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.
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.
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.
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).