One of the big downsides I’ve found with my company being remote for about 6 months now is the nearly constant issues with tone and attitude in communication ch

One of the big downsides I’ve found with my company being remote for about 6 months now is the nearly constant issues with tone and attitude in communication channels like video calls and Slack. I listened to one coworker tell another that they had no sense of humor and were too “by the book” and it was disrupting the ability to communicate. When a fraction of people worked remotely, this virtually never happened, because with only a small set of people working remotely, people had the mental bandwidth to devote a little extra time being sure to interpret their tone charitably, check for assumptions and follow up more often with them to fill in communication gaps that in-person gestures and signals would avoid. But when everyone is remote, it’s like taking the attention and time budget you have and dividing it by a much larger pool of people. It’s simply intractable for a human to spread their attention like that and remain diligent and focused on communication metadata about every pairwise colleague interaction channel. It spreads you too thin and you run into extremely exhausting ego depletion and decision fatigue from all these little micro communication assessments you have to make that our brains are just not setup or wired to handle because we’re so adapted to analog facial and voice analysis with gestures and cues. I despise loud, distracting open floor plans deeply, but the pandemic time period has made me deeply question whether fully remote work would actually be better. I feel way more tired and mentally exhausted from remote work, and casually I’ve noticed many, many more arguments and short fuse communication issues with everyone in my company. I think it speaks to the evidence that the most cost effective office environments for knowledge workers, even in dense urban centers, from the point of view of pure short term cost savings to the company, are environments where every individual knowledge worker has a private office with a door that shuts, combined with separate communal workspaces for the extreme minority of people who either need a mix or need more extraverted / social work environments instead of quiet / private workspaces. That way meetings naturally happen in person and it’s low-cost to setup meetings, grab coffee together, grab lunch, etc., while still preserving the remote work benefits of privacy and quiet. Unfortunately though my experience working remotely has taught me that avoiding a commute is deeply not a good reason to be remote, because the costs in terms of worse work experiences and worse communication are way too high.