"Augmenting" your team with remote workers leads to horrible communication. First, meeting rooms require very good audio setup, and very few people will spend the time, hire a sound engineer, and operate the meeting such that everyone in the room is clearly audible. As a end result, the remote workers often sit there with the sound up trying to figure out what's being said most of the time. Thus, people can never really act normally - everything has to be this composed, staged, response.

Additionally, the mostly local team will frequently have offhand conversations the remote workers are never a part of. Thus, you get siloing. Add time zone shifts, and the amount of siloing increases.

The place I work for now has teams that rarely meet in a physical room together - even though several members sit near each other, everyone's got a headset. It is amazing how decent audio changes communication. We also frequently have chats online.

Additionally, all major meetings at my current company are held as if people are remote. And events or other informal affairs are kept organized and isolated. I don' t have to sit through notifications about the coffee machine on the 3rd floor of a building 1300 miles away being broken.

I believe this has led to senior management feeling comfortable working remotely as well, so some VPs work from cities where there is no significant office or company presence.

Now, I _do_ wish this company relied on writing, but not everyone is a good writer. It takes a lot of time to build up that kind of confidence. If I could make one change, it would be to improve writing.

EDIT: I don't know why this is downvoted. It's incredibly rude to have meetings at your desk like that in an open plan office.

> Resolving even little issues takes too long because round trip time between question and answer is often several days.

This is the crux of the issue. You can expect question and answer round trip to be up to 24 hours, but the work flow must not depend on this being being minutes or hours. This means structuring work flow in larger chunks, writing tasks for remote teams clearly and having robust success criteria that remote team can check against, locally, before claiming they are done. And remote team must be able to understand what the request is before signing off on it -- at the very least they should have crystal clear understanding on those written success criteria.

Done this way, little issues that require a 24-hour turnaround are few and far between. It never works perfectly, so the company should also bring key tech leads together a few times per year. It is a different setup, requiring more careful planning at headquarters and competent leads, but it can be done.

But companies that manage remote teams as if they sit in the same building will get some serious disappointment. My 2c.

When I was working like that for a short while, I was trying hard to not collaborate with anyone and just do things myself in order to continue to make progress and get something done. Other team members who were trying to collaborate had extremely low output and their days were filled with troubleshooting stuff together with the remote team since basic things didn't work or got blocked by knowledge not existing on one side etc.

It was a nightmare.

A few bad members can ruin everything.