I highly disagree. As someone who can work whenever and wherever he wants, with only meetings to tether me to the office, I much prefer 30 minutes of in-person chat to a 30-minute call. I regularly go to the office longer than I need to or on days where I have no appointments there because random run-ins and quick brainstorm chats definitely have their value. Go read this if you haven't already. Students have free public transport over here, which has resulted in enormous growth in peak demands since that free card was introduced. So now many cities over here have staggered their rosters; school A starts at 8:30, and school B at 9:00 so that they don't all want the same 8:15 bus. Some cities reach out to their biggest employers. Half of all jobs in my city were either in higher ed or at the massive hospital, so the city got them to cooperate as well, staggering shifts and giving employees benefits for 'peak-avoidance'. It's hard to measure the impact of it all, but it's definitely a solution that works on a smaller scale.I know it's potentially disruptive for meetings, but many face-to-face meetings could be just as effective if they were teleconferences.
No, I will definitely concede that face-to-face interaction is an incredible thing, and I much prefer it to anything else. My problem is that what I'm working on is fairly narrow, and there isn't really anyone around my workplace doing the same thing. There are some other folks working on the same thing, but they're scattered all around the world. We meet up every couple of months for face-to-face researchin', and I feel pretty terrible about it, because airplane carbon emissions. I've said it before, but I think it's very important that we at least start trying to adopt VR teleconferencing. Ugh, that little bit of latency has already burned me, though.