In the remote shops I worked people discuss everything (and anything) on IRC, slack, hipchat etc. Even their pie in the sky ideas. Never had the problem you described. If anything, people are more open and engaged: they would even sign in after (or before) work to bounce ideas. Sometimes even from their vacations. Never seen that in "onsite-only" shops, BTW (open-space or not).
If it isn't like this (and most places aren't like that) you are going to miss out on things when not in the office.
Notice that I said team. You can still have a remote team inside of a mostly office-going company and it ends up being similar to a satellite office for a regular company.
Eg Google has many satellite offices, so they could arguably have "remote" be one of those "offices". I don't see this ever actually happening, but they could do it if they make sure that team is remote-first.
I sometimes wonder if many of the "on-site only" employers even realize how much they are missing out on. For example, when I'm in the office, I work from 9 to 6, period. When I work for a remote gig, I can be working 12 hours a day without realizing it - my job literally becomes my life. I understand that it may not be very healthy for me, but isn't that every manager's dream? Yes, you have to make sure people like what they are doing, but that's a different problem and relevant even for onsite gigs.
Depends... are you working on the most important stuff first?
I'd rather have a strict 9-5'er that's always working in priority order than a 12-2am'er that's scattered and not delivering important work.
IMO the most important thing for success in remote work is having a prioritized backlog and defined iteration. It's way too easy to lose hours and days down an unimportant rabbit hole without these things.
I'd say many places don't have enough PM rigor to make remote work sensible.
Which, of course, it is.
Isolated: "separated from other persons or things; alone; solitary" [0], "separate from others" [1].
Remote: "far apart; far distant in space; situated at some distance away" [0], "separated by an interval or space greater than usual" [1].
I agree the little things that mimic, or substitute for, the subtleties of working in an office are still vital when working remotely.
IMO, good communication, collaboration and transparency is not about remote vs. office. I'm sure we can find plenty of bad experiences for both.
I'm sure we all recognise it, because it's the shitty baseline, but we can do and do better than this.
Groups with good communication skills will succeed at communicating no matter what. Groups with bad communication skills will fail at communicating no matter what.
It's still politics (and policy and actual leadership effort) that must happen to apply the fix, but technology offers tools and tools can be the basis for enabling options that were previously impractical, infeasible, or impossible.
Those employees do a good job on their work, but they're still compartmentalized. They don't participate in company-funded culture/morale boosting activities. They can't really break a problem down at a whiteboard with a group of engineers who are in the office. They can't participate in much of the interviewing process that brings new people into the company. They can't get coffee with that random junior person in sales who has some great ideas about the product but is hesitant to schedule a formal meeting with a senior engineer who's surely busy with far more important things. You get the picture...
I believe that a "remote-first" organization can work with the right people, but how does a primarily on-site org accommodate remote workers?
Juinor ppl getting face time with architects/engineers - this is more of a company culture thing I think.
Text chat allows people to "overhear" conversations in an unobtrusive way to both the person doing the eavesdropping and the person(s) talking.
In-person requires more active engagement to do the same thing -- you have to go and interrupt that conversation, or awkwardly put yourself into the conversation and "listen." If your entire company is in the #general channel, you will naturally discover things passively eavesdropping that you wouldn't see or hear otherwise in a physical office.
I don't randomly run into colleagues while eating lunch on Slack. I do in the cafeteria.
If I need to casually run something by someone else without raising hackles, I can arrange to bump into them in person. I can't do that in email/Slack.
Text chat is a useful tool, but is not a full replacement for the human experience of walking around other people in 4D.
In your example, if your company were remote-first, the head of marketing would always be on slack and you wouldn't have to wait for the opportunity of inadvertently running into her just to have a conversation. And so would be your colleagues with whom you (apparently) can only interact when you happen to have lunch together. And so on.
You never "raise hackles" by asking something in Slack, because chat is unintrusive by definition (as opposed to walking up to a person uninvited).
By that logic anyone who doesn't want to partake alcohol-infused after works the company arranges needs not to bother. Or anyone who brings their own lunch while the rest of the department goes out for lunch. Or anyone who doesn't like small talk. Anyone with those preferences would not be "staying in touch" in exactly the same way as the remote worker.
-- do you realize that, one does not become effective in RW overnight? We get the habit of effective office work after several years of practice, RW should probably take only slightly less. Spreading this time one day every couple of month indeed turns RW days into days off IMO.
-- who can bring in figures of how much a random general company benefits from rank-and-file employees "knowing what needs to be done" rather than simply following orders? From my personal (very long and diversified) experience, deficient communication is rather a norm in a company, and ... everybody seems to survive?
I like to counter this argument (about the value of informal communication), by the example of the military (where by definition you are not expected to have all information), at which point people usually take offense ;-). Stil, the army to me is the example of the efficient human organization usually attaining the goal?
Have worked remotely 18 out of the last 20 years. The interruptions +remote, but the structure of being in an office +onsite. I'm not sure people can make blanket statements which is more productive I feel it varies by person.
If the company is not competent enough to convey them in mail, Slack, Skype, and 200 other ways, then I'm not sure it matters...
Of course all other constraints are never equal.
Working at the office is about "staying in touch". When you are in the office you see new directions the company is interested in long before you get an assignment.
It doesn't matter if you are in an office with the door closed, or working from home: either way you miss things that you should have been told directly but nobody thought to tell you. So you end up doing otherwise great work that it leading the project in the wrong direction.
That is when you are in the office someone from marketing can see you in the hallway and ask about the hot new feature of today without invoking all the formal channels to take to the guy remotely. Thus when you are working from home you lose a lot of opportunities to do what is needed as opposed to what you are told. People who can figure out the right thing and do that are more valuable than people who only do what they are told.
Note that the title is correct: all employees should be trusted to work remotely from time to time. However that does not mean you should work from home all the time. You should be a regular at the office so that you don't lose touch. At the first sign of illness (you or your kids), bad weather, or a hard no interruptions problem: you should be out of the office and working from home. However you should also be a regular at the office for the benefits of being at the office.
Of course this depends on your job. If you are a contractor you might be in a situation where you do the letter of the contract and are gone - the only time you might want to do something else is if you are trying to turn the contract into a full term position. Even then though, some contracts are get release N out the door, with a possibility of renewal for release N+1 - in that case you may have the option to change what is in release N.