Your Corporate Retreat Is On—But It’s Going To Be Weirder

At the last global sales meeting he attended before the pandemic, Jeff Chase went to Caesars Palace Las Vegas with about 60 colleagues, plus many of their spouses. In February, the biotech sales manager scouted a location for their next retreat, the Renaissance Aruba Resort & Casino, on Zoom. He never left his home in Indianapolis.

The woman organising the visit, travel entrepreneur Sarah Reuter, instructed him and 70 other attendees from the corporate world to locate sunglasses, a hairdryer and a refreshing drink in their homes. When the video panned to the Caribbean, they were asked to turn on their blow dryers to simulate a coastal breeze in their hair.

“Myself, no, I don’t have long hair, so I couldn’t do that part,” Mr Chase says. He still enjoyed the whirlwind tour enough that he’s planning to book one of Elevate Travel Co.’s virtual retreats for the company’s biannual sales meeting this fall.

Vaccines are now reaching many American workers, but some companies are in no rush to bring back the in-person off-site retreat. Instead, they’re turning to a host of increasingly elaborate virtual options, including murder mysteries staffed with actors, webcast trips to beach resorts and safaris, and purpose-built digital islands for multiday gatherings.

They’re not quite a substitute for the splashiest pre-pandemic corporate off-sites—where some participants might have slept in a castle or raced Fiat 500s around the Tuscan countryside—and usually require much less time and money. But they can still help employees bond and let off steam after months of working in unusual conditions, their participants say.

Sean Hoff, managing partner of Toronto-based corporate retreats company Moniker, says clients have started inquiring about in-person trips, but are holding off on deposits and flights until at least June. So he’s ploughing ahead creating a virtual island for an upcoming retreat of around 240 people for Webflow, a San Francisco website-design company.

Employees will participate in videogame-like team-building activities, including a boat-building race. They will inhabit customized avatars and gather in virtual locales like a “tiki hut” and a “treehouse” for small-group meetings.

“The HR team, for example, will be able to say, meet us over by the dock at 5 p.m.,” he says.

“I’m not going to lie, I was a little sceptical at first. But after a year of remote work I was so desperate to meet more of my colleagues that I just dived in,” says Allison Williams, an account manager based in St. Louis at Articulate, an e-learning software company. Articulate held a weeklong virtual retreat in early February with over 104 sessions, including virtual yoga and virtual escape rooms. Out of 291 employees across 10 time zones, 267 participated, according to a company spokesman.

Ms Williams taught a class to 45 colleagues on calligraphy and says she made a new friend, a “fellow pen nerd,” in the process. She also made new work friends through the happy hours at a virtual beach club staged on Remo, an online conferencing platform. There were various seating options, including a bar, fire pit, or surfboard-shaped table. Employees talked in small groups with whoever else gathered at each site.

Alejandra Sereleas, a vice president of accounting at the France-based videogame company Ubisoft, hired Moniker to stage a virtual, 1980s-themed murder mystery for her team of about 80 people last June.

The scenario is a wedding: The groom mysteriously drops dead after taking a sip of his drink. The participants meet eight suspects, all paid actors, and must interrogate them to solve the crime.

“We asked everyone to be in character and be creative, and sent them a wedding invitation before the event,” Ms Sereleas says. People embraced the theme, she says, donning side ponytails and chunky jewellery and setting ’80s-themed Zoom backgrounds like a Pac-Man maze.

After the murder mystery, which made its debut last May as Moniker’s first virtual offering, the company created a “lunar outpost disaster scenario” set in 2037. It was adapted from a NASA training exercise for aspiring astronauts. Participants act as mission control for a crew of colleagues whose exploratory trip to the moon’s surface has gone awry.

