Lack of communication breeds lack of concern, in my opinion. I don't think some folk understand how high your communication bandwidth needs to be to go fully remote.
Agreed, you need very proactive communicators. I just left a startup but it felt like issues fell through all the time, and not because they weren't raised, but it felt like people didn't understand the importance. Had a persistent collection of issues all in the realm of reliability, it took a long, long time (and many Pagerduty alerts) for me to realize that Engineering leadership above me was not communicating to Product that there was a cluster of similar issues affecting end users. And Product, I guess, wasn't reading post-mortems.
Looking at it from another point of view, even if your workplace objectively sucks and you don't want to be there, the lack of communication makes it worse:
* You can't really "see" the stress in people's faces. Hell, there's Zoom airbrushing so you don't look dead. You don't see when they start the day, end the day, have a long lunch, etc. All of those were subtle cues for what you yourself could get away with doing and not doing yourself.
* If your coworkers were phoning it in, it was relatively clear. Which isn't bad, it means you could phone it in. But we've had layoffs now. And since you can't really "see" people working, when they say "I spent 8 hours sweating over my keyboard," you take it as face value. You think that you have to do the same and more just to be average.
* If your coworkers aren't fulfilled with the work or another aspect, it's probably not well-articulated or even shared. These used to be things you simply ended up discussing over a beer. Now you end up intentionally Slacking each other (if at all), and probably when the sentiment has gone from "this isn't great" to "I'm actively looking and stressed." You don't get as much time to fix things, or as much time to realize you're not alone in it.
All-in-all, I'd still hope we can have remote as a norm, but only a handful of people know how to communicate proactively imo. The rest probably need 2 straight weeks of in-person work every quarter or 2 days of hybrid work per week.
Looking at it from another point of view, even if your workplace objectively sucks and you don't want to be there, the lack of communication makes it worse:
* You can't really "see" the stress in people's faces. Hell, there's Zoom airbrushing so you don't look dead. You don't see when they start the day, end the day, have a long lunch, etc. All of those were subtle cues for what you yourself could get away with doing and not doing yourself.
* If your coworkers were phoning it in, it was relatively clear. Which isn't bad, it means you could phone it in. But we've had layoffs now. And since you can't really "see" people working, when they say "I spent 8 hours sweating over my keyboard," you take it as face value. You think that you have to do the same and more just to be average.
* If your coworkers aren't fulfilled with the work or another aspect, it's probably not well-articulated or even shared. These used to be things you simply ended up discussing over a beer. Now you end up intentionally Slacking each other (if at all), and probably when the sentiment has gone from "this isn't great" to "I'm actively looking and stressed." You don't get as much time to fix things, or as much time to realize you're not alone in it.
All-in-all, I'd still hope we can have remote as a norm, but only a handful of people know how to communicate proactively imo. The rest probably need 2 straight weeks of in-person work every quarter or 2 days of hybrid work per week.