[khendron]

> but of course plenty of orgs figure out how to collaborate effectively while remote.

Some do, but most don't. Too many companies seem to think becoming remote means just installing Zoom on everybody's computers and sending them home. In reality, there is a lot more to it than that.

No remote technology comes close to having collaborators together in a room with a whiteboard, with a well-defined agenda. But while remote collaboration is less efficient, it doesn't mean it can't work. You just have to recognize that things are going to move slower and consensus of opinion will take more time.

[gumby]

Where’s the work on converging the two so (ideally) it doesn’t matter if you’re in the office or not?

I spend half my work time in a chem lab and half not in the lab. I would benefit if the two environments were not so disjoint.

> No remote technology comes close to having collaborators together in a room with a whiteboard, with a well-defined agenda.

Sad to say this is very true (with a minescule number of lucky exceptions IME). There is a lot of effort going into trying to narrow the gap but no breakthroughs yet that I have seen.

But there seems to be no work on the opposite.

For example these days it’s pretty routine to have automatic transcripts and recordings of zoom calls posted in the appropriate slack channels so you can catch up on parts (or all) you missed, refer to a discussion that might not have felt significant at the time, and so on. That stuff doesn’t exist in meatspace meetings.

The random asynchronous slack remark in the middle of the night can be transformative (most of course are useless). The same is true running into someone at the coffee machine.

We’re a startup but every morning we have a deliberately agendaless, unstructured call (late enough that kids are at school and you’ve had time to catch up on things if you want). Sometimes it’s 20 minutes and sometimes three hours. We ended up doing a major technology pivot as a result of this. But this doesn’t scale.