Reply to RTO in many cases is the height of hubris.

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]What I think is absolute hubris is thinking that working from home has no impact on team engagement, cohesion, creative problem solving, company culture, and general communication. I am in No Way championing RTO to prepandemic norms, but I think there is significant value for being in person once a week. With natural fluctuations for people / kids being sick, holidays, school breaks, dentist appointments, etc. I feel like this averages out to employees coming in 3 days a month. If you truly think you are an independent contributor and that you gain nothing from going to the office in person occasionally, I would argue you don’t understand your role in your organization or you are shortchanging your org in the value you could contribute and short changing yourself in terms of career development and refining your soft skills.

Two stories to make my case:

I manage several teams in the procurement department of a large IT company. We worked remotely pre-pandemic, but came together once a month for required training. That day counted towards the recommended 1 day per week. As a team lead I was very lenient with that “day” and my team probably averaged 2.5 days per month with some people coming in at 10am or leaving at 3pm for traffic or kid related pick up / drop off. When the pandemic started we didn’t do any extra video calls or engagement activities. We thought “we know how to be remote!” Around 6 months I noticed we were just less connected as a team - despite taking every day. Around a year, little cracks started to show because people didn’t know about special projects or certain initiatives that they would have wanted to participate in. Even though these things are announced in meetings, I think people were missing out on the coffee maker / lunch time chats to say “let’s work on that together”. In Year 2 people started leaving. I had to start arrranging coverage when previously team members naturally stepped up to cover each other, knowing it would be reciprocated. Without a personal connection, it was just a job no different than the same function at another company. It has been a long hard fight to build a team back to a fraction of the connection and camaraderie we had pre-pandemic.

Second example - I once worked in Chicago and had a client in Vancouver BC back when FaceTime/video calls didn’t exist yet. We worked on the project for months before meeting in person. We were a consulting company delivering services to an internal department and the travel expense was considered extraneous and unnecessary. At a mid-point we went out to the client for 3 days. Just 3 days over 6 months. Somehow taking in person and also sharing meals with the team and getting to know them was SO impactful. It felt like when we got back to Chicago that all of our meetings went so much more smoothly, we communicated more efficiently and solved problems more collaboratively.

TL;DR - A small amount of face time is priceless. It doesn’t take much to establish and maintain that connection, but it’s short sighted to think in person time is useless. [/quote]

NP here - I don't think face time is useless. In fact, I had an in-person meeting yesterday that went way better in person, even though it could have been a phone call. I just think it's mostly not worth the tradeoffs. That is, yes you lose something with remote, but most of us are willing to give it up in light of what we get by not commuting, and most employers are willing to give it up if they are saving on CRE (those who aren't are going back, IMO, mostly for CRE reasons not employee camaraderie). And with the current hybrid situation, most mandatory in-office days do not include in-person meetings even among the people who are all there on the same day, making mandatory in-office entirely useless to employees.

BTW, in your first example, it's wild to me that you look at employee disengagement during a global health emergency, in which people were dealing with a ton of personal and family issues (and which was followed by a really strong job market where people could get raises) and say that losing your monthly in-person was the reason for disengagement. People had other priorities -- which ties right back into RTO not being worth the benefits of chatting in person, even though those benefits exist.[/quote]

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