Personally I grew up with my friends in multiple continents, and messenger apps like MSN etc kept us connected.
Every job I’ve had has similarly been a mix of locations with teams over multiple sites.
Working from home during the pandemic has been a natural extension of that.
You can build deep and meaningful connections with people online. You just need to approach it differently.
Look at entire gaming communities that do so despite never meeting.
Working apart from each other also doesn’t mean you can’t meet up outside work unless you truly live far apart. You can still socialize, but this time on your own terms instead of during work.
Anyway personally I haven’t felt a deterioration in connections. In fact I talk more often to my colleagues, and more importantly, to a wider range of colleagues than before.
I do however think different people have different aptitudes for online socialization. I do notice some people who were not terribly social at work, suddenly stop talking to anyone they don’t work with directly. And many people have issues not having face to face communication for context clues.
However I think this is totally subjective to the individuals, and having worked at multiple multi site companies, I think remote work can be much better for wide team building.
You can do away with the smaller cliques to some degree, disseminate information in easier to find locations and reduce tribal knowledge. People in other locations can be seen as equals to the ones local.
In fact when I worked in the office and supervised teams across multiple locations, I’d treat everyone on the team as remote when it came to most communication. Team chat rooms were encouraged instead of people coming by my desk unless needed. What I saw was that more people were aware of everything going on and were able to do better work as a result. I also found people who were too shy to ask questions were suddenly more able to ask them and have them answered because they saw the more confident individuals also asking things in the open chats rather than in person.
There are definite downsides to it all, but I find it really scales better in the long term