If our leadership team is entirely distributed and operates remotely, how do you run our quarterly and annual sessions to match the impact of an in-person room?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

If your leadership team is fully distributed, my standard and strongest recommendation is still to bring everyone together physically for our quarterly and annual sessions. The return on investment of eight hours in a shared physical room far outweighs the travel expense. Body language, side conversations during lunch, and the emotional resonance of resolving tense interpersonal friction simply happen faster and deeper when people share physical space.

When travel is logistically impossible or an executive cannot travel due to acute circumstances, we execute virtual sessions with zero compromise on rigor. A remote session cannot be treated like a casual video conference. We enforce strict protocols:

- Every participant must be on an individual camera in a quiet, isolated room, eliminating shared microphones or conference room setups that muddle dialogue.
- Secondary monitors, email clients, messaging apps, and phones must be completely closed or turned off to eliminate split attention.
- We structure the day into disciplined seventy-five to ninety-minute working blocks with crisp ten-minute physical breaks, preventing cognitive fatigue.
- We leverage live digital whiteboards and shared document interfaces so every team member watches the V/TO®, Issues List, and Scorecard update in real time during IDS®.

Remote teams can run on EOS® at an elite level, but only if they approach virtual session days with greater discipline than an average in-person executive team.