[eropple]

IMO: skill issue.

Communicating effectively on camera is a learnable skill, it's not one most people in tech have. But making sure people are trained to do a good job is a management challenge and it's incumbent upon management to make sure people are doing it. If, after two years, your team still has trouble having real conversations over a teleconferencing solution? That's a management failure.

"Lunchroom conversations" are arguably the hardest thing to foment in a remote environment for sure, but between things like cross-teams with breakouts and the like, you can do it. And some people are going to do it naturally; I know what most of my director's peers' teams are up to and I have contacts in all of them, while also touching base with them on a regular basis. If your teams don't have people who do this naturally, assign it. If you don't, that too is a management failure.

"It's hard" is true, for sure. But "we decided we don't want to and never wanted to try, so we're going to inflict misery on our employees" is an abrogation of the employer's part of the social contract.

[ajmurmann]

There is something about in-person communication that's different for bonding. It's just human nature. Getting information across can be trained, but the social aspect will always be missing. That's ok if you make up for it.

Ones thing about meeting in physical space that I miss is directionality and locality of sound. If we are sitting with 4 people at a table at lunch, we can organically switch between having a single shared conversion or two different ones.

> "It's hard" is true, for sure. But "we decided we don't want to and never wanted to try, so we're going to inflict misery on our employees" is an abrogation of the employer's part of the social contract.

Agreed. Different from a power trip though. IMO it's just ineptitudes.

[snotrockets]

Just shifting from face to face to video conferencing won't cut it. You need to be efficient communicator in writing, which is harder to bullshit your through (or maybe requires different kind of bullshiting)

[eropple]

Also true. My current job has a lot of people whose survival mechanism to date has been "interminably long Zoom meetings where people tune out". Now that I have been on a "fewer, better meetings" kick, that is definitely springing some leaks.

I would stress the video capability, though, because that's the thing that impacts how people feel in pretty substantial ways. I have a weekly 90-minute meeting every Friday where my product teams bring questions to both ask me and to kick around with a group, and so far the feedback has been excellent--and a direct reason cited is that I'm not just letting the meeting wander but I am leading it, I'm standing up while on camera and projecting excitement and a reason to be engaged. When compared with the interminable-drone meetings the rest of the week, it really drives the point home that you have to talk to people like you want them to listen to you, and that is much harder on a camera but it is a totally learnable skill.