“Measure what is measurable, and make measurable what is not so.”

– Galileo Galilei

Galileo wasn’t speaking about company off-sites, but his advice applies just the same. In business, we’re trained to track what matters. Whether it’s churn rate, customer lifetime value, or employee acquisition cost—if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it. And if you can’t manage it, how do you justify investing in it?

Company retreats often fall into the “feels right, hard to quantify” category. Everyone enjoys them, people come back energized, Slack lights up with thank-you notes… but when budget season rolls around, sentiment isn’t enough. This is where ROI matters—not just as a finance tool, but as a way to think clearly. It forces us to ask: what outcomes are we hoping for, and how will we know if we achieved them?

Take any high-performing team initiative—say, a new CRM rollout or a DEI training program. Would you greenlight it without understanding the expected return? Probably not. Retreats should be no different. If we treat them as strategic investments, not perks, then building a model to evaluate their impact isn’t just helpful—it’s essential. Not to oversimplify the value of human connection, but to make sure we’re creating the conditions to replicate it when it works.

Business isn’t an exact science—if it were, we’d all be trillionaires by now, sipping piña coladas on our private islands while our spreadsheets made perfect predictions. But in the real world, we work with assumptions. Good ones. Thoughtful ones. And as long as we’re transparent about them, they help us move from gut feeling to informed decision.

Assumption 1: The Composition of Your Team Matters‍

The potential return on investment from a retreat varies significantly depending on who you're investing in. A company of mostly junior developers and support staff will naturally see a different impact than a leadership-heavy team of senior engineers, middle managers, or C-levels. Why? Because the cost of replacing, retaining, or motivating more experienced employees is much higher—so even small improvements in retention or performance have a greater financial effect.

Think of it like compound interest: the more valuable the contributor, the bigger the return from even slight gains in clarity, alignment, or motivation. Our calculator factors this in by applying a range to every ROI estimate, depending on the seniority mix of your team. It's not about saying one group is more worthy than another—it’s about recognizing the different weight their roles carry in the company’s overall performance and costs.

Assumption 2: Cost of Replacing and Training an Employee‍

This is one of the most well-documented costs in HR—and the numbers are staggering. Our model draws on conservative estimates from multiple online sources, including a summary by PeopleKeep:

• Entry-level employees: 30%–50% of annual salary
• Mid-level employees: 125%–150% of annual salary
• C-level employees: 200%–300% of annual salary (while the average cited is 213%, we believe this underestimates true impact)

These estimates account for:

• Hiring (advertising, interviewing, screening)
• Onboarding (training, time investment)
• Lost productivity (can take 1–2 years to ramp up)
• Lost engagement among remaining staff
• Service errors or customer impact
• Training investments lost
• Institutional knowledge lost
• Cultural disruptions

Source: PeopleKeep - The Real Cost of Losing an Employee

Assumption 3: Retreats Improve Retention‍

Let’s talk culture. Atlassian, a pioneer in distributed work, has found that intentional team gatherings boost feelings of connection by 27%, with effects lasting 4–5 months. That’s one of the reasons they bring teams together around three times per year. While their workforce is spread across 10,000+ locations, 91% of Atlassians say in-person time is a key reason they stay with the company.

If we conservatively attribute just a portion of that retention and connection boost to well-run gatherings, it still adds up to a meaningful reduction in attrition—and a powerful argument for investing in thoughtfully designed retreats that foster belonging, alignment, and team momentum.

The ROI calculation for this portion is straightforward: Cost of attrition without intervention – improved attrition cost post-retreat (22% gain).

This figure isolates the impact of retreats alone and does not include the effect of other employee retention initiatives.

Source: Lessons Learned: 1,000 Days of Distributed at Atlassian

The Second Pillar: Boosting Productivity and Revenue

So far, we’ve focused on minimizing the negative impacts of turnover with the help of a company retreat. But there’s a second, equally powerful source of ROI—and that’s the positive side: increasing productivity and team output.

