My theory is that it's similar to why they do team-building exercises: they want employees to be friends with each other, because it promotes retention. Are you

My theory is that it's similar to why they do team-building exercises: they want employees to be friends with each other, because it promotes retention. Are you going to leave a job where you know everybody for a complete unknown for a 20% raise? Will you even start looking around? They could accomplish the same thing by paying above-average, but obviously everybody can't do that and anyway team-building once a quarter is cheaper. Then again, office space is super-expensive and if they can actually reduce (or eliminate) the amount of office space because of WFH that would be a huge savings. But not every company can do that (yet).