Why Gathering Together Is Not a Perk. It Is a Need.

Remote work changed how we operate. But the psychology of human belonging did not change with it. Here is what the research says about company events, team culture, and why a Christmas party matters more than most leaders think.

Published by EliteSource  |  Workplace Culture & Events  |  9 min read

Picture the last time your team was genuinely all in the same room. Not a video call where three people forgot to unmute and someone's dog made an appearance. An actual room, with food on the table, background noise, and conversations that drifted pleasantly off-agenda. Think about how that felt, and whether your team has had that experience recently.

For a significant number of organisations across Australia and New Zealand, the honest answer is that it has been a while. The shift toward hybrid and fully remote working, which accelerated dramatically after 2020, gave employees flexibility they had wanted for years. The commute shortened or disappeared. The school run became manageable. The ability to focus for long, uninterrupted stretches became, for many, genuinely better than the open-plan office had ever been.

All of that is real. And none of it is the whole story.

The Paradox Nobody Warned Us About

Here is something that the research keeps finding, and that organisations keep underestimating. Remote workers are, in many measurable ways, more connected than their in-office counterparts ever were. They send more messages. They attend more digital meetings. They are reachable for longer hours, across more channels, than any previous generation of employees. The infrastructure of connection has never been more sophisticated.

And yet they are lonelier.

A 2024 study drawing on data from 87,317 employed adults found that workers who worked remotely three to four days per week had 16 percent higher odds of reporting significant loneliness compared to those who did not work remotely at all. A separate meta-analysis of 108 studies, published in 2024, confirmed that professional isolation operates as a distinct psychological pathway through which remote work affects employee wellbeing and performance. Not a side effect. A pathway. A documented mechanism through which something goes wrong quietly, over time, even as the metrics around productivity hold steady.

The explanation is less counterintuitive than it sounds. There is a meaningful difference between being in contact with people and feeling like you belong to something. Scheduling a meeting communicates efficiency. Sitting next to someone at lunch communicates something harder to quantify but considerably more important. The small, incidental, unremarkable moments of shared physical space are not nice-to-haves layered on top of the real work. According to a growing body of research in organisational psychology, they are part of how trust is built, how relationships form, and how people come to feel that their work means something to them personally, not just professionally.

"There is a meaningful difference between being in contact with people and feeling like you belong to something."

What the Numbers Say About Belonging and Business

The 2024 Gallup State of the Workplace report found that one in five employees worldwide feel lonely at work. This is not a finding from the depths of a pandemic lockdown. It is a 2024 measurement, taken years into the normalisation of hybrid work, at a point when most organisations believed the adjustment period was behind them. Employee engagement in the United States reached its lowest point in a decade in 2024, at 31 percent. Globally, it sat at 23 percent. In practical terms, that means roughly three in every four employees in the world are going through the motions rather than genuinely contributing.

The retention data is equally stark. Research from 2024 found that employees with a strong sense of belonging are five times more likely to remain with their organisation. An earlier study by BetterUp found that employees with high belonging took 75 percent fewer sick days and had a 56 percent lower risk of leaving. These are not soft, difficult-to-measure outcomes. They are the kind of numbers that show up directly in recruitment costs, productivity losses, and the often-invisible drag of disengaged teams on everything around them.

Maslow Was Talking About the Work Christmas Party All Along

Abraham Maslow published his hierarchy of human needs in 1943, and it has held up considerably well. The framework describes a pyramid of requirements: physiological needs at the base, then safety, then love and belonging, then esteem, and finally self-actualisation at the top. The insight that matters for organisations is not the pyramid itself but the order. People cannot reach their potential, cannot do their most creative and committed work, without first having their needs for belonging and social connection met.

A well-paid remote employee, working in a comfortable home office, with an excellent laptop and a genuinely interesting set of tasks, can still be stuck at the third level of that pyramid with nothing bridging the gap. The salary addresses physiological needs. The stability of the role addresses safety. But the love and belonging layer, which in a traditional workplace is filled quietly by a hundred small daily moments of human contact, can go chronically unmet in a distributed team without anyone quite identifying why.

That is where company events come in. Not as entertainment, and not as a reward for good performance, but as an intentional act of addressing a genuine human need that the working structure has inadvertently removed.

Not Everyone Feels This Way, and That Matters Too

It would be dishonest not to acknowledge this. Some people thrive in remote environments. Introverts who found the open-plan office genuinely draining, parents with demanding family schedules, employees in regional areas who previously faced long commutes, and people managing health conditions that made daily office attendance difficult are often genuinely better served by remote working. For this group, the isolation literature simply does not apply in the same way. They have rich social lives outside work, and they do not require the office to be their primary source of human connection.

