Yeah, this article has a little bit of truth, but is mostly misleading. (Which is par for the course when it comes to BI, I've found.)
From experience, my observation is that the point is correct -- teams produce better results if they are co-located. But only if they are truly co-located: that is, the team all share one big office. With permanent desks. And walls around that office, so that you're not distracted by all the other teams.
That is the "pit" environment that I worked in for several years around 2000, and while it was far from a panacea, it was by far the most productive environment I've ever been involved with. I did it at two companies, and we produced absolute magic. High-energy, high-communication, high-collaboration. (And an introvert's nightmare -- the downsides are quite real.)
You'll note, though, that that is nearly the exact opposite of the hotel-desked open-floorplan monstrosity that the bean-counters have now mandated at most companies (and are now imposing RTO mandates for): that is about the most counter-productive environment I can imagine, far worse than what my all-remote team does. (Making heavy use of Slack and Huddles to communicate near-constantly, which works quite nicely.)
I could believe that the main point -- idea-generation tends to centralize a bit more in all-remote teams -- but I doubt that's destiny, just something to be aware of and control for when managing an all-remote group.
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Yeah, this article has a little bit of truth, but is mostly misleading. (Which is par for the course when it comes to BI, I've found.)
From experience, my observation is that the point is correct -- teams produce better results if they are co-located. But only if they are truly co-located: that is, the team all share one big office. With permanent desks. And walls around that office, so that you're not distracted by all the other teams.
That is the "pit" environment that I worked in for several years around 2000, and while it was far from a panacea, it was by far the most productive environment I've ever been involved with. I did it at two companies, and we produced absolute magic. High-energy, high-communication, high-collaboration. (And an introvert's nightmare -- the downsides are quite real.)
You'll note, though, that that is nearly the exact opposite of the hotel-desked open-floorplan monstrosity that the bean-counters have now mandated at most companies (and are now imposing RTO mandates for): that is about the most counter-productive environment I can imagine, far worse than what my all-remote team does. (Making heavy use of Slack and Huddles to communicate near-constantly, which works quite nicely.)
I could believe that the main point -- idea-generation tends to centralize a bit more in all-remote teams -- but I doubt that's destiny, just something to be aware of and control for when managing an all-remote group.