This conversation, when I've had it with people, usually ends up with the same conclusions: people would like to see their coworkers face-to-face like.... a couple times a month. People have deep relationships with others without needing to see them 5 times a day, after all!

I think the difficulties around relationship building in this time are deeply linked to whether you are able to socialize "through a computer" well or not. I'm not really talking about Zoom etc so much as just text chat or the like. There are definitely people more and less comfortable at it.

It is an interesting question. I have two new team members we added 2 months ago. Neither is very technical and, admittedly, it can get challenging sometimes, because pre-WFH, I could have just showed them what to do instead of spending 20 minutes trying to explain what I want them to do. I could technically grab a screen, but.. apparently, neither learns well that way and just yesterday I had some really odd issues with sound and MS Teams screen sharing.

Anyway, as much as I love remote, in person has its benefits.. like being able to strangle someone when needed.

I've found the opposite.

As a developer, WFH actually facilitates things like pair programming and peer review. Especially for introverts like myself, it is much easier to do a screenshare of your IDE and review code in a group than try to sit next to each other or review code on a big screen in a meeting room. This has become a thing for us now (let's jump on a zoom and i'll show you quickly), for anything that's too complex to slack.

The ability to easily screen share and record sessions as needed means I can get the big picture in the initial live session and review the details later via recording as needed (especially those nitpicky code details nobody remembers the first time around).

I will miss this when we have to go back to the office.

Videoconferencing tooling is still awful.

Bad latency, pixelated screensharing, frequent issues with sound and video. On top of that hardware problems with bad microphone setups, cross talk, etc.

I hope that at some point someone is going to show up and take this seriously. Treat it like a medical service, or a least close to. But I'm not holding my breath. I believe it was least year that I read that John Carmack had measured the latency of his cell phone and found it to in the vicinity of 700 ms.

Unrelated: how do you remember your username?

That's the sound his co-workers make when he strangles them!

Not OP, but as someone who's used such handles in the past, using a password manager.

I'm not OP but it almost looks like they got the username and password fields mixed-up when they were creating their account.

For all we know, their password might be something like "remote_worker"!

My guess would be that that's a phrase.

or you never log out

Hm I hadn’t thought about this in that way - this is very true - we maintain a lot of close relationships with people we don’t spend nearly 40 hours a week with.

And fwiw, I think I fall within this line of thinking - for me going to the office would be productive if it were at its absolute most once per week.

> how much of the current productivity is the result of relationships that were built in the office.

This is going to be the big struggle for teams who formed in person but are now hiring remote.

I joined my current company about six months prior to the pandemic and had ample time to get to know my colleagues face-to-face, making the transition to remote working very pleasant. I'm not sure if the experience has been the same for people we've onboarded remotely; they're productive but I'm unsure if it'll be easy for them to build up the same kinds of relationships.

You also tend to get into situations where there's a social divide between a subset of the team who have constantly worked together synchronously in the past and new starters who only appear in 2D on Zoom. This may not be a problem for some people, but it's a concern for someone like me who gets a lot of their daily social interactions via work.

There's definitely a social part of work that, IMHO, waxes and wanes as you go through life. In your 20s and pre-family it's a significant aspect of your social life. Then I think it wanes as you have a family and kids when you don't have enough time for everything and work socialization is a chore. Then I think once again after the kids move out work socialization becomes more important again.

Of course thats just a generalization.

I find my older coworkers have more friends at work, simply because its the people outside thier family they see every day. I am friends with zero coworkers but also can spend my evenings out with friends - I don't have familial duties

> I learned more about people that I had spent months zooming/emailing with over the past few weeks talking to them face to face.

One thing I thought of that could alleviate this would be the team work getaways. Think 2 weeks away, 3-4 times a year. Obviously not everyone can every join all of them, but I'd imagine most still would do 2. Ideally the families should also be invited.

I am sure it would still come out cheaper than maintaining office space and build stronger relationships than the mere coffee break talk.

>One thing I thought of that could alleviate this would be the team work getaways. Think 2 weeks away, 3-4 times a year.

This proposal is so far outside what I’d consider ok that I’m not even sure whether I’ve understood correctly?

If employees are going away together somewhere for a couple weeks, four times a year, then they’re spending 2 whole months away from home, living in another location (maybe a hotel?) And the suggestion that they take their family along? What happens to the partner’s work? The kids’ school and their friends? Your social life?

