My personal experience is that having initial in-person to actually get to know people short cuts a ton of time establishing a good working relationship to make subsequent remote collaboration more effective.
Funnily, DH's experience has been the opposite.
He's had 4 different subordinates and a peer join his team since covid, and he's actually found it easier to integrate them into the team without the office nonsense and distractions.
One of the team members was only a temporary placement, and they developed such a great rapport that DH is now their mentor even though they've moved on to a new department.
It really depends on the work I think. The work DH does isn't really collaborative, so it doesn't require a ton of meetings. It requires a lot of one on one conversation with the person assigning the work (ie DH), but otherwise it's quite independent.
Meanwhile, my non-profit work is hopeless without in person meetings. It's a lot of wrangling big personalities and handling delicate group politics and egos. It just doesn't work over zoom very well.
My point is not to disagree with you, just to emphasize yet again that I don't think we can generalize anything to all workplaces.
Remote also mitigates some "hey you have a second?" water cooler conversations that exclude folks who are not at the office for whatever reason.
My team when covid hit was split between two offices. Most of us (I think 5/7) were in one office. The two people in the other office regularly commented how much more connected they felt to the team as a result of WFH.
I think it's also important to recognize that there are two types of remote.
- Pandemic remote - 12+ months remote, no in person meetings
- Regular remote - as many onsites as you want
Covid remote is not the same as what working remotely is in a normal world. You can much more easily take the best of both worlds in a non-pandemic remote situation.
Yeah, that's a distinction as well, working from home vs truly working remote from your employer's location.
Some jobs are very amenable to being truly remote. None of DH's new subordinates work in the same province, and he'll likely never meet them. However, his peer on a different team doesn't do as much research, they hold knowledge events, so a lot of the work can be done at home, but does benefit from in person coordination.
Overtime each workplace will figure out for themselves what works. I know some companies are knee jerking back to pure in office work, but there's just SO MUCH savings to be had by not maximizing office space that eventually they won't be able to ignore the siren call of the bottom line.
Enough big companies are already not bringing people back. As someone already said, this genie isn't going back in the bottle, no matter how long some companies hold out.
The pressure of housing costs, stress of commutes, demand for remote work, and rise of the gig economy was already exerting enormous pressure to allow more out-of-office work. Covid didn't start it, it's just the massive catalyst that will speed it up because it's proving that the reasons for resistance aren't as legit a concern as everyone worried about.
Historically, requests to work from home were driven by people who needed some kind of accomodation: parents, people with disabilities, etc. So it has historically had a bias against it because there are biases against these populations.
Covid is the great leveler. With almost everyone working from home, for such a long time, it became a lot easier to see what type of work performance stayed consisted, what suffered, and what thrived.
I know that the Canadian government has absolutely no plan to bring everyone back. They have been on a mission for the past decade or so to cut their office space budget. Entire departments have been building infrastructure for remote work for years.
They're the biggest employer in the city, and other businesses have to compete with them. We have a substantial tech sector here, so they will follow pace with whatever the government does. Shopify has already said they aren't going back to the office.
As I said, perhaps some companies will knee-jerk everyone back to their cubicles at first, but the writing is on the wall in my city that the change will be rapid and permanent.
With winter commutes here being so dangerous, the employee demand will be astronomical, and we've had very high employment rates for the last few years, which means staffing shortages, so what employees want matters.
If even one major city moves quickly in this direction and companies demonstrate substantial savings as a result, even the most recalcitrant, old school CEOs can't resist a proven strategy for improving their bottom lines.
