the UX and Community-eXperience of remote vs in-office

There’s More Proof That Return to Office Is Pointless - I have mixed feelings on the "Return to Office" debate. Starting my current second Remote job in a row, I appreciate the flexibility of my daily schedule and lack of commute - but I also sometimes resent how my company partially "owns" my office space and makes it a little less fun for my personal side projects.

I'm also aware of how many companies and teams haven't leaned into building a sense of online community. There's a UX story here: achieving a virtual group presence and ongoing conversation is a harder row to hoe with MS Teams than some other platforms. Each Teams space feels like a collection of public email threads (with a clunky Word-like formatting tool ribbon front and center) vs the more chat-y experience of Slack, where there is a single conversation with threads branching off.

(It seems Google Chat recently pivoted to be more like Slack - so old threads with new replies are no longer moved up. But Slack has a gloriously clever bit of UX with a checkbox to copy any given thread reply to the main channel - this empowers a user to selectively bring up an old conversation that might have dropped off other folk's radar.)

Of course, the tech matters a bit less than the mood of the folks using it - it's a cultural thing, and I'm not sure yet if that best comes from the top down or can be made organically. It's a little disheartening when you see a bunch of unused channels, where the last post was months and months ago. (I think one UX takeaway there is don't get TOO fine-grained with your room/channel creation. In theory specialty topic channels might encourage discussion in that area, but in practice it can dilute an already small pool of participants.)

Getting back to other Hybrid and In-Office concepts, I do worry that as a remote worker I am more of a fungible commodity than I would be otherwise. No matter how one feels about a bias against remote work, living near Boston, I wonder if there's a competitive advantage to having hybrid or in-office as an option? One that personally I would have been ok with, though I like companies that respect employee's countering opinions on the matter.