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Comment by gkoberger | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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

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