The idea of in-person meetings only works if there is one office where everyone is at.
I was forced to move to another state (pre-pandemic). The people on my team were in offices, but 5 different offices. So I moved to another state to be in an office, so I could sit on the phone all day, every day. There is no sense to that. It’s no exaggeration that the forced move cost me tens of thousands of dollars… and for what?
I recently had a FAANG recruiter reach out to me and when I brought up this concern when I was told I’d need to relocate to an office ___location, I was told the recruiter was in a similar portion on her team, spending all day on the phone because her team is spread across multiple offices.
In person meetings are great, but if the reality of the office strategy isn’t going to make them possible, then there is no point. I think the occasional in-person meetup can do a lot to build rapport with members of the team without being in an office all the time, or on a weekly hybrid schedule.
I’d go a step further to say that a meeting where 3 people are in a conference room and others are remote, is worse than everyone joining remote or from their desk. Meetings should either be 100% in-person, or 0% in person. Anything in between is a bad experience. I think it’s a safe bet that any company making news about return to office strategies has multiple offices with teams spread across multiple cities, states, and even countries. This makes meetings a poor justification for workers being in the office.
>Meetings should either be 100% in-person, or 0% in person. Anything in between is a bad experience.
Agreed, even one person joining remotely completely changes the meeting. The remote person is slightly out of sync with everyone, can't participate in any whiteboarding sessions, and you lose the connection because they are a face (or icon) on the screen and they are looking at a wide angle feed of the entire room.
I was forced to move to another state (pre-pandemic). The people on my team were in offices, but 5 different offices. So I moved to another state to be in an office, so I could sit on the phone all day, every day. There is no sense to that. It’s no exaggeration that the forced move cost me tens of thousands of dollars… and for what?
I recently had a FAANG recruiter reach out to me and when I brought up this concern when I was told I’d need to relocate to an office ___location, I was told the recruiter was in a similar portion on her team, spending all day on the phone because her team is spread across multiple offices.
In person meetings are great, but if the reality of the office strategy isn’t going to make them possible, then there is no point. I think the occasional in-person meetup can do a lot to build rapport with members of the team without being in an office all the time, or on a weekly hybrid schedule.
I’d go a step further to say that a meeting where 3 people are in a conference room and others are remote, is worse than everyone joining remote or from their desk. Meetings should either be 100% in-person, or 0% in person. Anything in between is a bad experience. I think it’s a safe bet that any company making news about return to office strategies has multiple offices with teams spread across multiple cities, states, and even countries. This makes meetings a poor justification for workers being in the office.