From what I observed during the pandemic, I sincerely believe that the only reason remote work is worse than working in person is how little effort teams tend to put into making remote work equivalent to in person work. The biggest thing I saw throughout the entire pandemic on multiple teams was zero effort to create a culture of meet on camera for quick ad hoc, hey I have a quick question on this, ah cool thanks bye, it's always have a big fat meeting with lots of people or we're all just poking each other on chat with long reply latencies, which works very poorly. The only solution that was tried at my company was taking attendance, which is crazy, anyone who's gone to school, which is everybody, knows that taking attendance does zero to create collaboration, it just marks down whether you were there. Ass in seat? Check, we're done, mission accomplished. To me if you're taking attendance you've already lost because attendance is table stakes.
I strongly feel a large number of people complaining about "lack of collaboration" have a dark pattern of not documenting things.
Sure, you don't need to write everything down - but how many times could someone have simply RTFM if people were more in the habit of documenting institutional knowledge among other things? Even just defaulting to email discussions would help keep track of things much better.
And yeah, when I'm working with other people, I make a point to hang out in a BigBlueButton or other similar instance, with a note with my phone number there, as well as putting in my email signature line my phone and a note that I'm available for videconference.
One of the problems associated with remote work is that synchronous communication is not guaranteed. People tend to work varying hours and even during their "work hours", they will make breaks to do various activities like household chores etc. So it tends to be more difficult to catch a co-worker for a quit chat. Then there's a feedback loop where you basically stop trying since it has such a low chance anyway.
To me, the work varying hours is part of the problem; if the remote work is expected to replace in office work, then similar hours have to be worked, in which case people need to be available throughout the work day.
To head off negative reaction to this, I'm not saying that remote should always be similar hours, I mean remote work positions that otherwise would have been in office before the pandemic, if that makes sense.
I just look at this situation and to me it looks like people are like, ohh noo, remote work isn't as good as in office work, well, yeah, you haven't even tried to make it anything like "in office work but thru a camera," you've almost allowed your domestic employees and contractors to work as if everyone's in different teams in different timezones, with all of the problems that come with that...
I feel the exact opposite. People should make an effort to make as much communication async as possible. Usually, I don't need a ton of 1:1 interaction, and if you really do feel there's something to discuss synchronously, you can schedule a meeting in advance. The situation where you're so completely blocked that you can't make progress on your own or switch to a different task (or where the house is on fire and something needs to be done now) are rare in my experience.
Of course, sometimes it makes sense to do check-ins (e.g. for onboarding) or a pairing session, but that can also be scheduled.
I also tend to forget things that were just said in personal interactions or meetings. If it's written down, I can look it up.
