For sure! I see a lot of value in conferences and retreats for that purpose. Personally though hybrid was so much worse than full remote. As soon as we went hybrid people just went totally dark from the rest. I would come in every few nounths and having to catch the cubical jockies up to speed on what the rest of the world was up to. Also way too much gossip in office sometimes.

Hybrid also led to a bunch of duplicate tracking of work. Jira, emails, chats, in person conversations, in person meetings, white boards, Visios, PowerPoint’s, etc all to talk to different people to say the same things.

It was also a generally dysfunctional place to work but some of it was introduce with RTO.