[zith]

This is my experience in very small companies (think a <10 person startup). The value of everyone knowing a lot of what's going on from immersion is immense. You can have very little processes around information sharing (which takes time to set up and fine tune!), very little time to convince people what needs to be done (it's obvious from the conversation the other side of the room is having), and all the nuance of in-person communication is kept.

Once a company gets a little bit bigger, the processes around information sharing, planning and other communication has to be in place anyway. Teams need to collaborate, work needs to be tracked, there has to be meetings for planning. Once you're already doing that you might not lose anything by going remote.

[fhd2]

This. If your company is on two floors, you have a remote company anyway.

In my experience, it's not _entirely_ that simple though. For some people, chatting and video calls feel super awkward and makes them avoid communication. For other people, in-person is super awkward and has the same effect. There are a lot of nuances. I suspect RTO happens in companies run by the former type, and remote happens in companies run by the latter. As a CTO (did that for more than a decade), I always tried to give the team what they need. But even then, when in doubt, I suppose I often went for what I would need, if I was them.

[phicoh]

In my experience, meeting people in person at the coffee machine or at lunch creates way more social cohesion compared to exclusively using mail, chat, and video conferencing.

This is important even in bigger organizations, because you want to catch errors early on. It helps if people bounce ideas off colleagues to see if there is anything they missed.

With people you barely know, if it is not your responsibility to comment, why bother? Better to get get some work done, then to read the chat all day.

Personally, I think about two days per week at the office is best for this purpose. But that may very from person to person.

[soco]

I am in a big company >100k employees and I don't care what the other million people do, because obvious reasons. I work for remote clients and my team is scattered all over the world, so there's no high bandwidth input possible from them. My local colleagues work in totally unrelated projects so beyond a bit of fun there's no shared information needed or required. I still go in the office for this banter like once a week, but I guarantee you my productivity is like the half - there's always somebody walking around with a coffee interrupting me for some "high bandwidth information exchange". Morals? Please stop assuming everybody works like you.