I'm a programmer and for the last year and a half my team is working on a completely new design for our product. In order to achieve it, we had to work closely with the design team. As the company is mostly remote (even though he have an office and basically all of the team is located in the same city), we did many meetings online. They were not very productive. It was obvious that some people were either frying eggs, watching TV or whatever, but some members were active and collaborative, while others were silent and basically non-existant. Because of that we had to repeat all the same stuff every other week and we were getting nowhere.
So we decided - I mean really, all of us decided as a team, not because some exec or middle management feller made us - to meet several times a week in the office to clean things out conceptually. We did 3 days a week for a couple of weeks; then 2 days for a couple more and then we started meeting once a week. In a month we made a staggering progress, all of us were on the same page and from that moment on it was smooth sailing.
I'm the last person on the world to diss remote working - I fucking love it. And I still do. But there are times that people need to meet face to face and yes, it makes a huge difference. It depends on the situation though. Because when we cleaned up all the conceptions, the work itself has been remote 95% of the time - and there were no problems. I'm going to the office once a week - most of the time everyone is staring at their screens and that's about as collaborative as it gets. If someone tells me - "You need to be in the office to do better work" - sorry, that's absurd.
If there is a reason to go there, like the one above - I'm all in. I was probably one of the people who missed the least amount of live meetings. But if some fat cat tells us to do something - not cool.
