In-person events and employee engagement: what the data show about bringing a team together

Try a test next Monday. Ask three people on your team what they remember about the company's last gathering. Notice what comes up first in their answer. I bet the memory will arrive through a moment they felt: the laughter that took over the audience, the colleague who went on stage with a trembling voice, the phrase someone repeated in the hallway for weeks. That is the material internal engagement feeds on, and that is what I talk about in this second article of the series on the work I did at gLue's invitation.

Internal engagement in decline: what Gallup measured in 2025

Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2025 report arrived in April 2025 with a direct message for anyone who takes care of people. Global engagement fell from 23% in 2023 to 21% in 2024. The sharpest drop came from managers, whose engagement went from 30% to 27%. Among individual contributors without management roles, the rate held steady at 18%. Gallup estimated the cost of low productivity in 2024 at US$438 billion.

Jim Harter, from Gallup, described the chain that links these numbers: manager engagement affects team engagement, and team engagement affects productivity. For those who work in HR and culture, this sentence sets priorities. A gathering that brings leaders together carries the mood of the entire company in the weeks that follow.

The Latin American figure brings some encouragement, with the caveat that the release does not detail the region. I read in it a sign of energy worth nurturing and of room for your company to make engagement an everyday commitment, with moments set on the calendar for it to grow.

Loneliness at work and relationships: the warning from the Work Trend Index

In 2022, the Microsoft Work Trend Index surveyed 31,000 people in 31 countries, according to a report by the World Economic Forum. Half of remote employees and 55% of hybrid workers said they had felt lonelier at work since changing formats. Leaders named building relationships as the biggest challenge they faced. And 38% of hybrid workers said they did not know when or why to go to the office.

I read these numbers as a request for a reason. People want to know why it is worth being together, and a well-planned in-person gathering answers that question with the event itself. It gives the team a reason to meet and an entire moment dedicated to building bonds. For those who handle internal marketing, this turns the internal event into a relationship tool, designed with the same attention given to a campaign for the customer.

The request made in person and the strength of meeting face to face

In 2017, Roghanizad and Bohns published a study on requests in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. In the University of Waterloo's announcement, the result appears clearly: a request made in person was “significantly more effective” than the same request sent by email.

Think about what an internal convention asks of people. It asks for buy-in to a direction, energy for a goal, trust in a leadership, willingness to change. Each of these requests gains strength when it is made with people in the same room, looking at the same stage. Presence gives the request a face and a voice, and that helps the team say yes.

Culture and internal marketing with gLue

Among the services that gLue lists on its own website is culture and internal marketing, alongside corporate events, conventions and conferences, brand activations and launches, and incentive trips. One sentence on the website sums up the house's ambition: “Corporate events that turn positioning into presence.” When the topic is culture, positioning is what the company believes about itself, and presence is the moment when the team feels that belief firsthand.

I have enormous affection for the way Paula and Diego, who run gLue, treat each project, and I am always grateful for the trust they placed in my writing. This meeting began with Ton, from REC, who was generous enough to build the bridge between us. Seeing the result of that introduction keeps me grateful to him to this day. It is worth following gLue's Instagram to get a sense of the agency's standard of delivery.

Experience script: how a gathering becomes a memory the team shares

When I write the emotional layer of a gathering, I start with the audience. Who will be in the room, where they come from, what they expect to hear, what they need to feel to leave wanting to tell others what they lived. Every choice in the script answers these questions, from the first line to the last minute.

Picture your company's annual convention. Leadership goes on stage with the goal for the year. The script works so that this goal reaches people as a story they recognize themselves in, with the challenges they know and the achievements they helped build. When employees see themselves inside the story, they feel something different, and that feeling is what makes them remember.

A shared memory is one the team tells together. Someone starts the sentence in the hallway and a colleague finishes it. At aiqfome's event for influencers, the end of the night became a chorus: the guests sang together “Eu não vou emboraaaa” (I'm not leaving) in front of the board of notes. The same mechanism works for an internal team. A chorus stays in the memory of each voice because it was sung with the other voices.

From the gLue and aiqfome case study to your company's corporate event

The project that gave rise to this series was a four-day event for aiqfome, a Magalu group company that gLue has served since 2019. I hold a special affection for aiqfome and am grateful for the chance to write for this brand. The leadership, creation, production and delivery were gLue's. I was invited by the agency to contribute to the script, writing what each guest would experience, feel and keep in their memory. The mechanics and scripts remain confidential, out of contractual ethics and respect for the work of gLue and the client. The approved account is in the gLue and aiqfome case study.

I take from this work a conviction that applies to your next internal event. Engagement grows stronger when people live through a moment together that moves them. That moment calls for an agency able to deliver it with excellence and a script that gives meaning to every minute for those in the room.

In the next article, the audience changes and the bar rises. I will tell the story of Encontrinho da Carola and After da Carola, the event aiqfome holds for influencers, and show how gLue kept a generation used to everything fast and intense engaged until the end of the night.