Remote work in disruptive times

In recent days there's been some serious LI finger-wagging pointed at Musk, the valley bombast, and now Evan Spiegel, Snap's CEO over their draconian reversion to require a return to full-time in the office. To set my position outright, I happen to believe that "a little togetherness" is a very productive axiom in work location patterning, and that remote is now a proven model for productivity and team happiness.

I do, however, wonder if the broad brushing that we LOVE to apply in pile-on criticisms of these policy bullies is a bit too simplistic. Hear me out.

Twitter is clearly about to plunge itself into a very disruptive and regenerative phase (insert destructive, if you prefer) unlike anything the business has never seen. Snap is hitting a survival risk phase up against a wall of noise as ad-based models are under budget assault. Remote work feels straightforward when the path ahead is clear, when the communications and teams are logically aligned, and when people changes are marginal and comfortable.

The question I raise here is when the business is being heavily disrupted or challenged in ways in which the company has no muscle memory, is the pure remote model a barrier to successful change management?

I'd pose the argument that - at a minimum - the senior teams need to probably over-index on togetherness to drive efficiently to alignment and shared ownership of the changed agendas or dramatically new environments. In my experience, there is real value in the ambient patterns of in-person team behavior and open ad-hoc conversational communications. Perhaps these phases of heavy change management can be handled with new practices within senior teams only versus broad policy reversions? Do we think of these as just phases while we still anchor around remote and lightweight hybrid models?

In my own current situation, where I have a brand new team building a brand new platform, we've asked the team to commit to a phase of hybrid in-person time (lightweight, as in 1-2 days every couple of weeks). I'm witnessing that step-function progressions occur when the team is present around each other and a physical white board [sorry, Miro]. We're viewing this as being right for the formative stage and to establish deeper/faster understanding or the team's collaborative working and thinking styles. I feel confident this is a predictably effective way to traverse this stage; I also feel a pure remote model would be slower - and riskier - while we lay the groundwork on product, dev, and go-to-market mapping.

I'm legitimately old enough to be challenged as reverting to old behavior. Perhaps, but I've lived (happily) in remote work models for 3 years now and have all the best tools and work habits formed around the remote model.

What do you think? How do you re-align your business through material changes in people, markets, customer patterns with remote teams?