What would make more sense is simply to move the office to the Midwest, and interact with other branches or businesses remotely.
This would seem to give the best of both worlds - cheaper cost of living, and physical interaction.
The company laptop shows up at your front door and you get on the phone with the hiring manager who tells you how to log in.
I started in April and I've never met any of the people I work with in person. On my team, only one of the people was ever in the actual office.
It isn't a problem. Takes a little longer to build trust with people, that's about it.
> It isn't a problem. Takes a little longer to build trust with people, that's about it.
It is a problem, because there's more to being on a team than getting a laptop and doing assigned work. Losing workplace human contact may be find for some people, but for me the loss has been palpable. The change is necessary given the circumstances, but that doesn't mean it's fine.
This gets at some of it: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/21/opinion/work-from-home-lo....
I work with hardware and being able to have someone physically look at a schematic with me or explain something to me in person greatly shortens the amount of time it takes me to understand them.
Edit: I also think we don't know the long term effects being remote has on innovation. It seems like people congregate in cities because the rewards to being near people are greater than the costs. Is technology really so good now that it can offset all the years of evolution we've gone through to make us into the social animals we are?
For anything abstract I would argue that the people who are able to onboard and form teams and ideas remotely are inherently the best for the job and likely produce a disproportionate percentage of any teams output. In my experience when you remove middle management (as it happens when you go remote), you want to only hire those people adapted to remote and self-directed work.
I would argue that location based and remote teams are fundamentally different companies. Similar to how tech first and tech-second companies are fundamentally different. I can't think of a single tech-second company that was able to move into the tech-first world. Some local companies might be able to morph themselves into remote companies, but as we see today, they will both lose a lot of staff, and even change their product eventually.
I'm lucky in that I have an office that's open so I can still have access to the fancy microscopes etc (as well as to more able sets of soldering hands/equipment), but being largely remote has definitely made distributing prototypes across the team for development and QA much more difficult (not to mention if mods to those prototypes are necessary).
I generally preferred working in the office pre-pandemic, but it wasn't strictly necessary. I also hated living in the bay area. I finally got all the i's dotted and t's crossed and I'm now living somewhere I vastly prefer (far fewer people and a whole lot cheaper). I've only been here 3 weeks and it's already hard to imagine going back.
Just because you can't see how it could work doesn't mean it can't. I know from experience it can. That doesn't mean that it will work in every situation for every person, but there is literally nothing in the world that fits those requirements. Some things work for some people, and not for others. EVERYTHING in life is like that.
Remote working is no different.
Presumably, they'd do it the same way fully-remote companies have always done it. Either you onboard people remotely, or you travel to meet up in person for onboarding. You don't need an office to do that.