I like to work in the office, bc one of the reasons is that I get to chat with my boss, about general stuff or potential new projects. If you go remote, you are going to fully lose this kind of opportunities.
Does this create an unfair condition for remote workers? It could be.
I have had teams that were in the office but fully distributed, with only one of my team members even in the same country as me. People could, and did, still chat to me. The big difference is that it required discipline. Especially from me in order to deal with team members who were reluctant to speak up. I solved that by ensuring we always had at least one weekly one on one call scheduled to speak about nothing in particular. If nothing else came up, we'd discuss ideas or training or general improvements we could make, but on purpose those calls were always explicitly not for project discussions (if anything came up during these calls I'd schedule other calls for that).
Sometimes we'd have "nothing" to talk about until people realised I'd still insist on doing the call and it turned out they had stuff to talk about when I was there on the phone anyway and they didn't feel like they were wasting my time because I'd made it clear this time was already blocked out.
Doing fully remote requires managers who understand how to ensure they pick up on things from team members when they can't see them, and that will be an adjustment for a lot of companies.
But once you have that, and managers learn how to be available in the same way, it'll work just fine. Consider that lots of managers don't know how to be available in person either, but lock themselves away in offices and only emerge for meetings with agendas that does not leave much room for raising issues or general chat other than for a selected few, so this is not a new issue - just a different version of an old one.
Do you not set weekly one on one time or just do quick huddle calls to chat on simple projects? My boss and my team is just as buried in the office and full of meetings. So we are going to be talking on teams/slack anyway- not sure about what I personally view as FUD about these mythical conversations people have with their managers and peers. Maybe my workplace is more fast paced than most. We also have a huge slew of contractors and offices coast to coast.. so it's not uncommon to have to set meetings with resources on both coasts. For us remote work has been, well, pretty freaking normal. And cheaper we have already divested of a couple smaller remote offices.
Not the commenter you replied to, but I think my personality is such that I chat casually with my in-group and am a perfectionist with communication with outsiders. Back when I worked in-person, I had daily informal communication with lots of teammates as well as my boss. Since I got a new remote job during the pandemic, I tend to only reach out to those I work most closely with (just a couple of people). Certainly there's nothing actually stopping me from opening a new Teams message to my boss or other teammates and saying "hey, how's life?", but in practice, I don't. It's almost as if most of my team are now "outsiders" who I'm very deliberate messaging, rather than the in-group who I feel comfortable bantering with. It's something I'm aware of and am working on, but I definitely don't have the same level of intra-team communication now as I had pre-pandemic.
I've had the same from the manager point of view. As the manager I had the luxury of just forcing the issue by scheduling one on ones with everyone and flat out telling them I wanted to make sure I actually regularly spoke to everyone and I could just blame it on being "busy" and so wanting to block out time to make sure I had it set aside.
As an introvert, I resorted to that in large part because it removed my ability to manufacture excuses for myself or just forgetting because I rarely get the impulse that I feel a strong need to talk to someone.
But you can do the same yourself even if you're not in a position to demonstratively schedule actual meeting slots with people: Just put reminders in your calendar to talk to people without scheduling an actual meeting. If you want to make it seem more organic, just put in the right number of slots and keep a list to yourself that you randomise week by week. You can always tick people off if you have conversations outside of your schedule.
My boss is not my friend, why should I chat with him about his or my private life, I am an introvert so I never start this kind of discussion, but from the OP I understood he was refering to work related chat
Yeah, I'm not an "I need to be friends with my coworkers" person either, but I just mean the everyday stuff that is work-related or work-tangential. Who is meeting with who, how people feel about what's going on, etc. More than one might glean from a Confluence page with notes from a design meeting or whatever. "Oh, the real reason we chose technology X for this feature is just because Jim knows it well", "oh, the real reason we're adding this logic to the back-end is because the boss thinks the front-end devs are incompetent", etc. Things that get whispered in person, but don't get written in an email or wiki page.
Maybe some teams are small enough or well-adjusted enough for this not to be an issue, but I've definitely felt I've lacked this sort of context since having fewer informal talks with my boss.
Does this create an unfair condition for remote workers? It could be.