effective for long term employees who would benefit from physical close-proximity (the water-cooler style propagation of ideas for example)
You can still have those when you work remotely. There just needs to be a mechanism set up to actively share things - where I work at the moment we have a weekly "web engineers" huddle to share ideas, tools, and articles we've found. We have Slack and stuff as well obviously, and we talk to each other, but there needs to be something slightly more formal when you're remote.
FWIW I've also worked in companies that had no "water-cooler chat" despite being physically present. You have to consciously want to talk to people, and some companies are full of people who just don't.
> had no "water-cooler chat" despite being physically present
i'm not saying that just because one is physically present that this would occur - i'm saying that for this to occur, physical proximity is a necessary (but insufficient) condition.
Making this process of osmosis more formal just defeats the purpose - after all, these huddles and idea meetings and "demo days" already happen in a remote setting (at least, if your company's management decides its worth the time to replicate it remotely).
You can still have those when you work remotely. There just needs to be a mechanism set up to actively share things - where I work at the moment we have a weekly "web engineers" huddle to share ideas, tools, and articles we've found. We have Slack and stuff as well obviously, and we talk to each other, but there needs to be something slightly more formal when you're remote.
FWIW I've also worked in companies that had no "water-cooler chat" despite being physically present. You have to consciously want to talk to people, and some companies are full of people who just don't.