>Productivity has fallen off a cliff among everyone I've asked

You're not asking but I'm here to tell you that productivity has skyrocketed for me & those that I work directly with.

At the end of the day, that comes down to the type of industry/work and whether you have effective management. Organizations that are able to make 100% remote work function properly are at a serious competitive advantage in many ways.

Were these people with "person" jobs or "thing" jobs? Person jobs are sales, marketing, maybe even business analyst, etc. Thing jobs are coders, DBAs, accountants, etc. I find it very easy to believe that people whose job primarily revolves around other people will have serious productivity issues remotely. It's harder to comprehend that jobs around code/numbers/widgets have the same problem. I'm not saying it's impossible, just harder to understand.

Things and person I guess? This is in research, but any research is about communicating ideas. People need other people to help with their research and strategize the next steps, and it's hard to properly explain your thoughts and engage people with your ideas if you aren't in the same room with zero body language and have to speak one person at a time, and are bogged down by having too many zoom meetings to make up for the lack of informal meetings to do any real deep work with the time left.

It's a two pronged effect that myself and colleagues are experiencing: the meetings themselves aren't very productive due to the lack of in person communication and need to be longer to share the same quantity of information and understanding, by having to coordinate meetings between multiple people they are perfectly interspersed such that you can't really get any deep work done until 5pm rolls around and you can start burning the midnight oil uninterrupted.

Plus there is the mental side. We are friends who work together as much as we are collegues, and losing that side of interactions is tough for everyone. If I we had been working remote full time I would have never made these friendships stemming from casual random conversations, which imo really improves productivity in the group more than anything else.

How much of your day was taken up by meetings before and is the same amount of time used for the equivalent meetings now? Do you have additional "status" meetings that were hastily put together just because?

Most of the marketing teams I work with were pretty distributed anyway. Direct sales does a lot of F2F normally but many/most don't have company offices. And there are Thing jobs that involve, e.g., working with hardware that can't really be done remotely.

Zoom, despite being better than the past software, still is fairly bad compared to talking face to face. Low bit rate video, walkie-talkie style communication due to noise cancellation, even when you all have headphones on and other issues just make it frustrating and lower quality.

Also for tight knit teams, the lack of a daily lunch with your coworkers is something else you miss.

Personally, I've been way _more_ productive during all of this. And before the pandemic, I was somewhat of an in-office advocate myself.

Same for me. My team members have all told me their productivity is up sharply without me prompting them during 1:1s. I was a strong advocate of in-office work before, but now I think we'll probably plan 2-3 days weekly from home once work returns to the office.

What are your thoughts on companies like Basecamp, Gitlab doing remote so well?