And this is just scratching the surface of the practical considerations - totally setting aside the dystopian aspect of spending so much of your own time with your co-workers.

Even with your extra proviso that not everyone would need to join, if a company had this one aspect of their work-practice, then I’d avoid them at all costs

I worked remote for 5 years before COVID. I was somewhere around 10% travel to customer locations, and about 1 week per year to HQ overseas. It was a great balance. I’m not sure how that would scale to an entire company though as one week of travel expenses worked out to around $2000 for domestic travel within the US. Does the cost of carrying office space work out to more or less than $8k per person per year?

COVID style isolated WFH ruined WFH for me and contributed to burnout.

Renting a hotel for a week is probably way cheaper than $8k per person. Your costs were large in part because of the small scale that is done.

You're not including airfare, food, and meeting space. It might not quite reach $2k but pretty close.

But that's likely still cheaper than office space. That ranges anywhere from $20-$70+ per square foot depending on city and how nice it is. So even a tiny desk space is 500-2k a month.

Still, you guys assume this would be within the US, only. Excuse me for saying that, but that's some typical, US-centric kind of thinking. There's really whole world out there. If you're going to go for 2 weeks, go to Asia, South America or Central/South Europe and pay a third of the costs. Heck, do you know how cheap country side airbnbs in Portugal or Italy are? THAT'S how you build lasting memories.

Time becomes expensive then too… Jet lag is also a substantial issue. You have to accommodate the lowest common denominator in these situations. (People who have substantial family, don’t do well with jet lag, and aren’t very fond of long flights in economy)

Personally, 2 weeks is the minimum in my book for any kind of substantial time difference (4+ hours) and substantial flight time (8+ hours each way). I’m sure others feel even more aggressively than I do. I cannot imagine how people with kids would feel. The food and bacteria issues also just make things really challenging for many people.

There’s also the issue that you’re usually there for work, not just fun. Thus, you don’t really get to enjoy the spectacles as much because you’re gonna be doing 40+ hours working. I’ve been in exotic destinations before and had work stuff come up. It is not fun anymore. Terrible if anything. Rather be home than be in amazing place but unable to enjoy it.

You make some good points. Time difference is definitely a factor, but the thing is that with people WFH, you presumable are already dealing with people working in different timezones. So you organize those trips to always be somewhat within +-4h of the most of your employees. And those who can't join, will join into another destination. It would surely be one of those things you'd have to have a team dedicated to organize. But that's a team that would replace a bunch of existing, office-specific operational positions.

Food and bacteria – well, that's true. Although not everyone is affected and these come mostly from poor hygiene of either cooks/staff or the employees themselves. You make sure you choose a trusted and tested locations and educate your employees over tap water usage. I guess not much more can be done.

> There’s also the issue that you’re usually there for work, not just fun.

I think it's a matter of the vision. I absolutely would have made it to be more fun than work. First of all, in my example those would be frequent, so there would be less or no FOMO and not everyone would go to each of them. Which means you could definitely delegate the line support to those absent. If you ended up getting called in for help after all, that's just life. But, that's also unlikely to happen each time you getaway.

> you’re gonna be doing 40+ hours working

Well, no. I understand it may have been like this in your case, but it shouldn't be. I see those getaways more as a concentrated leisure/team-building activities you otherwise do throughout the year in the office and still get paid for. Except here you have an added benefit of actually being able to hold some really cool, out of the "cubicle-box" brainstormings/hackatons. Plus all the team building games, parties, etc. – again, all those things you'd normally do in the office to actually bond with people.

My $8k figure was based on 4 company get togethers per year ($2k * 4).

$2k for one week of travel expenses was based on 5 nights of hotel at $150/night ($750), 5 days of rental car at $200, gas for the car at $40, roundtrip flight at $500, travel to/from home airport at $60, parking at home airport at $50, and 6 days of meals @ $55/day ($330). Grand total $1930 plus taxes and tips.

When my company rented out the convention space in the Hard Rock Hotel plus rooms for 50-100ish employees, the room rates were still $150+/night. Granted that was the same week as CES, but I don't think hotel costs scale down that much unless one is willing to sacrifice location or something else.

The other things should be scalable a bit with tradeoffs. That said, I wouldn't be too keen on going on a week long work trip where I can't leave the hotel, must eat every meal at the hotel with my colleagues, and don't have any way to get around. To me, that means a successful event would have to budget for people expensing at least some of their own meals and for people expensing at least a few taxis/ubers.

