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Comment by jraby3 | Hacker News Reader

I have mixed feelings about this. I’m a partial owner of a company with 50 employees - about half are distributed. We used to meet 4-6x per year F2F pre COVID. Post COVID we’ve met twice in 2 years.

I notice that people are much friendlier after we meet F2F. They remember that there’s a human who they know and have hung out with. This feeling fades as time passes.

I don’t know what the right answer is, and I feel a little hypocritical living abroad and managing my team. But some things are definitely lost by solely working outside the office.

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I'm friendly and cordial with my coworkers, I don't need to be friends with them. The only thing that is missing for me is the pressure to pretend to want to spend social time with random people I only have contact with because our job responsibilities overlap. I always know there's another person on the other end of the Teams call, there's just less of a facade. All I want from my job is to log in, do my work well, and log off at the end of the day. I don't have holes in my social life that I need an employer to fill.

> I'm friendly and cordial with my coworkers, I don't need to be friends with them.

This. My coworkers are colleagues. We have friendly professional relationships. But they are not my friends.

I didn’t mean to hang out. It’s more that people get frustrated more easily and have less patience. Once they’ve seen each other, their are some warm feelings and friendliness that persist.

We just spent a 3 day weekend at a casino, with food, drinks and some activities. I feel like there’s a big difference in the way people behave towards each other before and after the weekend.

This has been my experience working on a distributed team as well. I think my ideal setup involves getting the team together in person once or twice annually for a few days where the focus is brainstorming/collaborating.

Our company is trialing/thinking about going fully remote, but then having a few big "meetups/workations" every year. Maybe rent a nice cabin (big cabin) for a month, and people are free to show up for a week or more.

You get a little socialization going, you give people the freedom to choose, you still save money in total AND because the "hybrid" isnt randomly distributed, you might actually get all those "useful" communications happening.

I've found this to be the case. But I don't think it has to be face-to-face. Booking a meeting/lunch on zoom where people have fun by playing an online game (https://www.drawasaurus.org/ was my favourite), can do wonderful things for team cohesion in my experience.

Some of the best teams have never seen each other face to face. You shouldn't have to rely on people meeting face to face to be nice to each other. It sounds like you have a larger cultural problem not associated with where people are working if that's an issue.

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