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Comment by Johnny555 | Hacker News Reader

Offsite retreats seem like a bad idea in general, I've never been to one where I felt the team or company worked together better afterwards, and I've seen some spectacularly bad results... like the time the facilitator tried to get to the bottom of tensions between the CTO and head of sales (the classic problem of "Engineering isn't shipping features fast enough" and "Sales is selling features before even consulting with engineering"). The discussion quickly turned shockingly personal and within a month after the retreat both the CTO and head of sales quit. At least they called an end to the retreat early.

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I feel like our offsites, especially in a post-COVID remote world, tend to improve communication and productivity. People get to know their coworkers, and feel much more comfortable working cross-functionality.

I've had some bad experiences, of course, but overall I've found it to be incredibly worth it.

I think there's a difference between getting employees who work remotely from each other into the same room for a week, and a "retreat" offsite where pseudo-theraputic approaches are used to try to get employees to open up or bond socially.

I think “retreat” is used pretty colloquially and doesn’t imply pseudo-therapy.

From the article: > “Vulnerability-Trust exercise”

From your parent comment: > the facilitator tried to get to the bottom of tensions between the CTO and head of sales

I was referring specifically to these sorts of things. Retreat doesn't always include this, but sometimes it does, and when it does it's a stupid idea.

"Retreat doesn't always include this, but sometimes it does, and when it does it's a stupid idea."

Unless maybe done by professionals?

I never have been to one such retreat, but I know human conflicts and I know what difference it can make, if skilled people can mediate.

Such professional therapy should probably be administered privately and during the course of a regular workday.

Professional individual therapy is something different from professional mediation between people with conflicts.

I've mostly seen "retreat" being used for cases where you go on a pseudo-vacation with collegues paid by your company, with or without pseudo-therapy bullshit.

I've been on a couple of them (without the bullshit) and people did indeed open up and bonded, but I should note that the conditions for this were positive in the first place (i.e. we weren't trying to invert some negative situation).

Nothing that can't be achieved over couple of beers after work, thats how (not only) Czechs do it and it generally works very well. Bonus points if you can get customers for such event too, a lot of things can be figured out quickly instead of corporate meetings.

We do that too sometimes but it doesn't create the same kind of memories as spending a week in a tropical paradise or going on some kind of adventure together.

Huh. Reading your comment and the parent above - maybe retreats aren't "therapeutic", but "exacerbatory" - as opposed to making interpersonal relationships uniformly better (bad -> good and good -> better), they make good relationships better but bad relationships worse?

I would very much agree with this. If you’re at an offsite and it goes that badly, things probably weren’t solid to begin with.

The most valuable element is probably in forming positive interpersonal relationships where none existed previously. Whether that's people that work remotely and rarely see each other in person, or people who work in the same building but rarely interact

I worked remotely with only seeing my team a few times per year. During our last offsite, I looked around the 80+ person room and realized that I just don't enjoy working with any of these people.

+1. I too feel the same thing after 3 years of remote work. Sometimes I even feel that my colleagues are way more dumb than they appeared to look in online.

Yeah that was me after 3 years during a company over the panny-D, I just had nothing in common with any of the people working there, the company didn't seem to have much ambitions, definitely did not realize they needed 5-10 more people to do the work they wanted to be done.

I wonder if we should "enjoy" it, or whether it's just that we can't relate to the other people in the slightest when in person? I work from home and very very very rarely do I go into the office, but when I do it's quite pleasant and all but I am glad to be free of the social environment; I am there to solve things and get stuff fixed and working, not make new friends. I don't mean that nastily - I mean I go to work to work; I don't go to socialise. Some people cannot differentiate these two concepts.

> I wonder if we should "enjoy" it, or whether it's just that we can't relate to the other people in the slightest when in person?

You should “enjoy” making things with those other people. You should have cohesive competence with each other that enables you to crush out the work that comes your collective way.

