[phicoh]

In my experience, meeting people in person at the coffee machine or at lunch creates way more social cohesion compared to exclusively using mail, chat, and video conferencing.

This is important even in bigger organizations, because you want to catch errors early on. It helps if people bounce ideas off colleagues to see if there is anything they missed.

With people you barely know, if it is not your responsibility to comment, why bother? Better to get get some work done, then to read the chat all day.

Personally, I think about two days per week at the office is best for this purpose. But that may very from person to person.