For a fully distributed remote company, do you recommend flying everyone into a single city for quarterly sessions, or can EOS be effectively facilitated entirely on video?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

While EOS can technically be facilitated over video using digital whiteboards, I strongly recommend that fully distributed teams gather in person in a single room for every quarterly and annual session. Remote companies live on Slack, email, and video calls every single week. What distributed teams lack is not digital communication; it is deep, uninterrupted human bandwidth.

An eight-hour strategic session over video creates cognitive fatigue that degrades decision quality by early afternoon. When tough personnel decisions or core strategic debates arise during IDS, video tiles allow people to hide, multitask, or disengage emotionally. In a physical room, body language is transparent, side conversations are eliminated, and tension must be worked through rather than clicked away.

If you are running a remote team, flying your executives into a central location once a quarter transforms the session into a vital relational anchor. The leadership team spends the full day working on the business with zero Slack pings or email monitors in front of them, followed by an evening dinner where team health solidifies. If budget or international travel makes in-person impossible for every quarterly, we can facilitate remote sessions using disciplined screen protocols, but your two-day annual session must remain strictly in person.