I’m a little suprised that Richard Hamming doesn’t come up in this conversation. He’s a mathmetician who noticed from working in research at many different locations that there were 2 kinds of people, those who worked with their doors open vs those who worked with their doors closed. The closed were considerably more productive in the short term. In the long term they were largely irrelevant to their field. I’m wondering if WFH is analogous to working with your door closed. It’s much harder to be distracted by colleagues who might be be bringing course correcting information about your field. It’s the main reason I like working in offices, the random encounters that seem impossible remote. I have a suspicion that onsite companies may move slower but have better acceleration all things being equal. But, if you can’t attract talent, which this article suggests, that might be a bigger problem to overcome, and I don’t know which has a bigger effect.

My simplistic view: A company is a collection of workers who need to work as a team to achieve goals that are a not achievable by a single person.

Therefore the communication/synchronisation/interaction of the people is the most important thing that defines a company.

1. Workers in an office can onboard new workers more easily.

2. Leaders (whether official or unofficial) can communicate with people more easily.

3. Companies benefit from the social bonds formed between workers inside the office environment.