Struggling to Get People Together in the Office? Enter: a New Era of Corporate Events 

Today’s corporate events happen far more often than in the past, and they’re smaller, closer and mostly kept to internal staff. 

Every leader knows that connection is crucial to culture and teams. But getting those personal interactions can be tricky with today’s era of hybrid work.

Enter: the rise of corporate events. In the world of endless Zoom calls and disparate in-office interactions, events are increasingly popular among employees. As many as 42% of employees attended at least one event in 2023, according to research by Nicholas Bloom, a Stanford University economics professor who focuses on business management. 

“Events have clearly taken off,” says Bloom. “It’s a huge theme, and I’ve spoken to several hundreds of managers and executives and board members. And I do this at least once a day.”

A Way to Drive Connection and Combat Loneliness 

The trend is driven by the obvious: leaders need some way to maintain community and connection among employees. The value of the office is in the people, not the place, writes Chris Capossela, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer in Harvard Business Review. 

Capossela’s research found that 85% of employees would be motivated to go into the office to rebuild team bonds and about the same amount, 84%, would go to the office if they could socialize with coworkers.

Since the pandemic, people have consistently said they felt disconnected from their work colleagues. In fact, Gallup’s 2024 Global Workplace Report found that one in five people feel lonely at work and 20% say they experience loneliness daily. Remote employees are more likely to feel lonely than those who work on-site.

In recent years, employers have acknowledged this problem and reconfigured the office to be more of a gathering space for culture, mentorship and professional development. Now, events have become the next layer to creating that bonding and connection.

Companies aren’t just designing with this in mind. They are taking it a step further by adding flexible spaces for internal and external events. In Los Angeles, PR firm Edelman opted for a ground-level café instead of a traditional reception area, offering staff a place to work during the day and gather for informal meetings and breaks.

For events, there is a built-in stage, hidden storage for chairs, and the coffee counter can easily become a bar. The café also offers clients, many who are influencers, a place for content creation, truly thinking outside of the box of what a corporate collaboration space can be. 

“Relationships synergize more naturally in person,” says Todd Heiser, principal and managing director of architecture firm Gensler, which designed the Edelman space. 

A Different Kind of Corporate Event 

The idea of an off-site retreat was popular back in the 1990s where leaders might take team members to outside locations for tree ropes courses and trust falls and the like and then talk about their big futures. But it didn’t happen very often. 

Today, events and retreats are becoming far more common. But they look a lot different.

Those events are not necessarily thousand-people mixers and international pow-wow events. Two-thirds of events have 50 or fewer people attending, according to Bloom’s research. And they tend to be local and short, just half-day events. “Three-quarters of them last less than a day and require one hour or less of travel,” says Bloom. 

This is due to many employers being far more conscious about employees’ time and avoiding overnight trips and long travel. They’re trying to minimize the time they must spend away from their personal lives and their families, Bloom says. 

Events Instead of More Days in the Office?

In some cases, these events are altering the hybrid work schedule. So instead of asking people to come into the office three days a week, they may ask for one or two days a week but then gather together for an event every other month. 

While in the past, events might include outside partners, suppliers or clients, they are very internally focused today, says Bloom.  

The Right Space for Events

Designers have already been moving toward creating workspaces that are ideal for socialization, team building, and collaboration and they’re making targeted investments in changing what their office looks like. That usually comes in the form of more collaboration space, more amenity spaces to meet and socialize, according to a recent report by real estate giant CBRE.  

Yet some companies want to get their employees out of office, and they’re booking hotel conference rooms or a WeWork space for a gathering. “I’ve heard about people doing it in a greenhouse, in a former massive, kind of stately home, or former industrial buildings, a factory with old equipment around, but has lots of high, open ceilings,” says Bloom.

The activities and events may look different today than they did in years past, but that need for bonding and connection has never diminished. By fueling that basic need for belonging, companies can drive high-performing teams that are more productive, creative and collaborative. And they’re less susceptible to burnout. It’s no surprise then, that company leaders are sending out the invites.