Global Teams Should Have Office Visits, Not Offsites

Article originally posted on Harvard Business Review

Global teams work better when members get to know one another. Team members give their colleagues the benefit of the doubt, pick up the phone when issues arise, and are generally more effective at collaborating. But given tight travel budgets, the disruption to work and family, and the enormous carbon footprint associated with global travel, it’s not always feasible to give team members the opportunity to meet face-to-face. You have to be strategic about when and how your team gets together.

Given that, many leaders opt to have an offsite where a project team meets early in the project to establish strong relationships. While offsites are well-intentioned and useful, my research in several studies shows that the best use of precious travel funds for global teams is actually to invest in site visits.

In fact, in the data of one study, conducted with Mark Mortensen, we found that offsites had few lasting effects, while site visits, where team members went to the location of their distant collaborators and worked side by side, learning about one another and how they approached their work, improved collaboration over the long haul.

How are site visits better?

In a study I conducted with Catherine Cramton, we found that site visits were superior in three ways. First, we saw that people discussed work more. Distant collaborators often use meetings, email, chat, and other technology to talk about their work, but during site visits we saw constant, quick discussions, with colleagues asking and answering questions in the moment as they were engrossed in joint work. As a result, their approaches and thought processes were more transparent, and they had a deeper understanding of one another’s work styles and capabilities.

Second, during site visits we noticed that people disclosed more personal information and socialized more. This also happens during offsites, but during site visits there is more opportunity for one-on-one interaction with colleagues, such as a lunch or a quick coffee. People also socialized outside of work. Hosts might take visitors to their home for a meal or to a sporting event, conveying valuable information about the local culture and peoples’ personal lives. After site visits, we found that colleagues had a much better sense of the lives that people lead, what’s important to them, and how to collaborate.

Third, visitors were like anthropologists, observing the native behaviors of their collaborators within the social context in which they resided. A huge advantage of site visits, for example, was that distant colleagues got a vivid sense of how their teammates were seen by others in the local context. When they spoke, did others listen attentively or roll their eyes? Whom did locals ask for advice? These cues were vital for understanding how people fit into the social fabric of the host site, their level of influence, and their roles. Through observation, colleagues also got a sense of the personality of their collaborators. In one case, we were told by an Indian developer about the difficulty he was having with his German colleague, who seemed not to like or respect him. But, he said, after seeing how his German colleague interacted with his countrymen during a site visit, he understood that it wasn’t anything personal; it was just his colleague’s personality. Offsites in general tend to be focused less on working side by side to complete day-to-day work, so they therefore lack many of these same benefits.

Cramton and I found that coworkers who had spent time together during a site visit responded more quickly because they were less anxious about inadvertently causing offense or creating a misunderstanding. They also talked more often after site visits than they had before. They called one another on the phone, were more comfortable contacting each other outside of work hours, and talked for longer when they connected. They discussed more difficult topics (which they’d often avoided before) and shared more personal information. These findings were echoed in a not-yet-published study I conducted with Niina Nurmi in a multinational engineering company. We found that site visits that facilitated learning about coworkers’ work practices, communication styles, and personalities contributed to more interpersonal closeness and, in turn, higher levels of collaboration effectiveness and responsiveness. We even saw higher levels of job satisfaction as a result of the visits.

In a study of workers in a global chemical company, Tsedal Neeley and Mark Mortensen found that not only did site visits help people gain more knowledge about one another, but they also helped visitors acquire reflected knowledge, meaning they better understood their own site as viewed by their distant coworkers. For example, if you’re in Germany working with team members in India, you might learn during a site visit that Indian team members see German colleagues as brusque, but you also gain a rich experience of the open, friendly interactions that take place in the India office. As a result, it begins to make more sense that they would interpret Germans’ responses as brusque, so you now have a better understanding of how your behaviors in Germany are viewed by your team members in India. Neeley and Mortensen found that reflected knowledge led to higher levels of trust and enhanced collaboration.

So who should travel and to where and how often?

These findings suggest several things for allocating scarce travel budgets. First, we found that it’s important that both leaders and team members make the trip. It need not be everyone on a team, and they need not travel en masse (in fact, it’s probably better if they don’t), but a team member in each location should be given the opportunity to understand the distant location and coworkers. So if you’ve got a team that spans three locations, it’s ideal if coworkers from each of those locations travel to the other two. We often see that organizations emphasize travel to headquarters. That leads to a deeper understanding of how things work at the home office but doesn’t help those at headquarters to understand the distant sites, which is also crucial to global collaboration. How often to visit is a more complex question, and there isn’t yet research that offers a definitive answer. From my research with Catherine Cramton, I would posit that travel to each location every 9–12 months is adequate, but on particularly volatile projects or when team membership turns over rapidly, more frequent travel may be required.

In the end, what matters is that coworkers have a personal connection and not be reticent to reach out to their distant colleagues, especially when problems arise. One caveat is that the activities described above — e.g., working together, observing one another, etc. — are essential. When visitors are not hosted well, don’t sit near their coworkers at the distant site, and don’t feel welcome, tensions can mount and site visits can go wrong. Well-orchestrated site visits, however, go a long way toward creating a foundation on which teams can build.