You don’t have to “enjoy” the other person’s company, in a would-I-have-a-frosty-beverage-with-them way. You might! These are not mutually exclusive, but they are also not required to be simultaneous properties held of effective work relationships.

Put more simply, I certainly wasn't the smartest person the in the room, but I felt close to it...

Most people were younger than me. Over time, the company laid off or pushed out many of the experienced and smart colleagues I had joined to work with, replacing them with less experienced employees.

We have one annually for my company. It's at a casino, with a few scheduled meals and some activities (video game room, trivia done by a professional company).

It's voluntary and employees are allowed to bring their spouse. I think it helps a lot with communication, especially since we are a distributed team and most peoplr don't see each other.

But it's hard for me to know for sure, no one tells the owners the truth. It is voluntary and almost everyone attends. I think most people think of it as a free vacation.

I guess it's a personal thing, but I don't see how everyone going to a casino is a great idea, or developing team relationships.

I would guess that the casino is a relatively cheap space that can do entertainment and conferences and food, and it's not being chosen for the gambling aspects

I get what they offer, I guess I just don't see that as team building.

Having fun with people in general is team building. Amusement park would do the same thing. It doesn't have to be any special format.

I wouldn't call it team building. I just think of it as a reminder that we are all friends that we all have families and struggles. We're all human and doing our best.

It's at a casino because it's near our facility, has conference rooms, event spaces, entertainment, and the weather doesn't matter.

Sometimes some people sit at a table and play while hanging out and that's fine. But it's not really about drinking or gambling. Just having a little fun together and getting to know each other and our +1s on a more personal level.

I worked at a company that was pathologically thirsty and had only hard drinkers above entry-level.

For those people, just drinking was the bonding. It reinforced the tribal affiliation.

Casinos often provide free drinks. QED

This makes sense its the:

> I like to spend the company budget on blow and hookers, therefore it makes sense for me to invite all the employees to a strip club as it is a little more restrained.

Mentality.

> I think most people think of it as a free vacation.

I'm shocked that someone does NOT think so!

Not as shocking when you realize you are wasting your downtime with work colleagues. I’d rather have control over my downtime regardless of who is paying.

Do you really think it's either or? I certainly don't use my days off for that.

Is it really a vacation if you have to spend it with your work colleagues?

> I think most people think of it as a free vacation.

It's not free if the company is paying for it.

I'll offer another antidote. Every single place I have ever worked at that had such retreats had a big layoff within ~6 months.

It's like the CEO or execs see there are a lot of problems and think this will magically fix all the "issues". It doesn't, so they turn to the next solution. Just fire a bunch of staff and start over.

Probably see it as the easy way out because actually bringing about change in a culture that is already entrenched is hard work and they don't have the mettle for it. Or don't trust the org to be on board with it.

Easier to just do a reset instead of thinking about how one might bring effective change over a reasonable period of time.

> classic problem of "Engineering isn't shipping features fast enough" and "Sales is selling features before even consulting with engineering"

That's not a problem, in the sense that there was never any possible debate: if I make a promise on your behalf, I am a di*k.

It’s a mix. Partially a systems problem. We used to have that problem, then we changed the way work is selected. Sales is part of the process, so they’re forced to see all the things we could build and help decide which ones were saying no to. They still promise things occasionally but they hedge a lot more now. And our teams delivery rate has increased dramatically because we’re not getting yanked around all the time.

This sounds like a successful implementation of the conjoined triangles of success :)

Sales is welcome to build the products they're selling while engineering builds the ones on the roadmap.

These often happened on weekends and I used to simply ask my manager about the days off for this and answer often was a shocked face and a no. So I rarely attended those.

Work should be time-bounded. Weekends should generally be off limit, even if it supposed to be a "fun" work thing.

Sounds like it was productive!

I agree, unironically. Not all workplace tensions can be resolved amicably. Often the only solution is for one of the parties to go. The sooner it happens, the better.

No it wasn't. Those kinds of conflicts always have blame for the rest of the execs too.

