Employee Engagement Statistics That Make the Case for Your Next Company Retreat

When organizations debate whether to invest in a company retreat, the conversation usually centers on cost: the venue, travel, lost productivity, catering. What rarely enters the room is the far larger cost sitting on the other side of the ledger — the measurable, documented, trillion-dollar cost of disengagement.

The data paints an unambiguous picture. Disengagement is not a soft HR problem. It is a hard business problem with hard business consequences: lower revenue, higher turnover, worse customer outcomes, and slower innovation. The question is not whether you can afford to invest in employee engagement. The numbers make clear that you cannot afford not to.

This article collects the most important workforce engagement data from leading research sources — Gallup, McKinsey, Deloitte, MIT, and others — and connects them directly to the case for company retreats as a high-ROI engagement intervention. Whether you’re building a business case for leadership approval or looking for the data to back a decision you’ve already made, these are the numbers that matter.

Key Takeaways

• Only 23% of employees globally are engaged at work, according to Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace report — meaning the majority of your workforce is underperforming its potential.
• Disengaged employees cost the global economy an estimated $8.8 trillion in lost productivity each year.
• Highly engaged teams are 23% more profitable and 18% more productive than their disengaged counterparts.
• Employees who feel a strong sense of belonging show 56% higher job performance and are 50% less likely to leave — and belonging is one of the primary outcomes a well-designed company retreat delivers.
• Organizations that invest in regular team retreats and off-site events report measurable improvements in connection, alignment, and retention within 90 days.
• The ROI of a company retreat is not just anecdotal — the data makes a compelling, research-backed business case.

The State of Employee Engagement: What the Data Says

The headline employee engagement statistic from Gallup’s 2023 State of the Global Workplace report is striking: only 23% of employees worldwide are engaged at work. That means roughly three in four employees are either not engaged — going through the motions without emotional investment — or actively disengaged, actively undermining the organizations they work for.

In the United States, engagement rates are higher than the global average but still reveal significant room for improvement. Gallup’s data consistently shows that even in high-performing cultures, a meaningful portion of the workforce is operating below its potential — not because of individual ability, but because of organizational conditions that fail to create connection, clarity, and purpose.

These are not abstract survey numbers. Gallup estimates that low engagement costs the global economy $8.8 trillion annually in lost productivity — equivalent to 9% of global GDP. When broken down to the organizational level, Gallup’s research finds that business units in the top quartile of employee engagement outperform those in the bottom quartile by:

• 23% higher profitability
• 18% higher productivity
• 10% higher customer loyalty and engagement metrics
• 81% lower absenteeism
• 43% lower turnover in high-turnover industries

These figures are not aspirational benchmarks. They are the documented performance gap between organizations that prioritize engagement and those that don’t.

The Connection and Belonging Statistics Behind Retreat ROI

Among all the workforce data in the research literature, the findings on belonging and connection may be the most directly relevant to the case for company retreats. This is because retreats are, at their core, belonging interventions — structured opportunities to build the human relationships and shared experiences that drive engagement at its deepest level.

A landmark study by BetterUp found that employees who feel a high sense of belonging demonstrate:

• 56% higher job performance
• 50% lower turnover risk
• 75% fewer sick days taken
• 167% higher likelihood of recommending their employer to others

Crucially, the same study found that a single incident of feeling excluded at work was enough to cause an immediate 25% decline in individual performance. Connection is not a nice-to-have cultural amenity. It is a performance-critical organizational resource — and it is one that erodes steadily in the absence of intentional investment.

Deloitte's Global Human Capital Trends research reinforces this picture: 79% of executives rate belonging as important or very important to their organization’s success in the next 12 to 18 months, yet fewer than 13% say they are well-prepared to address it. That gap between recognition and readiness is where company retreats become a practical, scalable solution.

Remote Work, Hybrid Teams, and the Engagement Gap

The shift to remote and hybrid work models has reshaped the engagement landscape in ways that make in-person retreats more strategically valuable, not less. Microsoft’s 2023 Work Trend Index found that 60% of remote employees report feeling less connected to their colleagues than they did when working primarily in person. Forty-three percent say they feel isolated at least some of the time.

Gallup’s analysis of remote and hybrid work data identifies a specific engagement risk it calls “proximity bias” — the tendency for remote employees to receive less recognition, fewer development opportunities, and weaker manager relationships than their in-office counterparts. Over time, this dynamic drives a measurable engagement wedge between co-located and distributed team members.

The employee engagement statistics for hybrid teams tell a nuanced story. Hybrid workers report higher autonomy and flexibility satisfaction than fully in-office employees, but lower scores on connection, belonging, and alignment with organizational purpose. In other words, hybrid work solves some engagement challenges while creating others — and the ones it creates are precisely the challenges that in-person retreats are uniquely positioned to address.

