As a counterpoint, we had a mix of remote department and in-office departments at my last company. Transitioning to fully remote made marked an increase in politics every time.

It sounds counterintuitive at first, but fully remote moves even more conversations to side channels. At the office it’s hard to have secret exclusionary meetings without other people noticing eventually. Online, you can create a private Slack channel or even a separate off-Slack group for the in-crowd where you exclude others, and no one can see it.

The politicians also developed a habit of meeting up in person (lunch, shared work days, etc) in ways that strengthened their political power. Ironically, having everyone go remote was a catalyst for giving the politicians a leg up on relationship building.

We still saw upsides of remote work, but I’ve lost all illusions that remote work is an improvement for office politics. If anything, the extra effort required for relationship-building in remote teams just gives the politicians more of a moat to protect their political domain.

I am 100% experiencing this right now. It isn't negative, exactly, at least not yet, but a lot of informal discussions between teams that used to occur in the hallway, break room, or wherever, just doesn't happen spontaneously when we are all remote. So it goes through more traditional channels, which makes it more formal and more political in many cases.

The agenda barely matters. People just tend to behave better when they're dealing with a real human being that they've met instead of a screen name in Slack that they argue with every day.

This is why I never promise anyone 100% WFH or 100% remote any more. I tell everyone to plan for 0-3 weeks travel, giving some leeway for flying people out for face-to-face planning.

I’ve seen this work with unruly customers, too.

MS Teams makes a substantial distinction between:

- group chats, which appear like any other chat interface (Whatsapp, FB Messenger)

- and channels, which appear as potential threads to be nested (which most chatters _hate_)

MS Teams also has much greater overhead for adding members to a Team, which is a prerequisite for looping them in on a @mention within a Channel. All of these are much easier and straightforward on Slack, but you're basically stuck once your Corporate IT Overlords have selected a Product.

That basically turn Office Discussions into Internet discussions. There are many things that just dont translate well with words, or even with Voice and Video Call.

Since you say politics reasons wholly because of this reason, it’s not like Slack is not available if you are not fully remote.

It's not for everyone, don't act like WFH is some sort of amazing thing that only people in bad situations or who are incompetent dislike.

1. is straight up incorrect anyway, my schedule has gotten more consistent since working from home. It's entirely based on your own ability to start and stop your workday.

Being micromanaged remotely isn't much fun either. Like having a stalker. I'd get voice calls within minutes of a Skype status update. "Ah, no, everything's ok. Just grabbing lunch. Thanks for checking."

Even in tech, not everyone is an introvert.

Wanting to work somewhere other than your home does not mean you don't like being at home, nor that you have family or workspace issues. I would assume that some of us have a newfound appreciation for the energy and architecture of the modern cities and offices. I love my home but it's just not the same kind of space.