Measuring the impact of an offsite when your company is fully remote

Measurement starts before departure. A remote company that brings its team together almost always has several reasons in mind: strengthening trust, aligning priorities, launching a project, welcoming newcomers. If those reasons are not written down, you will not know afterwards whether the gathering helped.

GitLab gives a public example of a clearly stated aim: its handbook explains that its company event is meant to build trust through social connections, in the hope of higher motivation, productivity and retention. The company also states that the event is not an incentive trip, a conference or a holiday.

For your own gathering, we suggest limiting the list to two or three goals, each with a simple question.

• Relationships: who wants to know whom better, across which teams?
• Alignment: which strategic decisions should come out of these days?
• Integration: how do newcomers find their place?

Share these goals with participants before the trip. They will also steer the programme: whatever serves no goal can stay on video.

Public practices are modest and precisely for that reason useful.

• Zapier asks open questions after each retreat: what was awesome about the trip, and what should be done differently next time. It also asks about formats (unconferences, roundtables, team day) and leaves a field for other comments. The feedback has concrete effects: the company stopped pairing its retreat with a conference after finding attendees were tired and scattered.
• GitLab relied on a survey run after its 2019 event to prepare the next one, and tracks attendance: about 575 people took part, with an 86% attendance rate according to its public account. Requests from attendees (advance information on activities in large groups, randomised meal seating) fed into the changes.
• Doist documents its annual retreats and team mini-retreats year after year, which makes it possible to compare places and formats.
• Basecamp creates a new project space for each meetup to gather messages, schedule and documents in one place: the trail is kept.

The common thread: they ask few questions, but they always ask them, and they act on the answers for the next time.

A gathering that produces good conversations but no decisions leaves little behind. For remote companies, writing is the memory, so that is where to measure.

• A decision log kept during the gathering: the topic, the decision, who owns it, the deadline.
• A thirty-day check-in: what has moved, what has changed in nature, what stayed stuck?
• A ninety-day check-in: do the relationships formed during the gathering show up in day-to-day work, for example in projects run between teams that did not collaborate before?

These indicators are qualitative and specific to you. We publish no benchmark figure: neither ours nor the market's is worth as much as tracking your own decisions.

It is tempting to link a gathering to team retention, but it is difficult. Many factors influence whether someone leaves, and a week in person cannot be compared with a control group.

What public sources allow us to say is more modest. GitLab presents retention as a hoped-for outcome of trust built in person, not as a measured figure. In Buffer's State of Remote Work survey (2020 edition), collaboration and communication, and loneliness, rank among the main struggles cited by respondents: these are problems a gathering can help address, without claiming to solve them.

In practice, you can track, qualitatively and with care:

• departures and arrivals in the following months, without drawing an automatic causal link;
• a simple question in your regular survey: "I know enough colleagues to ask for help";
• the integration of recent joiners, through a conversation with their manager.

These elements only make sense read together and over several editions.

More often than not, the difference lies in discipline rather than in the measuring tool: sending the questionnaire within two or three days, publishing a short summary to the whole team, announcing what will change next time. Zapier does this by asking what should change; GitLab adjusted its programme based on feedback.

On our side, Solara DMC organises the stay in Spain: accommodation, rooms, restaurants, activities and transfers. We build the programme with you around your goals, schedule time for the questionnaire and the decision log, and give you the actual running order so you can compare from one edition to the next. Write to us with your dates: we will come back to you with availability.