> You dismiss communications tools, but it's more about who is using them than the tools themselves in my opinion.
And in my opinion those virtual tools are inferior in many ways to face to face communication (and superior in other ways, as you point out), and those pros and cons matter and are genuinely impactful regarding how people should communicate and collaborate in a remote setting vs an in-person setting.
All that being said, getting back to the original claim:
I think those are the same companies that aren't willing to put in the work required to build strong collaborative cultures _onsite_.
Looking at my reply I realize it wasn't sufficiently responsive to the statement.
I think I have a deeper claim, which is that in a face-to-face office setting, culture is more likely to evolve on its own accidentally because human beings are inherently social creatures, and incidental interactions in an in-person setting result in a culture developing.
In a remote setting, those incidental interactions are far less likely to happen. That means the development of culture, and social connections within the organization in general, are less likely to occur organically. Instead, you have to rely on much more deliberate culture building.
So I think I agree with the statement that "companies with a strong practice of building and developing a work culture in an in-office setting will have an easier time transitioning to remote work, because they have practices in place to be intentional about work culture development and reinforcement".
I don't agree with the inverse statement (as posited by the person I responded to) that "companies that don't have a practice of building a strong culture in a remote setting will not have a strong culture in an in-person setting" because I think office culture is more likely to grow organically in a face-to-face setting where incidental interactions with people are more likely to occur.