Debate: Did remote work actually kill office culture or just change it?

I saw a huge difference in my team’s communication over the last 2 years since we went fully remote. Before, we’d hash out problems in 5 minutes by the coffee machine. Now, it takes 3 days of Slack messages to get the same result. Is that a loss of culture or just a different kind of efficiency? Where do you land on this?

3 comments

3 Comments

reed.elliot14d ago

Funny how we act like 3 days on Slack is some huge disaster when half the time pre pandemic we wasted just as long waiting for someone to get back from lunch or wander over to our desk. People love to romanticize the coffee machine like it was some magical problem solver but half those conversations were just people complaining about the weather. Honestly the whole "culture" thing feels more like people just missing having an excuse to leave their house and socialize. If your team's communication is that fragile maybe it wasn't the location that needed fixing.

the_lisa14d ago

Yeah I used to be one of those people romanticizing the office days but you make a solid point. All that bumping into people at the coffee machine mostly ended up with me listening to someone's weekend story instead of getting my question answered.

margareto2614d ago

Honestly the "coffee machine problem solving" era is like people pretending they never had to wait 20 minutes for Greg to finish telling you about his kid's soccer game before you could ask him a simple question. Ngl, Slack dragging things out for 3 days just means everyone finally gets to overthink their responses which is honestly more accurate to how real decisions should be made anyway. Tbh if your culture dies because you can't bump into someone by accident maybe it wasn't much of a culture to begin with.

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