Not all companies are structured to be innately remote. My team for instance is really struggling to adjust to remote settings, despite having a flexible WFH setup and working closely with remotely located teams before.
It is little things. Relationships between colleagues get colder. The people I used to see daily were also great friends of mine. Giving constructive feedback and taking criticism is a lot easier when it is by a friend and face to face. Meetings lose the wonderful flow they can have when in person. Brainstorming and white boarding has all but disappeared.
The way I see it, with no offense meant. If your work can be done fully remotely. Maybe it isn't that difficult to begin with.
Big decisions need big discussions and big consensus. My best progress has been made when I get a room together with a team mate, with a huge board and we brainstorm for hours on end.
90% of the time coding is the easiest part of the job. That it can be done remotely, doesn't alleviate the bottleneck much.
Or maybe if your team consisted of introverted, brutally objective people from the get go, who like the additional coldness of remote communication, then sure. But, it actively excludes a lot of the workforce.
I agree that it's management. I have two primary projects right now, and the difference couldn't be more stark.
One has most of the issues you describe, the workflow has gotten cold, meetings are mechanical, communication is poor, the team slack is dry. Problem solving is hard over email, only one person on the team proactively makes phone calls. And of the two offices, this one had the most people that would chime in on conversations from over the cube walls.
On the other project, management has taken the "overcommunicate" route to WFH. Everything feels collaborative, I talk to everyone often enough that nothing that would naturally come up in the office but might not be big enough for an email gets dropped. I have better insight into the electrical and mechanical engineer's tasks than I did while in the office, we identify points of future collaboration calls in meetings, and I've gotten to know people joining the project during WFH well enough over video calls that we now chit-chat over slack.
Perhaps the most striking sign of a culture difference is around 2/3 of people on both projects only turn their webcams on for calls regarding the 2nd project.
Not all companies are structured to be innately remote. My team for instance is really struggling to adjust to remote settings, despite having a flexible WFH setup and working closely with remotely located teams before.
It is little things. Relationships between colleagues get colder. The people I used to see daily were also great friends of mine. Giving constructive feedback and taking criticism is a lot easier when it is by a friend and face to face. Meetings lose the wonderful flow they can have when in person. Brainstorming and white boarding has all but disappeared.
The way I see it, with no offense meant. If your work can be done fully remotely. Maybe it isn't that difficult to begin with. Big decisions need big discussions and big consensus. My best progress has been made when I get a room together with a team mate, with a huge board and we brainstorm for hours on end. 90% of the time coding is the easiest part of the job. That it can be done remotely, doesn't alleviate the bottleneck much.
Or maybe if your team consisted of introverted, brutally objective people from the get go, who like the additional coldness of remote communication, then sure. But, it actively excludes a lot of the workforce.