Ask any supervisor who moved a floor of people to work remotely what they lost, and you will hear a version of the same sentence: “I can’t tell how anyone is doing anymore.”

Somewhere on your screen right now there is a small green circle next to a colleague’s name. How much does that little green dot really tell you?

It tells you their application is running and their keyboard has been touched recently. It does not tell you whether they are deep in something they should not be pulled out of, whether they are two minutes from a customer call, whether they are stuck in a meeting, or whether they have been quietly struggling all week with tasks.

Webex is not the problem. It is a mature, secure, enterprise-grade meeting platform, and if your organization standardized on it, that was a reasonable decision. The audio is clean. The security posture is defensible. IT knows how to administer it. Nobody needs to be talked out of Webex.

But notice what that sentence actually claims. Webex is a good meeting platform. It is not a workplace. And for a distributed team, the difference between those two things costs real money.

The return-to-office argument has mostly gone quiet. What replaced it is harder to solve. How do you run a team when a few people are at desks down the hall, a few are three time zones away, and the arrangement shifts again next quarter?