Is there value added by an in-person meeting that you miss while working remotely?

During my first two months at the company where I was interim CIO, I managed to get to 3 of our offices before the lockdown started. That time I had to get to know them a bit in the flesh did make a massive difference to those relationships through the pandemic and lockdown, actually having spent some time with them. You can get an intro to someone on Zoom but it’s not the same as just being able to sit and chat with them, grab a coffee or lunch, etc.

We are all human—we need to have that physical, more genuine connection to have empathy, trust and reputation. We're not going to stop onboarding people or hiring people, so how are we going to build those connections? Because with the variants coming back up, we’ll be remote for a while. Over the last 2 years, I've had 2 supervisors that I've not met at all.

We had our first in-person event towards the end of July, for directors and above. There were 70 people that gathered in the office and it was the first time I had met anybody in-person. A couple of days later, I had a one-on-one with my boss and when I dialed in he said, "Jill!" with the most emotion I had seen from him since I started. That reminded me how different it is to get to know somebody in person versus in 2D over Zoom. It changed the dynamics significantly.