Every distributed team eventually has the same conversation. Someone on leadership notices the team feels a little more transactional than it used to be, and a little less like people who know each other. The instinct is almost always the same: schedule a team-building activity. So, somebody books a virtual game show, or worse, a scavenger hunt over Zoom, and for one hour a quarter, a dozen people who haven’t shared a room in months click through slides trying to guess whose childhood photo is on the screen.
Most teams who lived through 2020 and 2021 have a mild trauma response to the phrase “let’s hop on a call and do something fun,” and for good reason. The format asks people to perform connection on command, through the same screen that they’ve already worked on for eight hours.
We’re firmly in the camp that likes remote and hybrid work. It gives people control over their day, cuts out the parts of office life that never helped anyone get work done, and lets companies hire the best person for a role regardless of which city they live in. The one place distance still gets in the way is building trust.
Fifty-five percent of remote employees say it’s hard to feel connected to their coworkers,1 which lines up with what most of us notice anecdotally: reading a room, timing a hard conversation well, or getting a real sense of someone as a person rather than a name on a calendar invite.
In fact, Gallup’s decades of workplace research have found that employees who say they have a best friend at work are seven times as likely to be engaged in their jobs,2 and friendships like that tend to form fastest around a shared table, a delayed flight, or a dinner that runs long, not a meeting link. A case for spending the in-person time that already happens with a little more intention.
The good news is that closing this gap doesn’t require a new budget line. The strategy we’ve landed on treats the events the company is already attending, sponsoring, or sending people to as bonding infrastructure.
Nearly 80% of business travelers say attending conferences, leading presentations, or collaborating in person leaves them more satisfied with their job,3 which means these trips are already doing double duty whether anyone plans for it or not.
If three people from different departments are already flying to the same conference, that’s three people in the same city at the same time, not three separate trips that happen to overlap. A dinner the night before the show floor opens. Breakfast together instead of separately. A shared ride from the airport instead of three solo cars. It turns a trip the company already decided was worth the investment into real relationship-building time too.
This is the same principle behind event season planning for partner relationships, pointed inward instead of outward. The real value at any event was never the booth or the keynote. It was the dinner, the shared ride, the conversation that ran long. This is true whether the person across the table is a partner or a coworker who normally lives three time zones away.
A few things keep this the norm instead of the exception.
Plan events with people in mind, not just roles, and check who on the team hasn’t had real in-person time with this group lately. Build unstructured time into the itinerary on purpose, since a dinner reservation or a shared shuttle costs nothing extra and tends to outperform whatever’s on the official agenda.
Rotate who goes, because sending the same three people to everything builds strong relationships among three people, while cycling the roster spreads that same investment across the whole team over a year. And retire the mandatory virtual bonding hour if it isn’t building anything real, freeing up that budget line for trip planning instead.
The face time distributed teams need is often already on the calendar somewhere. It just isn’t being planned for purpose yet.
1Remote work in 2026: 50+ key statistics & trends | WorkTime
2Your Friends and Your Social Well-Being | Gallup Business Journal
3How Much Do Companies Spend on Business Travel in 2025 | Inspired Corporate Travel