Why Fully Remote Companies Still Meet in Person

A fully remote company runs on written communication, asynchronous work and clear ownership. People in Lisbon, Montreal and Singapore can make progress without ever sharing a room, and that is the real advantage of the model. It also means that the informal exchanges which happen by the coffee machine in an office do not happen by default.

Most remote teams still need some moments of physical presence. Trust is easier to build face to face, and certain conversations, such as a difficult reorganisation or the first discussion between two new colleagues, go faster when people are in the same place. Remote-first companies usually treat in-person time as a deliberate investment rather than a permanent office.

For an organiser, the question is therefore not whether to meet, but what the meeting is for. A clear purpose, such as onboarding a cohort, agreeing a yearly plan or getting two product teams to work together, decides the length, the venue and the programme.

Four needs come up again and again in the way distributed companies describe their gatherings. The first is onboarding: a new hire who has met the team in person usually knows who to ask, which shortens the first months. The second is decision-making on topics that are slow to settle in writing, such as strategy, priorities or the way two functions share responsibility.

The third is relationships across teams. Engineers and sales colleagues who have shared a dinner tend to write to each other more directly afterwards. The fourth is culture: rituals, shared stories and a sense of belonging are hard to maintain on video alone.

These are observations of how distributed companies explain their own practice, not measured results. Their handbooks describe in-person time as a way to complement remote work, not to replace it. A well-designed week therefore protects the asynchronous habits that make the company work the rest of the year.

There is no industry standard, and no reliable survey gives a frequency for fully remote companies. What can be verified is how some well-known remote-first companies describe their own practice. GitLab's handbook covers in-person events, including its Contribute and Summit gatherings, and states that a Summit typically takes place over one week. Automattic's own field guide to meetups describes one company-wide Grand Meetup a year, supplemented by smaller gatherings of teams and regions.

From these examples, the pattern is a yearly whole-company gathering, combined with team-level meetings once or twice a year and smaller local meetups when people happen to be in the same city. Companies that are still growing often add an onboarding gathering for each new cohort.

For a planner, the practical point is that frequency depends on headcount, budget and how much the company relies on written work. Publish the calendar early so that people can plan their families, time zones and travel with confidence.

The most common mistake is to plan the in-person week as an incentive trip, with long free afternoons and little shared work. Participants then return with a good memory and no decisions. A better structure keeps the mornings for working sessions, with a clear output for each one, and reserves the evenings for dinners and informal time.

Pre-work matters as much as the programme. Circulate the agenda, the decisions to be taken and the reading at least two weeks ahead, so that people arrive prepared. Assign a facilitator for each session and a note-taker, and close the week with a short list of commitments that someone owns.

Plan the venue for working, not only for atmosphere. Meeting rooms with good daylight, reliable connectivity for hybrid participants and a quiet space for breakouts are more useful than a grand hall that is hard to divide. A conference hotel in a city centre or a seminar estate in the countryside can both work, provided the rooms match the format.

For a distributed team, France is a practical choice when participants come from several continents, because Paris has long-haul connections and the rest of the country is reachable by train. Book three to six months ahead for a group of several dozen people, since meeting rooms, coaches and restaurants fill up quickly in spring and autumn. Check French public holidays and the days of planned strikes, which can disrupt trains and flights.

Schedule the week in a window that suits the whole team. A common solution is to hold the working sessions during the European afternoon, which overlaps with the morning on the American west coast, and to give Asia-Pacific colleagues an early start or a recorded replay. Put the time zones on the agenda, not in a footnote.

Finally, ask for three written quotes that break down the venue, accommodation, meals, transfers and audiovisual equipment, and read the cancellation terms. Indicative budgets are useful for a first comparison, but the final figure depends on the dates, the number of rooms and the level of service.