It's all about communication bandwidth. How well can I communicate with you face-to-face, via voice, or via text? Standard numbers are that 7% of the communication is in the words, 38% is in the tone of voice, and 55% is in the body language. If you're not face-to-face, your communication bandwidth drops dramatically.
But if you're both online at the same time, and you have videoconferencing or some equivalent, you can talk "face-to-face" without being on the same continent. I don't know how efficient that is compared to being in the same room, but I suspect it's somewhat less (you have to activate the app before you can have the conversation, and you never have a useful but accidental conversation because you ran into each other in the lunchroom).
>Standard numbers are that 7% of the communication is in the words, 38% is in the tone of voice, and 55% is in the body language.
Source? I'm pretty skeptical of these kinds of numbers. If you say 100 bits worth of words face-to-face, what is exactly the content of the remaining 1428 bits?
The claim (ascribed to Albert Mehrabian) is much more limited than that. Those are the alleged percentage influences on how much we like a person on the basis of a conversation with them. See, e.g., http://www.kaaj.com/psych/smorder.html (which I think is Mehrabian's own site) which says "Total Liking = 7% Verbal Liking + 38% Vocal Liking + 55% Facial Liking" and adds: "Unless a communicator is talking about their feelings or attitudes, these equations are not applicable".
I'm frankly doubtful even about that much, but Mehrabian certainly never claimed that any such equation holds for more "contentful" communication.
I work with a 90% remote, 10% local team, and due to the nature of engineering work, I find that the daily standup and and hour of shared development time while on a Hangout shares as much information as I share locally. This matches up with the amount (and quality) of interaction I had with a 100% local team as well.
You don't need face-to-face for everything. A lot of communications would be better off being rerouted to asynchronous, low-fidelity mediums like chat. When you try to jam everything into face-to-face + email, you create a lot of flow-destroying side effects, like meeting hell and frequent "do you have a minute?" drivebys.
For remote to work, the company should be remote native or majority remote. If 95% of the people and conversations are onsite, the remote team is going to end up being second class citizens.
But if you're both online at the same time, and you have videoconferencing or some equivalent, you can talk "face-to-face" without being on the same continent. I don't know how efficient that is compared to being in the same room, but I suspect it's somewhat less (you have to activate the app before you can have the conversation, and you never have a useful but accidental conversation because you ran into each other in the lunchroom).