Just before the turn of the millennium, I worked for a global company in a boring six-floor brick building with long corridors and offices behind closed doors. I worked on a team of eight, all located in a corner on the third floor.
There were coffee machines everywhere, but for some reason, people came to our corner for their breaks. It wasn’t because we had better coffee; it was because of Martina.
Martina was our boss. Under her wing, the team stayed motivated, engaged, and full of energy. That corner became a magnet.
Then came a reorganization. Our group scattered across countries and departments. I stayed in the same building. A few months later, I went back to the third floor. The energy was gone. Nobody went there for their coffee breaks anymore.
That’s when it really hit me. It’s not the place; it’s the people. And bosses have an especially important role because they’re responsible for creating the conditions.
Almost 30 years later, that lesson feels surprisingly relevant. The debate about remote work has become strangely focused on where to work rather than how to work. Leaders ordering people back to the office often point to productivity, collaboration, culture, and connection. Employees who are resistant point to flexibility, autonomy, and less commuting.
But what if we’re trying to solve the wrong problem?
Proximity is not connection
A study published in Frontiers in Psychology in July 2026 compared 7,704 remote, hybrid, and onsite employees in a large U.S. healthcare organization. On a 5-point scale, average well-being was 4.22 for remote employees, 4.12 for hybrid employees, and 3.89 for on-site employees.
People sitting together don’t always lead to connection. Remote employees mentioned positive connections most often, but after statistical controls, the differences between the groups were not significant. The researchers found no evidence that remote employees were less connected.
Being together and feeling connected are not the same thing. You can sit next to a colleague and feel disconnected. You can sit hundreds of miles away and feel seen, heard, trusted, and included.
Of course, one study doesn’t prove that remote work creates higher well-being, but stronger research points in a similar direction. A randomized 2024 study of 1,612 Trip.com employees, published in Nature, found that those working from home two days a week had higher job satisfaction and were one-third less likely to quit than in a fully in-office environment. The study found no evidence of worse performance ratings or promotion prospects.
A meta-analysis covering 108 studies and 45,288 employees helps explain why the picture isn’t black and white. More remote work was associated with both greater autonomy and greater isolation. Autonomy tended to improve outcomes while isolation worked in the opposite direction.
That leaves leaders with a more useful challenge: How do we preserve autonomy without creating isolation?
A workplace is an address. A culture is an experience
Psychological research points to three basic needs at the heart of that challenge: reasonable freedom over their work, a sense of belonging, and feeling competent. A physical office doesn’t guarantee that. Conditions matter, and leaders have enormous influence over them.
Imagine two people working from home. One has a manager who trusts them, communicates clearly, checks in without controlling, recognizes their contribution, and includes them in important conversations. The other gets unclear instructions, endless meetings, and micromanagement, and their coworkers forget about them when they make important decisions.
Same work arrangement. Completely different experience.
This is where three communication skills become leadership superpowers: empathy, clarity, and energy. Empathy makes people feel seen, heard, and understood. Clarity helps them understand what matters, what their employers expect, and what good performance looks like. Energy creates momentum through our words, voice, body language, recognition, and attention.
None requires sharing a postal code, although they require more conscious effort when people aren’t in the same room. Remote work with poor clarity can become chaos. Office work with poor clarity is just chaos in the same building.
Visibility doesn’t mean value
In my work with leaders around the world, I still meet many managers who see remote workers as less productive and less committed. Research suggests that this bias is real.
A 2026 experiment by academics at the National University of Singapore and King’s College London found that managers rated remote workers worse on perceived commitment, productivity, team spirit, and promotion opportunities. Yet the randomized Nature study found that hybrid work didn’t damage actual performance ratings.
This connects to proximity bias, which is the tendency to favor people who are physically closer and more visible to us. Fast Company has written about the risk that remote employees receive less attention, recognition, and opportunity simply because they aren’t in the room.
The person you see most isn’t necessarily contributing most. The person who stays late isn’t necessarily your highest performer. And the colleague you happen to have coffee with isn’t necessarily the one most ready for promotion.
If contribution becomes harder to see when someone leaves the office, the answer isn’t always to bring that person back. It’s to equip leaders to communicate better and recognize contribution wherever it happens.
Don’t solve the wrong problem
Instead of beginning with “How many days should people be in the office?” leaders could ask: What problem are we really trying to solve? When does physical presence genuinely make the work better? Are we bringing people back because the work requires it or because managers feel more in control when they physically see their people? Are we evaluating contribution or visibility?
I’m not arguing against offices. Quite the opposite. I like meeting people in person, and in my TEDx talk I praised analog communication in an increasingly digital world. Some conversations, relationships, and creative moments really are better when we share the same room.
But being in the same room isn’t enough. We shouldn’t confuse presence with performance, proximity with connection, or visibility with value.
Almost 30 years ago, people weren’t walking to our corner because of the building, the floor, or better coffee. They came because something good happened there.
That’s still a leader’s job today: create the conditions where people can do a good job, wherever they happen to be.