When people are more connected, happier, and aligned, they simply do better work. And retreats—done right—are a proven lever for achieving that. Let me quote Szokratesz Kosztopulosz, Events and Operations Manager at Toggl, a fully remote company known for its innovative time-tracking solutions: 

“For example, in my PeopleOps team, I don’t just have coworkers—I have friends who are willing to go the extra mile, not for Toggl, but for me personally. That’s because we’ve shared experiences: we’ve done barbecues, we’ve gone paintballing, we’ve stayed up late talking about life. So when I need help in a tough situation, I’ve got people who are ready to jump in because of that personal connection.”

These kinds of relationships can save businesses, increase productivity, and help companies thrive in ways that can’t always be measured by KPIs.

Research from Harvard Business Review and Gallup confirms what many leaders already feel intuitively: happy employees are 31% more productive, close 37% more sales, make 19% fewer errors, and contribute to a 21% boost in profitability. Even customer satisfaction improves by 10%.

Of course, not all of this comes down to a single offsite. But just as we did in the attrition calculation, in this calculator we attribute a conservative 25% of these performance gains to company retreats.

Why? Because unlike perks or digital check-ins, retreats break silos and create shared context that lasts for months. Many remote-first companies report that the benefits of a retreat typically last 3–6 months, which is why many aim to organize one company-wide and one department-level retreat per year.

And if you’re wondering whether a few days in the mountains can actually result in bottom-line improvement, here’s a story to consider: one of our clients got their introverted Lead Developer and hyper-energetic Head of Sales to share breakfast for the first time during a retreat. By the end of the day, they’d sketched out a cross-functional idea that later became a key product feature. ROI sometimes looks like a dashboard. Other times, it’s scrambled eggs and spontaneous genius.

Source: Trust and Flexibility Are Key to a Healthy Remote Work Culture

Final Assumption Recap & Calculation

Research shows that employee engagement correlates with a 21% increase in productivity across organizations (Gallup, 2012). While many HR practices contribute to that lift—such as better onboarding, leadership training, and recognition programs—a well-structured company retreat can serve as a powerful catalyst. It provides space for team alignment, trust-building, and strategic reflection, especially when supported by a thoughtfully designed agenda. To stay conservative, let’s assume that just 25% of that productivity gain can be attributed to a company-wide or departmental retreat. That gives us a 5.25% productivity increase attributable to the retreat alone.

Final Calculation

To estimate the ROI of a company retreat, we’ve focused on two key variables: reduction in attrition costs and increase in productivity. Based on available research and conservative assumptions, a well-executed retreat can contribute to:

• 25% of the improvement in retention, leading to a measurable reduction in turnover-related costs
• 25% of the productivity gains linked to broader employee engagement efforts—resulting in an estimated 5.25% uplift in productivity

Combined, the ROI is the sum of these two benefits. And that’s before factoring in less tangible but equally powerful effects like renewed motivation, cross-functional alignment, or team cohesion that pays off long after the retreat ends.

Final Thoughts

Why measure ROI at all? Because not all retreats are created equal. For the purposes of this calculator we assumed retreats contribute about 25% to the improvements in the variables we measured—but in reality, that impact can vary drastically. The agenda, the location, the balance of deep work vs. deep rest, the quality of facilitation, the airport distance, contingency planning, the swag—it all adds up.

Retreats aren’t just about food, accommodation, and team-building activities. They're strategic tools that can either become a game-changer or a missed opportunity. The difference lies in the how—and that’s where professional support makes a difference.

Partnering with a team like OnsiteHub, who obsess over the little things (so you don’t have to), is not a luxury—it’s part of maximizing ROI. Because when the right people gather in the right setting, with the right rhythm and purpose, the returns don’t just show up in spreadsheets—they show up in how your team shows up every day for the next 6–12 months.

If you’ve organized a retreat before, we’d love to hear your thoughts. What kind of ROI did you notice—whether in hard numbers or gut feeling? Which parameters did you use to measure the impact? Feel free to get in touch, share your insights, and let’s see if we could maximize those outcomes even further with our experience.

If you haven’t organized one yet, now’s a great time to explore the potential. Use our Retreat ROI calculator to dial in your own numbers, see what kind of value a retreat could unlock for your team, and reach out for a free proposal tailored to your goals.