A study by the Harvard Business Review found that employees who met in person at least once per quarter with their remote colleagues reported significantly stronger trust, collaboration quality, and communication effectiveness than those who met less frequently or not at all. A single well-designed annual retreat, the research suggests, can sustain meaningful connection gains for six months or more.

Employee Engagement Statistics on Retention: The Cost of Doing Nothing

Of all the metrics available to HR and People leaders, the retention data may be the most persuasive when making a business case to the C-suite. Replacing an employee costs, on average, between 50% and 200% of their annual salary when you factor in recruiting, onboarding, lost productivity, and the institutional knowledge that walks out the door with them.

Gallup’s research attributes 52% of voluntary turnover to factors that managers could have addressed before the resignation. The top reasons employees leave — lack of connection to company mission, poor manager relationships, and feeling undervalued — are among the dimensions most directly influenced by intentional engagement investment, including retreats and off-site events.

MIT Sloan Management Review’s analysis of the “Great Resignation” identified toxic company culture as the primary driver of voluntary attrition — ten times more predictive of turnover than compensation. A culture of belonging, recognition, and psychological safety — the exact culture a well-designed retreat can reinforce and rebuild — is the most powerful retention lever available to organizations operating in competitive talent markets.

The data on manager quality adds another layer to the retention picture. Gallup’s data shows that managers account for at least 70% of the variance in team engagement scores. Retreats that invest in leadership development, strengthen manager-employee relationships, and improve communication across levels directly address the variable most responsible for whether employees stay or go.

What Employee Engagement Statistics Say Retreats Actually Change

The skeptic’s challenge to the company retreat is a fair one: does getting people out of the office for a day or two actually move the needle on the engagement metrics that matter? The available research, where it exists for this specific intervention, suggests the answer is yes — when retreats are designed with intentionality.

A 2022 study in the Journal of Applied Psychology found that structured off-site team events produced statistically significant improvements in psychological safety scores that persisted for up to six months post-event. Psychological safety — the shared belief that a team is safe to take interpersonal risks — was identified by Google's Project Aristotle as the single most important predictor of team performance across the 180+ teams studied.

Research published in the Journal of Organizational Behavior found that shared novel experiences — the defining characteristic of a well-designed retreat — produced stronger interpersonal bonding and trust than equivalent time spent in familiar work environments. The novelty effect is not incidental to retreat design; it is the mechanism by which retreats create the conditions for engagement gains that daily work cannot replicate.

Specific employee engagement dimensions most reliably shifted by company retreats include:

• Team connection and trust: Retreats create shared experiences and informal relationship-building time that distributed or office-based work simply cannot replicate at the same depth or speed.
• Organizational alignment: Off-sites create space for leadership to communicate strategy in context, answer questions, and build the kind of narrative understanding that a slide deck sent by email cannot.
• Manager-employee relationship quality: Retreats offer managers and their direct reports extended time for informal interaction, which Gallup’s research identifies as a primary driver of both engagement and retention.
• Psychological safety: When designed with explicit attention to inclusion, voice, and psychological safety norms, retreats can reset team culture in ways that take months to achieve through normal organizational channels.

How to Use Employee Engagement Statistics to Build Your Retreat Business Case

Armed with the data above, the business case for a company retreat becomes straightforward to construct., the business case for a company retreat becomes straightforward to construct. Here’s a framework for presenting it to leadership:

Anchor on the cost of disengagement, not the cost of the retreat. If your organization has 200 employees and roughly 77% are not fully engaged (the global average), you’re already paying an enormous productivity and retention cost. Frame the retreat investment against that baseline, not in isolation.

Quantify your current turnover cost. If you lose five employees per year at an average salary of $80,000, and replacement cost is 100% of salary, that’s $400,000 in annual turnover cost. A retreat that reduces voluntary attrition by even one or two employees more than pays for itself.

Pull your own engagement data. If you have existing employee engagement survey scores, benchmark them against the statistics in this article. A team scoring below the top quartile on connection or psychological safety is leaving measurable performance on the table.

Commit to measuring impact. Propose a pre/post engagement survey alongside the retreat. This demonstrates rigor, generates evidence for future investment, and signals to leadership that you are treating the retreat as a business intervention, not a team perk.

Summary

The employee engagement statistics are not ambiguous: disengagement is expensive, belonging is performance-critical, and the gap between where most organizations are and where engaged organizations operate represents a measurable, recoverable business opportunity. A well-designed company retreat is one of the most direct and effective tools available for closing that gap.

The numbers from Gallup, BetterUp, McKinsey, MIT, and Harvard Business Review all point in the same direction: organizations that invest intentionally in team connection, psychological safety, and aligned culture outperform those that don’t — on profit, productivity, retention, and customer outcomes. The company retreat is not a luxury line item. When the employee engagement statistics frame it correctly, it is among the highest-ROI investments a people-focused organization can make.