ThemeMeetings & collaboration
CardCard 18 of 65
Questions5 to explore
StepBuild belonging

Face to Face

When & how we meet in person

In-person time is too rare on a hybrid team to leave unplanned, and too valuable to use for things that work fine over video.

Most hybrid teams find their own rhythm for when and how they meet in person, but not many make it explicit. The result is that in-person time happens when it happens, is used for whatever is on the agenda that week, and the particular value of being in the same room often goes untapped.

The research on hybrid work is reasonably consistent: in-person time is best used for things that build trust, resolve ambiguity, or require the kind of spontaneous back-and-forth that video flattens. It is not necessarily better for focused individual work, and it is rarely necessary for status updates or information sharing. If your team is meeting in person to do things that work fine over video, you are spending a scarce resource without getting its return.

Agreeing in advance what in-person time is for, how often it should happen, and what a good session looks like lets your team make the most of it rather than hoping the room does the work.

Make it explicitWrite down how often your team plans to meet in person, what you will use that time for, and what you will not use it for.

How strong hybrid teams handle it

The same building block, handled well. These are patterns from teams that work well across locations, offered as illustrations to react to, not rules to copy.

Use it for what video cannot do

Strong hybrid teams protect in-person time for relationship-building, difficult conversations, creative ideation, and anything where trust or ambiguity is the real barrier. They move routine updates and reporting back to video or async.

Plan the offsite before you plan the agenda

Teams that decide how often they will meet in person and put it in the calendar at the start of the year get it. Teams that plan it reactively usually get less time together than they intended.

Structured informal time

Leaving unstructured social time in the agenda (a meal, a walk, an activity) is not wasted time. It is how hybrid teams rebuild the ambient social knowledge that collocated teams get for free.

Equal preparation for remote days

When only some of the team travels for an in-person session, the people who stay remote need the same preparation and a clear sense of what they are missing and why.

Questions for your team

Use these on your own or in a group. There are no right answers, only better conversations.

How often does your team currently meet in person, and does that feel like the right amount?
What have you noticed gets easier or better when you are in the same room together?
Is there anything your team is doing in person that would work just as well or better over video?
How do you make sure team members who cannot travel still feel included and up to date?
What would need to be true for your next in-person session to feel genuinely worth the travel?

Watch for

Teams that default to in-person for big decisions can create an unintended two-tier system where people who travel have more influence than people who join remotely.
Without a clear purpose for the in-person time, sessions tend to fill with content that could have been a video call, and people come back wondering if it was worth the effort.
New team members need more in-person time than established ones. Not building that in explicitly means onboarding happens at a disadvantage.