[commandlinefan]

Since the industrial revolution, all knowledge work has required remote collaboration. If your company has multiple physical offices, or if you have a supplier or a customer that's not colocated within walking distance, you've been collaborating remotely, whether by mail, telegram, telephone or computer. Maybe that's slightly "inefficient" - or maybe it's a good thing with full-remote working that we get to refine it so well?

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

The positive effect a 2-week in-person visit to a remote office had on the collaboration over the next year or so astonished me.

Turns out humans are social animals, people with social bonds work together more effectively, and you don't build those via Zoom and Slack. And I'm not talking about "partying together every night, living at the office", just "being around each other and talking outside of the rigid confines of scheduled meetings".

No, scheduled socials aren't the same.

[reidjs]

What you are describing sounds like scheduled socials to me, just in the office instead of over zoom. But I would not be surprised if mostly wfh with a few in-person days turns out to be the optimal setup for most offices.

[tgsovlerkhgsel]

You can't schedule a social for 8h/day though. The trick is the informal interactions, e.g. over lunch, or between tasks, or when you overhear something interesting.

Compare e.g. a language course that you go to once per week or day for an hour vs. in-country immersion. similar thing.

[m4rtink]

I don't think its comparable - most factories still had huge main complexes in one place or at least a city where one could visit everything during a single day if needed.

Sure, there was internal communication with smaller factories and with customers, but with much migher latency and information content than whats possible now.

[specialist]

Your point highlights that calling it "remote work" is inadequate.

Communications separated by time and space is a familiar problem. We adapted, more or less.

With the apocalypse came the forever meetings (zoom calls), which are same time and same virtual space.