“We’ve kissed the Blarney stone in Ireland, had whiskey at the top of a mountain in Patagonia, rode on a dogsled in Finland, sailed a yacht off Cannes and hung out with a gorilla doctor in Rwanda,” says Liz Lathan, Austin, Texas-based CEO of Haute Dokimazo, an events company that pivoted to virtual experiences during the pandemic. Her corporate clients Zoomed with travel guides in 28 countries between last May and December.

Vanessa Blackburn, Cleveland-based enterprise retail strategist at Retail Zipline, a communications startup for retail stores, has already done two virtual retreats with her team. Their last off-site, planned before the pandemic, was to take place in Lake Tahoe, and Ms Blackburn hoped to tack on a few extra days to ski. Her company’s two-day virtual retreat in March struck a different tone.

Instead of lavish catered meals, employees got to spend $25 on their corporate card to order coffee and lunch delivery. And the goody bags sent to their homes included a tub of slime, a plastic Slinky toy and a colouring book—not for the workers themselves, but to occupy the young children that many still had at home. “My daughter loved that,” Ms Blackburn says.

From a young age, Jeff Goldblum had an eye for clothes. Growing up in Pittsburgh, he wanted glasses like John Lennon’s and turtlenecks like the Rat Pack’s.

As a member of New York’s Neighborhood Playhouse studying under the legendary Sanford Meisner, he scoured vintage shops for Russian-style overcoats and aviator hats.

After his success in blockbusters like “Jurassic Park” and “Independence Day,” he went through a Japanese-denim phase and loved what he calls “I’ve-been-working-on-the-railroad-type vests.”

“I’ve swung wildly, and I’ve had a lot of bad ideas,” Goldblum said of his style on a recent Zoom.

The 73-year-old wore a bespoke green shirt from Anto, a shirtmaker based near his Los Angeles home.

On his feet were light-green socks, and handmade shoes from Florence, where he lives part-time with his wife, Emilie Livingston, and their two sons.

This month, he reprises his role as the Wizard of Oz in “Wicked: For Good,” the second installment of the film adaptation of the musical juggernaut. He insisted he’s not contracted by Universal Studios to only wear green on the press tour.

In the last decade the world has paid more attention to the actor’s off-screen style, which has evolved since he began working with stylist Andrew Vottero around 2014.

A silver-haired fixture on best-dressed lists, Goldblum often finishes his zany outfits with chunky black specs. He has collaborated with glasses label Jacques Marie Mage and formed a close relationship with Prada , walking its runway and appearing in a 2022 brand campaign.

Here, Goldblum, who regularly performs with his jazz band the Mildred Snitzer Orchestra, talks cashmere, vegan Bolognese and handshakes.

Studying with Sandy Meisner was: a portal into my more-intense interest in clothing. Everything could be a key to finding a character, behavior and discovering who you are in the story – (for example) how the shoe felt and how it made you walk.

You don’t really see: a 1970s-style long shirt collar in stores. I had this green shirt I’m wearing made at Anto in Los Angeles. I have them in a bunch of flavors, including some with Western buttons. I’m thinking about getting one in orange.

I just read: James Kaplan’s two-part biography of Frank Sinatra, whose favorite colour was orange. I’ve always liked orange.

I like: that Marie Kondo book “Tidying Up.” In my youth, my family left me alone one day in the garage. It seemed messy to me. I started to throw everything away. I was sweating under my arms with excitement. I got a big kick out of it.

My kids: like to wear my band merchandise. They sometimes help me dress. I say, “Hey, pick out what I’m going to wear.”

I’ve had to get cozy with one or two: leather jackets for parts like Ian Malcolm in “Jurassic Park.” I have a Saint Laurent motorcycle jacket that I wore the other day that’s kind of tight. I like it a lot.

I probably wouldn’t want to wear: real fur. I’ve stopped eating animals except fish. It’s part health-wise from my nutritionist and part my own feeling about it.

My favourite meal is at: Craig’s in West Hollywood. My wife and I share a chopped salad, minus the cheese, to start. They have a spaghetti squash primavera with broccoli and a spicy tomato sauce. I get it with shrimp or vegan Bolognese.

