I'm back in the office (3 days a week) and there's some weird cultural thing on my team that I don't quite understand. Coworkers I sit next to will message me on Teams instead of just standing up and talking to me over the cube wall. No one eats lunch together or really converses outside of meetings. We have meetings on Teams even though everyone in the meeting is in the office sitting next to each other. I'll book rooms for the meetings and inform the team only to be the only one in the room.
I sometimes wonder if the change to the culture and ways of working from the covid-era WFH days became more pervasive than I realized.
Could be just the team culture. The meeting thing is pretty weird, but what happens if you just show up and tap them on the shoulder? Do they get annoyed or overall happy to chat? What about just drinking coffee/tea?
It also can be that the office space itself is too noisy so any discussion can distract a lot of people.
It sounds weird indeed, but maybe some higher-ups decided this is a way to go in case people need to be isolated again or when it's necessary to hire some remote coworkers who shouldn't be left behind, etc.