culture·Published 2025-05
Executive Offsite Frequency and Cumulative Severance Expense Accrual: A Positive Correlation
Principal investigator: Orrin Bletchley, Founder & Director of the Institute.
Organizations that hold more executive offsites per year accrue significantly higher cumulative severance expenses in the subsequent three years.
Methodology
One hundred and eighty-seven organizations provided records of executive offsite events — defined as any multi-day off-site gathering of five or more executives — for a three-year retrospective period. Offsite records were obtained from expense reports, facility booking confirmations, and in eleven cases from calendar data shared by an executive assistant. Severance expenses were drawn from audited financial statements where available; for private companies, from estimates provided by the CFO or, in eight cases, by a departing CFO.
Funding disclosure: Funded by the Institute's Organizational Culture Research Fund. The study was peer-reviewed by two Institute fellows who had each attended an executive offsite in the preceding year.
Instruments cited in this study
Full citation
Bletchley, O. (2025). Executive Offsite Frequency and Cumulative Severance Expense Accrual: A Positive Correlation. Institute for the Study of Pointless Metrics. r = 0.79, p < 0.001, n = 187.