When I'm remote, every email I type, message I send, Jira update, commit comment, etc. are etched in stone for reference in all of perpetuity, time stamped and all. There's an unspoken expectation to be informed and expert in all things in many work environnments to avoid looking "incompetent" (which is absurd, everyone is ignorant about some things). Remote work creates a hostile environment that makes this even worse. It makes people think about if they really want to email or call this person to ask about something because they worry that not being aware or not knowing about something may come off to others as being incompetent (people are aware that certain questions and statements can show your hand of expertise). So if I happened to be half paying attention during a meeting with a client or executive, if some change in an effort occurred I happened to miss or be too busy to see, or if I'm dealing with new tech I'm not quite familiar with... I have to tread lightly.
In person, you meet people, you get body language, everyone is forced to speak on demand so competency and lack thereof become very clear in conversations. Expectations relax because if the head has no idea and no one else does and everyone has to reference it, well then, I'm not doing so bad. I'm not relying on looking at their cherry picked correspondence choices. Not only that, people are then more willing to communicate with people because they become more comfortable. They build relationships and they know it's OK to show their ignorance about some specific topic and that person is going to help them out a bit, mostly off the books. Not only that, communication in general becomes less formal. If I'm at the coffee machine and see Alice there and I had some question, I can just drop it in a friendly way. My intentions are more clear from body language, am I trying to assess her or am I really just trying to get the information I need to do my part. If it's trivial it's more natural just just say hey, I don't know how to do this thing, do you? Imagine sending that in an email or scheduling a conference call.
This means for teams that have already built that level of trust are at an advantage in remote. They're comfortably sending those messages to one another. They've met the person and can gauge their personality. For juniors it's probably petrifying in some cases because they want to look more skilled and knowledgable than they are because they often don't have a general understanding of the level of expectations people have of them so they want to do better and often want to make an impression.
The issue is that office culture often has a whole lot of competitive elements and people are more hesitant to communicate, it brings everything to a crawl. If work environments weren't always pressuring their labor force, people would be more willing to admit ignorance and or make informal communications necessary to speed things along in a more formal and recorded context, at least that's my opinion.