This makes it more important, not less important, to think carefully about what company events actually do. An annual retreat or a Christmas party is not asking anyone to abandon their preferred working style. It is offering something different: a bounded, intentional moment of collective presence that exists outside the rhythms of daily work. The person who is perfectly content working from home can still value the annual dinner. The value of gathering together is not that it replicates the office. It is that it does something the office could not always do either, which is create a shared experience that people carry with them.

The Christmas Party Is Not Trivial

It has become fashionable in some quarters to be dismissive about company social events. The end-of-year function, the team retreat, the Friday afternoon get-together, the offsite that everyone attends slightly reluctantly and leaves having unexpectedly enjoyed. These are sometimes framed as expensive distractions from real work, or as morale-boosting theatre that does not change anything meaningful about how a team actually functions.

The research does not support that view.

What organisational psychology consistently finds is that the informal interactions that happen around and between the structured parts of company events are among the most productive relational moments a team will have all year. The conversation that happens during the walk to dinner, or the exchange at the end of a team retreat when the formal activities are over and a few people linger, or the laugh that occurs during the speeches at the Christmas party and becomes a reference point for months afterwards. These moments build what researchers call psychological safety, which is the degree to which people feel comfortable being themselves, raising concerns, and taking creative risks within their team. Teams with high psychological safety consistently outperform those without it.

A gathering does not build that safety directly. But it creates the conditions for it to grow in ways that scheduled weekly check-ins and productivity software simply cannot replicate.

"The informal interactions that happen around company events are among the most productive relational moments a team will have all year."

Retreats and Offsites: When the Change of Scene Is the Point

There is something specific that happens when people are taken out of their usual context and placed somewhere new together. The ordinary hierarchy of the office softens slightly. The person who is usually quiet in meetings says something unexpected over breakfast. The manager who can seem distant in a Zoom grid becomes recognisably human when they are trying to navigate an unfamiliar hiking trail with everyone else.

Corporate retreats and leadership offsites work partly because of the content and partly because of the context. The workshops matter. So does the fact that people ate dinner together the night before. Research on social bonding consistently shows that shared experiences, particularly those that involve mild novelty or mild challenge, accelerate the development of trust and rapport between people. The brain processes shared unfamiliar experiences differently from routine ones, and the connections formed in those moments tend to be more durable.

For distributed or hybrid teams, the annual retreat may be the primary opportunity their members have to develop the kind of rapport that makes day-to-day collaboration feel effortless rather than effortful. That is a significant function to ask of a two-day event. But it is also an achievable one, provided the event is thoughtfully planned rather than perfunctorily executed.

What Good Looks Like in Practice

The most effective company events share a few qualities that are worth naming because they are not always intuitive when the planning starts.

They have enough unstructured time. The scheduled activities create the frame, but the value often lives in the gaps. Planning every hour removes the space for the conversations that nobody expected to have.

They are genuinely inclusive in their design, not just their invitation list. An event built around activities that only some employees enjoy, or that implicitly exclude people with families, mobility considerations, or dietary requirements, communicates something about belonging by accident. The intention is inclusion. The execution sometimes says otherwise.

They are consistent rather than sporadic. A team that gathers once every three years is not experiencing the cumulative benefit of regular connection. The organisations that see the clearest relationship between events and culture are the ones that treat gathering as a rhythm rather than an occasion.

And they are proportionate. A small company with a tight budget does not need a resort offsite to achieve the thing that matters. A long team lunch at a restaurant everyone will enjoy, or an afternoon activity followed by dinner, can accomplish most of what a much larger event aims for. The scale matters less than the intention and the execution.

A Note to Leaders Who Are on the Fence

If you are reading this as a leader or an HR professional weighing up whether to invest in a team event this year, here is the most useful way to think about it. You are not buying entertainment. You are investing in the social infrastructure that makes the work your team does together more likely to succeed.

The research on belonging, engagement, and retention is consistent enough now that the question is not really whether connection matters. It does. The question is what your organisation is doing, deliberately and concretely, to create conditions for it. A flexible working policy creates autonomy. A team event creates shared experience. Both matter, and they are not substitutes for each other.

Your employees who genuinely love remote work and would not change it for anything may still remember the dinner you organised for three years. The colleagues who worry quietly that nobody really knows them may find that an afternoon away from their desks with the people they work alongside every day shifts something that no number of one-on-one check-ins managed to shift.

It does not have to be grand. It just has to happen.