I’ve always been hypersensitive to: certain fabrics, such as wool. I’ve recently accepted—what’s that wool called?—cashmere. I don’t like things that itch. And I don’t like tags in the back of my shirt. I use a professional seam ripper to cut out tags.

What drives me crazy are: printing machines and my phone, especially how it breaks down so often. I had to deal with that this morning.

My feet must be: comfy cozy. My wife, a ballet dancer, says we’re not really working unless our feet are bleeding. I can’t accept that. I really like these handmade shoes I had made in Florence. They’re the most comfortable ever.

Florence is: a jewel box of a city. I’ve found the people delightful and the quality of life great. There are so many artisans. My favourite hat is one I purchased at the Borsalino store. I don’t know any Italian. Just a word here or there.

I don’t want to get sick so I prefer: fist bumping to a handshake. My knuckles have hurt from a too-hard fist bump. So let’s fist bump gently. Let’s just fist touch.

I have to organise my: sock drawer. It’s in the research and development stage. I’m very into socks of one kind or another. I like to experiment with a colour, which is why I have a light green pair on now. For tight shoes, I like (thin) Pantherella socks . I like a shorter sock, too. Sometimes I make it look like it’s falling down.

For a while I had an aesthetic allergy to: cobalt blue. You’d see it on a lady’s blouse sometimes, and I would go, “That hurts! It’s too bright.” But yesterday, after going to the Dodgers game with my kids, I put on a Dodgers blue cobalt sock, and I was very happy. So I’m nothing if not changeable.

I love: pockets. I recently got a minty green chore coat by the Row that I really like. Its flap pockets are deep enough that things aren’t going to fall out. I’d never even heard the term “chore coat.” It carries my wallet, keys, maybe a Kleenex, a lozenge, a little pillbox with an aspirin and some hand sanitizer.

I never used: sunscreen. But my wife has got me using Sarah Chapman sunscreen , sometimes even tinted. I’ll use a Joanna Vargas serum of some kind. I’m not sure what it’s doing, but I put it on at night. I imitate Boris Karloff (in the “Frankenstein” films) and I make a joke with Emilie that I’m going to my laboratory to work on my new longevity theorem.

My acid-reflux man said: “Take care of your vocal cords.” So I’m off caffeine. I’ll have a Ryze mushroom coffee in the morning—a scoop with hot water and oat milk. Sometimes the kids will make me a decaf cappuccino with oat milk and a sprinkling of chocolate powder, and that is too delightful.

For many decades: I’ve been totally on the natch. I’ll have a sip of red wine if Emilie says it’s really fantastic, but I don’t want to get loopy.

I get the usual: seven or eight hours of sleep. I stopped wearing my Oura ring. I’d be in bed for 8 hours and it would go, “No, Jeff, let’s call it 5½ hours that you got.” It used to say, “You’re somewhat ready for the day,” and I’d say, “Go to H-E-Double Hockey Sticks.” I threw the darn thing away. I go with how I feel.

When I wake up: I go through the little vestige of transcendental meditation I learned decades ago. I crack my bones and do this stretching routine that ends with my taking a tennis racket and going through the motion of a backhand, forehand and serve. Then I take a Centrum for Men multivitamin, play my piano and work out in our gym.

Early on I was: a lanky guy. Then I started lifting weights. I wanted to steer some of those roles that were a little nerdy—even those scientist parts—in a cooler direction.

Am I: nerdy or cool? Well, these days, according to some circles, the two have overlapped. At this point, who knows?

Your Corporate Retreat Is On—But It’s Going To Be Weirder

Employees bond over a virtual lunar disaster or ‘80s-themed murder mystery.

The 73-year-old star of ‘Wicked: For Good’ gets cameras flashing with his kooky off-screen style. Here, he discusses his morning stretch routine, a work-in-progress sock drawer and his antagonism toward fitness rings.