Part of why working from home was soo effective for me at first is all the good will and camaraderie that I'd built up with my coworkers over many years - and vice versa. I imagine that if I had started a new role during the pandemic it'd have been quite different.

When people ping you on Slack or email and ask you in a really curt/terse way for something it can feel very transactional without the occasional small talk to humanise your coworkers. And I find it really hard to do that sort of small talk remotely/virtually.

So I think personally I need to have a day every week or two when you have a coffee/lunch/beer with people and get a chance to really have the small talk and put a face with the name. I also love huddling around a whiteboard for certain problems. Before Omicron I started going in one day a week and focusing it on the socialising and the meetings where in-person felt useful.

The catch with that is that it means 'work from home' can't be 'work from anywhere' - as everybody needs to be an occasionally commutable distance from the office for it to work. I also realise that it doesn't save the company money on the office if every team comes in the same day - so you might need a roster kind of thing to maximise the space. That sounds solvable to me though - enough so where it is my preference if we can make it work for 2022...