Concierge 
In 2012, Google launched a multi-year study called Project Aristotle. The primary purpose was to figure out what separates high-performing teams from the rest, even when the people on them look similar on paper. Researchers studied 180+ teams across the company, expecting to find patterns in who was on each team.
But there was no pattern showing that a particular mix of personality types, skills, or background worked better.
What they found instead was that how the team worked together counted more. And the single biggest predictor of high-performing teams was something called psychological safety. Loosely defined, psychological safety is team members shared belief that it’s safe to take a risk, ask a question, or disagree without being punished or made to feel small.
It is a finding that has been widely cited since the New York Times wrote it up in 2016. If Google found psychological safety to be the most important factor in team effectiveness, why would any leader treat it as optional? The real question is how you build it in a team spread across cities, time zones, and Slack channels.And the honest answer is that you can’t build high-performing teams from a laptop. You need time in the same room. And for disparate and distributed teams, that’s something a well-run company retreat gives you.
The five traits behind Google’s high-performing teams
Project Aristotle identified five traits the best teams shared. Psychological safety was the foundation, but the other traits reinforced it:
What’s noticeably absent are things like talent, IQ, tenure, and office perks. Google’s researchers expected those to dominate. But they didn’t even make the cut.
Why these traits are hard to build over Slack and Zoom
The part the original research touched on but didn’t dwell on is that psychological safety is built through small, repeated behaviors. Things like a leader admitting they were wrong, a quieter team member being drawn into a discussion, or a disagreement that gets discussed and resolved instead of buried. Google’s researchers found that in high-performing teams, everyone spoke roughly the same amount in meetings. They called this “conversational turn-taking,” and it predicted performance almost as well as safety itself.
Now picture how many Zoom meetings follow a similar pattern. One person dominates. Two say nothing. Three are on mute and likely multitasking. The cues that signal safety in person—eye contact, body language, short pauses that invite someone else to speak—are gone or badly compressed. You can run that meeting every week for a year and still not know whether your team trusts each other.
Distributed work isn’t going away, and most teams in 2026 are some version of hybrid. Psychological safety is not just a Google idea. Research on high-trust workplaces has linked it to 76% more engagement. But the habits underneath high performance still need a setting where they can be practiced.
What a company retreat changes
Building high-performing teams is what a well-designed company retreat is for. It does two things that day-to-day remote work can’t.
First, it puts everyone in one room for long enough that small interactions start to add up. There are meals that bring everyone together. Short conversations during the walk between sessions, or in the lobby at 9pm. These might seem inconsequential at the time, but it is in these moments where dependability and meaning are built. Teams that share meals and walks for three days behave differently when they get back to Slack on Monday.
Belvo is a good example of what building high-performing teams looks like. The financial infrastructure company has 95 people spread across multiple locations. When they planned their 2026 company retreat, they had three goals: meet each other in person, kick off the 2026 strategy, and have fun together. Four days in Peniche, Portugal, gave them the time and the setting to do all three at once. The strategy work succeeded because the trust work was happening alongside it.
Second, a company retreat creates permission to do work that doesn’t fit on a normal calendar. There might be a two-hour facilitated session on how the team handles disagreement. A round of structured feedback that would easily feel awkward in a 30-minute video call. Or a genuine conversation about what the work is for. These are the kinds of conversations that build the four other Aristotle traits.
How to design a team retreat around the Aristotle findings
Most company retreats default to a mix of strategy sessions, team-building activities, and social time. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it leaves the psychological safety work to chance. And if encouraging high-performing teams is something you want to work on, three changes make the difference.
Make leader vulnerability part of the agenda
Google’s researchers found that safety builds fastest when leaders go first. This could be anything from admitting a mistake to naming something they’re uncertain about or asking for feedback in front of the team. Try building a session into the agenda where the senior person on the team does this on purpose. It will feel uncomfortable the first time, but it is also one of the surest ways to build psychological safety.
Build in equal speaking time
In remote meetings, the loudest person wins by default. In person, you can design around it. Use small-group breakouts of three or four people for any important discussions. Rotate who speaks first. Use a structured format, like round-robin, or written first then spoken. Anything that interrupts the usual hierarchy. You’re rehearsing the turn-taking habit Project Aristotle identified, in the one setting where it can truly take hold.
Have the hard conversations while you’re in the room
This is the counterintuitive one, because many people actively try to avoid conflict. But Google found that high-performing teams had more conflict than average teams, not less. The difference was that they handled it directly and quickly. A company retreat is the right place to practice that. Schedule a session where the team works through a real disagreement within the group. It might be a strategic question, a process that some feel isn’t working, or even a decision someone has been avoiding. Don’t try to resolve it on a video call later. Do it with everyone in the room.
From offsite to ongoing practice
A team retreat doesn’t permanently fix anything, and it doesn’t instantly create high-performing teams. Trust takes time to build and seconds to break, and the habits people rehearse over three days will fade if nothing back home reinforces them. The retreats that produce change that lasts are the ones where the team leaves with two or three specific commitments. And they need to be commitments that can be proven or demonstrated, like a new meeting format, a feedback ritual, or an agreement about how disagreements get raised. And there must be a plan to check progress regularly, because the follow-through is what makes it stick.
What Project Aristotle ended up showing is that the traits separating high-performing teams from average ones aren’t accidents of hiring. They’re built, and for distributed and hybrid teams, the question isn’t whether to invest the time. Instead, it’s where the time gets spent. A few days together, designed with the research in mind, will move a team further than a year of standups.
“Our team offsite in Peniche was an absolute success, and we owe a huge thank you to NextRetreat. Their support was seamless at every stage — from the meticulous planning pre-event to the flawless execution on the ground, and even the thoughtful follow-up afterward.“
– Joana Maffi – People Lead, Belvo
Planning an company retreat for your team? Learn more about our Concierge package, an exclusive offering tailored to teams, ranging from 20 to 500 members, seeking a personalized, expert-led approach to corporate retreat planning.
