In a Remote World, Companies Still Need On-Sites

Remote work allows you to hire the best people possible, without limiting yourself to a specific zipcode. Granted, there are some legal restrictions on whether you can hire someone based on there location, but generally speaking, when you focus on a remote-first culture, you can increase your applicant pool and diversify your workforce.

Also, frankly, in-office work doesn’t work for everyone. The pandemic showed us we can get work done from home — and research shows that most employees are more productive working remotely than they are in-person. Employers are taking note: 16% of U.S. companies are now completely remote, and 26% of the American workforce worked remotely in 2022. By 2025, trends predict that over 36 million Americans will be working remotely.

However, while the evidence on the benefits of remote work is clear, there are still drawbacks to fully-remote work and advantages to meeting in person: 50% of fully-remote workers feel lonely at least once a week, and 19% cite isolation as a major problem. But, there are benefits to bringing people together for on-sites.

For all the benefits of working remotely, human connection is still important. This is where employee on-sites are worth their weight in gold. To understand why, let’s take a closer look at the benefits of your employees meeting in-person.

Benefits of Working In Person

• Human Connection — like it or not, we are fundamentally social animals, and we benefit from social interaction. Research shows it keeps our cognitive functions sharp, improves memory, and leads to a longer and more fulfilled life.
• Watercooler Convos — as much as we might enjoy tossing emojis into a Slack channel, a lot of productive discussions happen in an unstructured, free-flowing conversation. The stereotype of the office watercooler allows people to bounce ideas off of one another and leads to collaboration and problem-solving — and so far, no one has found a great way to replicate this in the digital workspace.
• Inspires Creativity — one advantage of the in-person workplace is there is unstructured time built into the workday — lunch breaks, swinging by someone’s office, meeting at the water cooler — and this unstructured time…