I might be reading too closely / projecting, but...

Sounds like an ineffectual CEO who didn't understand that his role, like any manager, is to help resolve interpersonal conflict between his subordinates that they're having trouble working out themselves. Outsourcing that to a random coordinator reeks of conflict-avoidant behavior. That they both quit tells me that neither one thought the other was the sole problem they were dealing with.

Not one but 2 managers removed. Amazing result.

Works well where I work. Some ground rules to help are:

* Do the bulk during work hours.

* Be 100% accepting of people who don't wanna spend free time on it. Or compensate.

* Add in loads of general fun.

* Let the employees be in charge of what constitutes fun.

* Go light on the actual work.

* Plan well ahead, respect people's own schedules.

HR justifying their own bloat. The staff and shareholders pay the price. Agency conflict of interest. The fault is with the CEO for not getting HR in line.

HR does what senior management tells them to do. The C-level loves it when you blame HR rather than them.

I had very positive experiences with some offsites, where the people 1) had fun 2) felt closer and able to interact more easily with each other (especially when working in a remote environment it's harder to grow closer)

But, like everything else, not all people enjoy them. I have seen people find obvious excuses to avoid them.

We have a "retreat" every other year or so at a certain resort across the country. What happens is that the company flies everyone there + including overseas employees) do 3 days of meeting plus 1 day of free time before flying everyone back. 2 employees share a room, no family or friends allowed even if you want to pay for your hotel rooms out of the pocket.

I don't see any point of this. Such a waste of time and jet fuel. I would rather have those meetings at worksite and get a nice discount for the resort and go there with my own schedule and on my own terms.

You are forced to share a room with another employee?

The golden-handcuff stories just keep getting weirder as I go down the thread.

Corporate isn't going to waste any money there.

Sounds like a potential HR nightmare.

Reminds me of that super cringy one that Wizards of the Coast did early on

Which one? I couldn't find anything in google

Part 1: https://www.salon.com/2001/03/23/wizards/

Part 2: https://www.salon.com/2001/03/26/wizards_part2/

When I was younger and eager for retreats I saw one turn really bad. The facilitator suggested volunteers to sit in the middle and people to be open about their bad and good things.

Oh man, this went south quickly after a few beers, the retreat was shortened, some people never talked to others anymore and the whole team broke apart.

The thing is that nobody was nasty, the first volounteers did nit give a fuck about what was told about them, so others took the step, the people sitting around git bolder (but still telling the truth) and at some point it all collapsed.

Retreats like this just concentrate the social dynamics of the people the organization has hired. I think people’s experience with them is directly correlated with the caliber of people you work with.

All of the stupid shit I’ve seen happen at these events have been done by people who I don’t miss working with

Maybe a retreat would be a good 3rd round interview.

Looks like a bad offsite handling, both in your case and linked article.

I feel that offsites work best when you let people interact on their own schedule, pace and topics. Trying to force hands via a lot of activities can kind of backfire.

Relationships happen. They are not programmatically built.

My experience is that its usually good for communications and cooperation, but not nearly as helpful as management envision.

i’ve been to a bunch and all resulted in a big increase in trust between teams especially between tech and sales. i mended a few poor relationships at the last notion one in maui, made some lifelong friends. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ maybe for every shitty one there’s 2 that are great

Film it and you have a Netflix series. It sounds better than most reality TV.

I think that ultimately it can help make a better company/team/etc, BUT you need a program / agenda and people that know what they're doing - can't just make it a bro fest.

Alcohol can be fine, but you will discover some people change when drunk, not always for the better. We had a few incidents at a previous company I worked for (involving people getting removed by bouncers or the whole company being banned from a venue - but tbf there was a lot of barf in the hallways and the like), but I gotta say, the people at the one I'm at now are all very conservative and mature when it comes to drinking and offsite behaviour. From what I know so far, anyway.

this could pretty much be it's own editorial, if you're feeling journalistic

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