Again, my experience with big company gatherings is tied to CES which is its own beast, but in the case of CES my company pretty much left everyone up to their own devices in terms of getting to/from the hotel and for most meals. Hotel rooms were also individually expensed (but out of a reserved block of rooms). My company was obsessive about expenses and the cost of CES, so I imagine if there were a cheaper way to do it, we would have been doing it that way instead.

The thing is I did not even think of doing that in the US, one of the most expensive of places. And even if in the US, you don't have to go to another city. No, quite the contrary. Some wilderness. Alaska, maybe? Montana? And that's not for the whole company at the same time, but for individual teams. You want some sightseeing? Sure, how about Puerto Rico? Or abroad, like Mexico, or South America? The options are limitless. Assuming people WFH anyway, it doesn't have to be "close" to anywhere in particular.

Yeah, as a long-term essentially remote employee, IMO you need to have week-long team meetings. Probably quarterly. I hesitate to require weekends. On the other hand, I have traveling about 130 days per year pre-pandemic.

Why do you need week long meetings ?

First off, take "week-long" as maybe a few days--perhaps a combination of broader team, smaller teams, and other syncs. Why more than one day? It's just more efficient if people are going to travel anyway. Especially long distances.

People are social and, in my experience, remote interactions work better when people have previously connected in-person.

> My biggest question right now about sustained wfh is how much of the current productivity is the result of relationships that were built in the office.

None. I started 3 different consulting jobs during the pandemic and always felt very productive and very connected to my colleagues, even though I never met them.

After working remote for ten+ years I disagree. There are things one can better understand about a person in a face to face meeting. When discussions become differently casual. Also some discussions are simpler in a completely informal circumstance ("random" meeting at the watercooler) than a virtual meeting of any kind.

Of course ymmv but blunt "None" isn't right.

People talk online too; it’s different for people who grew up using text messages and social media where they’re accustomed to building and maintaining online relationships.

I’m old, so don’t look at me, but when you look at the cohort of folk who are dealing with wfh successfully and productively, it’s, in my direct observation, younger folk.

None is perhaps true for more people than you think.

The ones who are struggling are the people who don’t “do chat” (ie the “oh no! I despise slack” group and the “let’s have a call to discuss that” group) and managers.

...and to be fair, it’s a lot harder to be a manager remotely; I can’t deny that.

...but people can build meaningful relationships online; it’s just different, and that’s hard for older people, in general.

Many of my best friendships were forged online, often in groups collaborating on doing real work.

I have not been able to get any such spontaneity during remote work with my group or division at a large tech company with mostly young coworkers. I haven't been able to figure out why.

> the “oh no! I despise slack” group

Chat can be super useful, but can also create a nasty interruption culture. I don't know what the tools are to turn chat into a value-adding thing, but I don't think they're in place yet.

It pains me to see the number of people who reply quickly to chat messages all day in order to show they're 'working' rather than doing their jobs.

>Chat can be super useful, but can also create a nasty interruption culture

How is does chat creates an interruption culture compared to people literally standing in your shoulder and directly interrupting you? At least with chat I can decide to ignore the notifications until I’m finished with my current task.

Sending a chat message is a really low bar: people send off chat messages at will, without respect to whether someone looks like they're concentrating, wearing headphones, have the door closed, are in the office, whatever. This is fine so long as chat is regarded as async, but in a culture where people feel compelled to get them in real time, chat becomes super interrupty, even compared to people coming by.

If people exercise good judgement on ignoring notifications, it's less rough, though the tooling is really poor for using chat for async tracking, organization, triaging, and replies, even compared to emails or tickets.

bingo - chat interruptions are more manageable than a literal drive-by

> > the “oh no! I despise slack” group

I despise slack more than probably most anyone. I've been working remote more often than not since the early 90s though, so remote is very natural. Non-stop interruptions will kill you though, regardless of job location, so close that slack tab.

> I don't know what the tools are to turn chat into a value-adding thing, but I don't think they're in place yet.

It's called email.. in the case of slack, just let it send notifications to email. That's how I monitor slack, I'll check my email when I have free time between concentration sessions.

It certainly depends on how willing you are to just have a random off topic chat with someone over IM. For me, there are a few people where if its the last hour of the day, we will just spend 30 mins half working half chatting. This helps build relationships with the people you work with in an otherwise unproductive period. If they are really busy at the time they can just tell you.

