Leverage blurring boundaries between friends and colleagues in cohesion planning. Photo Credit: iStock/Mary Long
If colleagues are choosing to spend their holidays together as “frolleagues” – friend and colleagues mashed together – why do corporate cohesion programmes still struggle to create genuine connection?
At first glance, frollidays – a second order portmanteau of frolleague and holidays – may seem like a generational phenomenon. A 2024 study of Indian travel showed that 40% of Gen Z and Millennial professionals preferred travelling with work buddies over family or schoolmates.
Flight Centre Travel Group research in 2025 also saw the takeoff of the frolliday trend, with Gen Z professionals leading the movement.
The frolleague stereotype, as it goes, involves younger professionals whose work friendships play central roles before they enter married life.
But the trend goes beyond age. Across many Asian societies, people are staying single longer. Even married professionals often find their strongest social ties rooted in the workplace, shaped by shared pressures and daily interactions, with less time to explore social connections outside the demands of work and family.
Rather than a passing trend, frolleagues reveal how workplaces create and sustain social ties – and why morale and cohesion results are strongest when these bonds happen organically.
Traditional teambuilding formats, from formal dinners to tightly programmed retreats, remain common. Yet, forced proximity between co-workers does not automatically foster genuine connection.
The success of frolleague bonds – whether during frollidays, pantry catchups or boardgames nights – is rooted in autonomy, common interests, and unstructured time.
With these in mind, here are some ways that cohesion staples can borrow from the frolleague trend to maximise impact and returns.
Make time for free-and-easy
Large-scale retreats that try to address everyone’s needs dilute individual experience. Rather than dictating every moment and overplanning every part of the itinerary, allow participants blocks of free-and-easy time where they can choose how – and with whom – they spend it.
Warm up before the event
Intersperse staple cohesion events with informal, employee-led and interest-based hangouts. These could be as simple as a running group, a local food crawl, or a photography walk. In doing so, you prime genuine connections across departments so that they will not feel forced when mixing inevitably comes up at the next official teambuilding event.
Track bleisure as a default
The popularity of frollidays demonstrates that travel is the surest icebreaker and corporate glue. The effects don’t have to be confined solely to retreats, incentives, teambuilding or bleisure formats. Even on business-focused trips, be prepared to track cohesion returns during unstructured time outside of meetings to not let sure ROI go unaccounted.
All that said, the lesson from frolleague culture is clear: Meaningful relationships are nurtured by choice, shared experience, and freedom. As organisations navigate the future of work, quality of connection, not just the quantity or scale of programming, will define the strength of corporate culture. Designing retreats that respect autonomy and social chemistry can help bring the best of frolleague bonding to workplace collaboration and productivity.