I'm in the same situation and I agree that when we are together we do collaborate and plan better. On Zoom, people tend to set their mic on mute and very passively engage. However, once we have to actually execute, being in the office is a negative. In the office, it is impossible for me to put my head down and work for a couple hours without someone showing up at my desk with a question. On Slack, I can set dnd with a status message and flow.
Honest question: in which way does productivity improve? Is that measurable? Or is that just a well-being feeling for meeting colleagues IRL?
In day to day remote work do you work together, or is it fully async with some chat-only meetings?
My teams velocity increased when we started doing hybrid instead of full remote. Of course thats not proof of anything as our jira points arent objective but it definitely lines up with feeling more productive. We were pretty async while remote. I dont think remote without productivity loss is impossible, but you need very skilled managers and most companies dont have those.
For us being in a central location is not possible. But for companies with an office building I can see the human dynamic of being together is very powerful.
Even with all the chat, trackers, conference tools etc “context” is the hardest thing to do remotely.