change your feelings about whether retreats are worth your time and energy.
Helping partners get noticed
We found that after participating in an offsite, partners were more likely to reach out to other partners whom they had not worked with previously.
To our surprise, we found that even workers who didn’t attend an offsite acted more collaboratively afterward. Having received the message that collaboration is important to the firm, they made up for missing out by finding other ways to start collaborating with more colleagues.
But building a successful career also depends on something harder to control than whether you reach out to new colleagues and clients: You need your colleagues to think of you when opportunities arise. And that likelihood can increase when you participate in offsites.
Getting 24% more requests to collaborate
We found an increase in newly formed connections across the law firm after these events. New collaborations on billable work increased, generating more revenue for the firm. And the targets of these new collaborations tended to be the people who took part in the offsite.
The partners who attended the offsite became more visible and had 24% more new requests to collaborate on work for a client in the two months following the retreat than those who did not. Importantly, these relationships were not superficial. Almost 17% of these new working relationships continued over the next two years.
While we analyzed only the relationships that formed shortly after the offsite, it is likely that colleagues remember those they meet at these events. The people who attend them continue to reap network-based benefits beyond what we found in the data.
We also found that offsites helped attorneys forge connections with lawyers in the firm’s other practice groups more than with those on their own team.
Overall, lawyers who went to an offsite made more new connections – about one per month – after an offsite than the ones who didn’t go.
Bridging silos at work
In the course of day-to-day work, people tend to interact most with the colleagues they already know.
This pattern seems to be even stronger in remote work. Offsites helped to break that pattern by giving professionals opportunities to engage with colleagues they don’t know. Sometimes, they end up eager to collaborate with people they meet this way.
These more distant connections can help people obtain diverse information, resources and perspectives and create opportunities to productively brainstorm.
When you work for a big employer, it can be hard to meet colleagues on other teams. Offsites may provide a significant opportunity to build networks and stand out among peers.
While offsites may never be your favorite way to spend a few days, our research shows that they can serve an important function for employers and employees alike.