Nobody decided to disconnect. It just happened gradually, then all at once.
When the team was in the same room, culture wasn't something you managed. It was something you absorbed. The way someone reacted in a meeting. The joke that diffused a tense moment. The small signals that told you where you stood and whether you belonged.
Then the team went remote. And the signals stopped. Not the big ones. The small ones. The ones that didn't make it into a Slack message or a weekly update. The ones you used to catch in the hallway and never thought to replace.
Six months in, the collaboration feels transactional. Twelve months in, the team feels like contractors who share a calendar. The work gets done. But something that used to hold it together doesn't anymore.
You think the problem is remote work. Remote work is just where the problem became visible. Culture was always built from small, repeated signals. In-person, those signals happened by accident. Remote, they have to happen by design.
What feels like disconnection is often the absence of structure that was never needed before. What looks like low engagement is often people waiting for a signal that never comes. Culture doesn't drift because people stop caring. It drifts because the conditions that used to sustain it quietly disappeared. And nobody noticed until it was already gone.
Imported from Post Archives — APR Posts Week 04-06.docx