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Sounds like you experienced a particular company's flavor of WFH, which sounds mostly worse than all the ones I have. I've also seen situations that start to go bad like you describe, but in some cases we were able to nudge it back. For example, someone tries to schedule a meeting for a week away, so you push for a quick ad hoc call in a few minutes instead. (Not that different than in-person, when someone says "let's schedule a meeting".) I've also seen experiments in WFH communication and team-building that aren't done well. For example, starting Monday morning with a ineffective all-hands that, rather than getting people on the same page and energized, sucks the life out of any refreshed start of the workweek. (Again, similar to if you'd herded everyone in-person into a large physical room, for the same content and delivery, only in-person is poorer view and harder to hear.) Also, in the worst situations I'm aware of, it wouldn't matter much whether the people were in-person. You might figure out more quickly that there's a problem, or where the problem is originating, but that's not been the hardest part. What in-person is best at is humanizing/personalizing people and forming bonds easily, with all the little cues that we've known since the '80s aren't conveyed as well through computers, and still aren't. (Well, for many people; other people are less comfortable in some in-person contexts, for various reasons, and tend to be more comfortable and themselves in other modalities.) There's also the occasional high-bandwidth highly-interactive collaborative design, but there's no reason most of that can't happen mostly WFH when your timezones overlap and you have good tools (e.g., effective shared whiteboarding/diagramming that's actually better than a physical whiteboard). Personally, my ideal is WFH, but being in-town or an easy commute away, for occasional high-value in-person interaction. With in-person emphasis on humanizing/personalizing/bonding (but naturally; I've seen these done in well-intentioned but miserable ways that people just try to get through, and it can be counterproductive). |