Face to face is very overrated.

During 2020 I interviewed people, hired and onboarded a new person, ended up interviewing for another company myself, joined them, have interviewed and hired new people at the new gig. Never met anyone in person. No issues at all.

Been doing similar conditions for much longer than a year though. Over ten years ago I was leading a team of 20+, everyone distributed across the globe, nobody in the same timezone as me.

I strongly disagree, between people that do not turn on their webcam during meetings, don't stay after 5 ect ... there is no social connection and nothing forces them to do so.

I'm glad, but this is one experience.

Many people, if not most, have more potential to connect better when more senses are engaged and more experiences are shared. These relationships sustain over time, with some degradation of course.

One thing that I've expressed to my company and coworkers is that I'd like to see full remote become more of a norm but I'd also love to see team building events remain as well. If there are a few times a year where everyone congregates in one location (probably at less expense than actually keeping an office set aside for them for the year mind you) and has a picnic or hackday that sounds awesome to me.

The pandemic made in person social interaction impossible (mostly, at least really difficult and uncomfortable) but that will pass. We can be full time remote but still occasionally grab a coffee with coworkers if that's convenient for folks. I'm a bit behind most of you (Canada is still mostly shut down thankfully) but I suspect that daily social interactions will start to increase rapidly as second doses start rolling out. Very few people actually want to be locked away at home all day, I think most folks just hate the idea of commuting and being a butt-in-chair again.

> We can be full time remote but still occasionally grab a coffee with coworkers if that's convenient for folks.

+1 this sentence; personally, I'm not interested in the fully distributed model espoused by some evangelists. I still desire physical proximity, with just-enough/just-in-time physical interactions as determined by myself (and relevant coworkers). I would love working for a business that offers something like an internal WeWork - reservable low-density dedicated workspaces, near social venues and transportation.

Yep, I’ve been referring to this as “work locally”, and I also feel this is an ideal balance, although it does limit your access to talent.

Maybe it limits your access to talent, but it will surely expand your access to experienced employees.

This rings true for me. I was in a very hectic workplace when the pandemic began and was able to function pretty much as effectively as I would in office.

Then I made a switch to a different company towards the end of last year and I do not yet feel a part of the team as I would normally. This is despite having a friend in the team. New relationships have been very hard to build with completely remote onboarding.

Personally, I have joined a company and scaled the team from 12-52 engineers over the pandemic. Our productivity is through the roof and everyone is getting really well and forming good connections.

> how much of the current productivity is the result of relationships that were built in the office.

IME these relationships are a function of how much time you spend talking with people and not of physical proximity. At my last job the person I was closest too was on another continent. We worked quite closely so I spent way more time talking with them then some people that sat a few feet away from me. We knew each others lunch and break schedules better than the people we ate lunch with.

There is a tendency to talk more with people next to you and only zoom someone for direct work discussion, but in both scenarios there's room to force some socialization. In our line of work we even have tools like pair programming to enforce these relationships.

I was a good bit more productive over the first few months of the pandemic than since then, and I attribute some of that (though not all) to the fact that most of the work I was doing in March to June of 2020 was on projects that had been originated back when we were in the office, while the projects I've worked on since then were originated after we went remote.

This isn't quite about relationships because I knew the people involved before; it's more about not having information that you tend to get just from being around the office. I'm not saying this is an argument for going back into the office so much as being mindful about communication.

The team I was on had never met in person. I think fully remote can work for a large portion of the population, once the same effort and resources are provided to them as in office workers.

I feel in opposite way and my experience including few years of pre pandemic remote working.

At office you can work together with same peoples over years but not get any real clue about who they are truly, because lot of politics, pretending and fears included in office life. On remote work peoples usually more open, honest and direct, in most cases it easiest for them to share stuff that they have passion about or describe real issues in life (But I think that also not true if your work required to do lot of short projects with different peoples).

Also, if you already work with someone for a long time remotely it always nice to meet him in real life and get to know little more.

I've now spent decades working with people I never met.

If you've been working remotely for decades, you:

A) Have a totally different work experience than 99.99% of folks out there

B) Might have different personality type than a huge chunk of people out there (hard to quantify, a guesstimate of mine would be at least 60%)

Perhaps. I note that when I worked in the bosom of the valley long ago (Netscape campus on Ellis), often I was working with others in the organization who were in different buildings and I never met them. Working with others in different countries has also been the norm for me for decades, predating my own remove move.