Seconding this. WFH is more conscious effort in this regard, but you don't _have_ to lose those things. The biggest difference is organic conversations will not

Seconding this. WFH is more conscious effort in this regard, but you don't _have_ to lose those things. The biggest difference is organic conversations will not happen in big meetings. When only one person can talk at a time, you lose all those side chats, etc. So you need to book a lot of smaller meetings with people. I have daily stand-ups with my team. I've never made it explicitly clear but kind of driven it towards a routine of "get the work out of the way, then we have until X time to chat and bullshit". I have a weekly planning meeting with a few members of the team. Same deal. Get the planning out of the way, then the remainder is for general chit-chat, talking about personal projects, etc. Every week I have three hours blocked off where I do a "check-in" with a bunch of other team leads. It's dual-purpose: There's a lot of things they might be dealing with that they'd never feel rose to the level of scheduling a meeting to discuss (whether problems or just wanting input, etc; this was previously a lot of the water cooler talk), but when the time's already there then they'll find all sorts of productive ways to fill it. And chit-chat once that's all out of the way. I do an hour once a week with my boss one on one. The entire office does a monthly-ish hour to play some silly online games and hang out as well. We've been hiring like crazy so at this point a lot of these people are people I've never met in person but I've built a pretty good rapport and relationship purely over video chat and Slack. All-in, I spend like 6 hours a week on this. And most of it's scheduled around the beginning/very end of the day where most people aren't as interrupted or super productive to begin with. Truth be told, this is barely more (if any) than the amount of time that we were spending previously on socialization at work. If we account for the _lost_ productivity of being distracted in the office, then I've definitely gained time. The hardest part was just accepting that I was going to have to let some relationships go. As much as I really enjoyed talking to that one frontend engineer and it _occasionally_ resulted in some sort of productive action, the trade-off just isn't there so I need to rely more on the team leads to solve and communicate those issues.