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by chrisco255 1965 days ago
I don't think so. My company was remote-first before the pandemic, but we still had about 25% of our staff or so go into an office regularly. The key is to have that remote-first attitude in spite of there being an office. One of the rules we had was "if one person is remote that's supposed to be on a meeting, then everyone has to treat that as a remote meeting and Zoom in". In other words, no one was on unequal footing for important team decisions, and if you had 5 people in an office that were supposed to have a meeting with 2 other remote peeps, those 5 people would jump on their laptops for the meeting, not huddle into a conference room. Subtle changes like this make a big difference.
1 comments

I work with teams that have rules like that.

The other thing to consider is that many of us routinely work with people across much of the world on a day-to-day basis. Even if everyone were in office--some are, some aren't--almost every meeting I'd be in would have people from 2 or 3 different offices. One office I work with a lot is in the same time zone. The other is 6 time zones away but that still works pretty well because we have meetings early in the workday our time, which for them is mid-afternoon.

This is my situation as well. My employer has >>100,000 full time folks spread all over the planet, and despite having one of the largest office buildings as my home base, for the most part I didn't work with anyone from it. So even back 3-4 years ago when I went to the office I spent almost all of my day on videoconference calls.