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Offsite? Retreat? Conference? Hang?

What do you call it when your remote company gets together to work in person for a week?

The whole Medium team gets together twice a year at an in-person location to work, play, celebrate our successes, and plan for the future. It’s a thing many companies have embraced in our new remote/hybrid work world. So what do we call these gatherings? At Medium we defaulted to “offsite” but we polled our team members and asked “What should we call this? ‘Offsite’ is a confusing word because they’re actually ON site… and we don’t have a ‘site’ to begin with… hmm. Should we rename this whole thing?” Here are a few highlights from our team’s written responses:

“No, ‘offsites’ makes sense to me!”

“Call them ‘retreats’—it enforces the feeling of team bonding as a top priority/goal.”

“It’s funny to me, but offsite is fine and has become engrained. I would say stick with it, though it doesn’t make sense and that’s okay!”

“‘Retreat’ is correct. But ‘gathering’ has more feels. As in, ‘a Median gathering.’”

“Retreat feels like we’re not working, when we actually do so much work and get so much done.”

“Offsite makes sense. ‘On site’ is your house. Where you work. Offsite still tracks in my opinion. I hate “onsite” sorry lol. I would accept ‘retreat’ but that has always had a goofy association in my mind with wellness and vacation and I’ve never really loved when companies have used the word ‘retreat.’”

So far our poll’s results show a winning 56.6% of us are sticking with “Offsites” for now, but as you can imagine, the Medium team loves words and is curious to know if there are more out there that may more accurately describe this growing phenomenon. If you have any ideas, leave them in the comments!