Nikos Moraitakis, the CEO of Workable, wrote the below on organising global company meetups. Workable provides a recruiting platform (ATS) to SMEs. Founded in Athens, they still have much of their product/tech team there, but the CEO is now based in the US with a significant team. I was going to summarise Nikos’ points but I think better to repost in its entirety:

"We've been doing global company meetups every year, starting with a dozen people all the way to 200. Last year we didn't do it to save money, and I regretted the decision. The effect on people is big. There are folks in the US who feel like they know people in Greece as if they worked next to each other for years because they had a chance to bond and socialize over a few days nearly two years ago. It has dispelled the usual "us vs them" divisions across two very far away offices. You can't put a number on it, but I'm totally convinced that the intangible benefits are far bigger than the large expense associated with it.

To make it more cost-effective, you can use the global meetup as a platform to do things that you would spend money on anyway.

Examples:

• Our managers and execs would normally travel to spend time in the Greek office, so they can do it on the same ticket and spend this office time before/after the meetup.
• We do a face-to-face meeting with all managers once a year anyway, so you can have this on the same ticket, too.
• Instead of flying a product manager to meet users, we bring in a few customers from around the world and have them talk in a panel in front of the entire company. Imagine a few of your users having a discussion with your PMs, devs, marketers and salespeople at the same time!
• We organize breakout sessions for training and workshops that would otherwise be impossible if you had to fly lots of people several times a year.
• Our "product roadmap" session sometimes devolves into a heated argument with dozens of people participating and debating. For some, this sounds like a nightmare, but for us it is a reminder that making a good product can be a messy affair.
• Departments leaders do sessions to educate people on other teams.
• Instead of doing separate management and sales training in each office, we pay for the trainer once and do it all together during the event. Having a sales training for the entire team once in a while is really worth it.
• You can even bring a couple of interesting speakers (e.g. this year I'm bringing the CTO of a public company to speak about large-scale infrastructure) and your entire team can watch a great keynote, instead of sending a few people to a conference.
  Remote teams often need to travel just to have some
• face-time over a workshop, or other excuse, but the real reason is to get people in the same room once in a while. If everyone knows they'll meet once a year anyway, it's easier for you to say no to non-essential intra-company travel.

I guess what I've learned from doing the global company meetups for years, and not doing it for a year, is:

• Global meetups can work wonders for company cohesion, but you need to put some thought and preparation to get more value from it.
• Make sure you save on other travel costs that you could combine with the global meetup.
• If it's a recurring, annual thing, people will get used to planning things around the event to take better advantage of it.
• The fancy stuff (e.g. keynote speaker) is good, but the sideshows and team interactions (e.g. product arguments and breakout sessions) are the best.
• At 50 people it's a super-valuable meeting. No brainer you should do it and focus more on getting work done.
• At 200 people you don't get actual work done and should focus more on free time, socialization and do the stuff that's impossible to do otherwise (e.g. have everyone interact with a customer, give everyone facetime with their peers)
• If you think of it as more than just a socialization opportunity, such meetups can be turned into a net benefit despite the seemingly large cost.

You will be tempted to pack it with sessions, workshops and "organized fun". I have found that it's better to limit conference room sessions to half a day and leave them a lot of time to do their own stuff and find their own way to have fun. Some of the most memorable moments for us happened in meetups, drinks and happenings that weren't on the schedule."