How often should a remote team meet in person?

Remote teams need two things from in-person time, and they have different clocks. Relationship maintenance decays slowly — twice a year is usually enough to keep people feeling like colleagues rather than avatars. Hard thinking together is event-driven and happens when it happens.

Conflating these is why so many companies land on quarterly offsites that are too frequent to be special and too infrequent to be useful.

One long gathering a year — three or four days, everyone, expensive, worth it. One shorter one at the six-month mark. Then working sessions called as needed, small groups only, when a specific problem justifies the travel.

If you are only doing this once a year, a conference-hotel meeting room is a waste of the opportunity. The whole value is in the informal hours, and those require somewhere people want to linger.

Not satisfaction scores. Whether people message each other more in the eight weeks afterwards. That is what you actually bought.