>His response was that I should come to office for 1 or 2 day trips!
I understand he missed the point in this case. However, if a company is willing to pick up the travel costs associated with a partly distributed team getting together on a semi-regular basis, that's often a pretty good approach.
Yes, processes should be such that ongoing communication is good. However one of the costs of having a more distributed workforce (which has various benefits to the company, including financial) should be a bigger T&E budget.
It seems that having great speech to text would make remote teams workable. Meeting notes are automatically taken and organized into a searchable journal
If nothing else, that would at least be an improvement over "let's take a photo of the whiteboard after this one hour ad-hoc meeting and attach it to the jira ticket".
I do make trips up every quarter, and they do reimburse expenses, but they are unarguably disruptive and occasionally burdensome to my life and my family.
I understand he missed the point in this case. However, if a company is willing to pick up the travel costs associated with a partly distributed team getting together on a semi-regular basis, that's often a pretty good approach.
Yes, processes should be such that ongoing communication is good. However one of the costs of having a more distributed workforce (which has various benefits to the company, including financial) should be a bigger T&E budget.