Culturally, the habit of having casual conversations over remote platforms is what was missing from "soft work" being performed remotely. In the article, they

Culturally, the habit of having casual conversations over remote platforms is what was missing from "soft work" being performed remotely. In the article, they perform an inversion experiment, "What if we all started off working remotely"? but they don't expand the logical conclusion of how companies would innovate if those weak link conversations don't happen.