| Prefacing this with the fact my office is essentially a farm, so quite nice surroundings, and also only a 10 minute drive away from home in a regional town, so there's no awful commute involved. It's still not the same - I was part of a team for 5 or 6 years and never met them in person. Apparently I wasn't important enough to fly to the US even once to meet everyone. We had very little rapport, didn't know each other at all, it was a very poor experience of being in a team and extremely demoralising and inefficient. I took my current job because I wanted to go back to the office and get to know my team mates properly. It's much better. I do like the hybrid approach, I can basically work from home whenever I want, but I go to the office most working days. I probably work from home less than 3 weeks of the year all up, and usually when I need to do something here I can't do at work like making some brackets or similar. The incidental conversations you have, short brainstorming sessions over breaks and lunch, just being socially closer, makes a massive difference. I used to go for smoke breaks with a different project leader, even though I don't smoke, because we could spend that time talking about stuff related to our projects and bounce ideas off each other. That job was also in an awesome startup complex that used to be a railway workshop - way cooler than sitting around in my spare bedroom on my own. I admit I'm no fan of too dense an open plan or hot desking - both dehumanising efforts - and eating at your desk should be banned. Slack/teams/whatever isn't on the same planet. |