My experience is a bit unusual; for many years I was switching from working in the office to WFH and back every few months (basically I was going back and forth

My experience is a bit unusual; for many years I was switching from working in the office to WFH and back every few months (basically I was going back and forth between the country where my family was and a country where my company was located). Most of the rest of the team worked at the office, but there were a couple of other remote workers would come to the office once a week or so. The company also had a tradition of "company retreats" where we would meet for the whole day in some nice surroundings, and do a mix of strategical planning, brainstorming, social interaction, walking in the woods, and even some silly "team-building" activities which occasionally turned up to be a lot of fun. We would be mostly off-line, won't even look at the automatic test reports. Having this experience, I believe that such retreats are much better than usual meetings or water-cooler conversations at building team cohesion, disperse knowledge, etc. (Thet don't replace impromptu white-board sessions, though, but I think in reality these are not happening as often as people claim they are). I only felt we did not have them often enough; Covid killed them, of course, which for me was the biggest directly work-related impact.