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.
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.
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.
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.
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.