[searchableguy]

The simplest reason is lack of effective communication, team bonding, and morale.

People behave differently behind a screen even if incentivised by money. This becomes a problem at the scale of big companies.

Eg - without body language, tone and context - everyone needs to be extra charitable to avoid miscommunication or distrust. This might cause people to be overly defensive in their approach to communicate.

[jonahhorowitz]

I've said this in other places, but as a _manager_ it's much nicer to work in the office, in person. That gets more true the higher up the management chain you go. Managers spend most of their time in meetings. Meetings suck over video chat. This is the entire reason CEOs (and pretty much everyone between them and line employees) would rather everyone come back to work. It makes their workday more pleasant.

[al_borland]

The idea of in-person meetings only works if there is one office where everyone is at.

I was forced to move to another state (pre-pandemic). The people on my team were in offices, but 5 different offices. So I moved to another state to be in an office, so I could sit on the phone all day, every day. There is no sense to that. It’s no exaggeration that the forced move cost me tens of thousands of dollars… and for what?

I recently had a FAANG recruiter reach out to me and when I brought up this concern when I was told I’d need to relocate to an office location, I was told the recruiter was in a similar portion on her team, spending all day on the phone because her team is spread across multiple offices.

In person meetings are great, but if the reality of the office strategy isn’t going to make them possible, then there is no point. I think the occasional in-person meetup can do a lot to build rapport with members of the team without being in an office all the time, or on a weekly hybrid schedule.

I’d go a step further to say that a meeting where 3 people are in a conference room and others are remote, is worse than everyone joining remote or from their desk. Meetings should either be 100% in-person, or 0% in person. Anything in between is a bad experience. I think it’s a safe bet that any company making news about return to office strategies has multiple offices with teams spread across multiple cities, states, and even countries. This makes meetings a poor justification for workers being in the office.

[starky]

>Meetings should either be 100% in-person, or 0% in person. Anything in between is a bad experience.

Agreed, even one person joining remotely completely changes the meeting. The remote person is slightly out of sync with everyone, can't participate in any whiteboarding sessions, and you lose the connection because they are a face (or icon) on the screen and they are looking at a wide angle feed of the entire room.

[FridgeSeal]

Managers and execs ought to already know that not everyone else is an exec, and don’t have the same face-to-face requirements, and do actually need time to do the “productivity” that nets execs their fat pay checks.

[theandrewbailey]

Meetings tend to be some the least productive activities, especially when everything "discussed" could have been sent out as an email (which can be read remotely).

[ryandrake]

Meetings can only be replaced with E-mail if people actually read (and respond to) their E-mail, and I've found fellow employees' E-mail hygiene to be pretty spotty.

[LoganDark]

Depends on the type of meeting. Where I work, we have a short 15-minute meeting every morning that's done over video call, just to see who's working that day and make sure everyone is on the same page. The CEO constantly does screen-share meetings with clients so they can show him what they're trying to do with the product, and he can watch the recording later and break it into tasks to give to us. I'd say it works pretty well. Without this the product would lose out on a lot of valuable feedback.

[tester756]

How those cross-geo projects manage to do it then?

or OSS like Linux?

[ghaff]

Lots of email, chat, and video calls. Also conferences in the case of major projects like Linux.

[cyanydeez]

More people use these things as coercive tactics than effective communication.

[seeEllArr]

They behave differently behind screens, yes, but I would not say the negatives outweigh the positives. I have worked, and worked with, tons of people in both scenarios. Some of the best colleagues I never/rarely saw in person. Some of the worst were around all the time.