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this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2026
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Mildly Interesting
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This has been studied for decades since the 90s. Oracle and IBM both did big "floating office" trials several diff times and much has been written about them. A lot of the downsides really come down to team psychology more than anything to do with efficiency or productivity or collaboration. Simply put, people are significantly more empathetic towards people they are in a room with, and significantly more likely to feel hostility or animosity towards someone who isn't. You've almost certainly experienced this if you've done a lot of work with remote teams - even when everything is fine there's almost a universal instinct to talk shit about the other team.
There are well understood ways to deal with this, mind you, but you actually have to be proactive about it. Most CEOs simply don't understand this, or are too lazy to deal with it.
I'm interested by these ways to deal with this issue. Do you have examples of thing I could do to improve the online team mood I'm a member of?
Right now I'm 2 days WFH, but could still be valuable since I'm looking for 100% WFH next.
It's mostly about face time and having people travel to connect remote teams and build rapport. On a personal level just talking about things other than work helps a lot but that's somehow more tedious. It's really hard if everyone is remote all the time, and easier if there's an office where you can onboard people at a central location. A truly zero office company is possible but you basically need to start coaching people on remote team psychology at that point. I actually talk about this pretty directly when interacting with people in our org and call out screen interaction bias when I see it. Its very obvious when you start looking for it, and if you have respected people talking about it, most people get it pretty quick.