Assistant Professor of Management and Organizations, Boston College
If you need to participate in video meetings for work, you’ve probably experienced more than one disruption, whether it’s kids darting around or home renovation noise.
Meetings that use Zoom and similar software are a fixture of remote work, which surged during the COVID-19 pandemic and remains prevalent. As of August 2026, 36% of American workers in management, professional and related occupations did at least some of their work from home, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
I’m a management scholar who studies how, when and where people work. Before the pandemic began, I was studying a professional services company. That made it possible for me to follow how its staff transitioned from primarily working in person to mostly remote through 2024, which gave me more insight into how remote work has changed people’s lives.
The study included 275 interviews and about 330 hours of observation. Most people in the groups I followed ended up working from home four or five days a week, joining meetings by video. What I found was the opposite of what I expected.
Learning more about colleagues
Rather than pulling colleagues apart, remote work brought them closer and made them more willing to be open with one another. The findings were peer-reviewed and will be published in an upcoming issue of the management journal Organization Science.
Before the shift to remote work, I assumed – consistent with the predictions made by many prominent researchers of workplace relationships – that moving people out of the office would break down social connections. But I was wrong.
In the office, before the shift to remote work, I found that people primarily viewed one another as work colleagues rather than whole people. Reflecting this relationship, workers sometimes said they felt uncomfortable sharing with one another aspects of their lives that might limit their ability to do work.
For example, one worker I interviewed, Patrick, was afraid to tell his colleagues he could not work late one night because he was helping his mom. All the names I’m mentioning are pseudonyms to protect the privacy of the people involved and their employer.
“Even though you didn’t sleep last night, you’re expected to show up and smile and be fine,” said Tamara, an exhausted parent with two young children, when she was still commuting regularly to the office.
Surprisingly, people told me that they learned a lot more about one another once they began to work remotely instead of being together in an office. During my research, I heard about children yelling in the background and pets wandering in front of cameras. A spouse arriving home from work stopped to say hello on screen.
In team chat channels, people posted photos of their children, their animals and the meals they had cooked.
“Everyone has noises in the background, or they have something going on or whatever, and so we get to know each other quicker and on a deeper level than we would otherwise,” Tamara told me. In some cases, this increased sense of closeness happened to people who had known each other for years prior to switching to remote work.
Growing psychological safety
Psychological safety is the sense that you can take an interpersonal risk at work, such as admitting a mistake, asking for help or raising a problem, without being judged negatively.
Decades of management research tie psychological safety to important outcomes for both workers and organizations, including learning, creativity and speaking up.
Over time, working remotely seemed to improve psychological safety for many of these co-workers.
People became “less afraid to talk about the interface of their personal and professional lives,” Leah said. Before, she added, no one would have volunteered that a breakup was affecting them and that they needed a day off to decompress.
After the company went remote, people told me they felt more comfortable sharing their own challenges as they tried to juggle their work and the challenges they faced in their personal lives.
Supporting work and nonwork activities
And as people started sharing these problems with their co-workers, they also told me they felt as if they could then better support one another.
When one worker’s father fell ill, his colleague, Brooke, took over the tasks the two had planned to do together.
“I’m just going to take this over for you right now,” Brooke told him. “And then, whenever you can, come back and swoop in.”
The colleague was able to dedicate time to caring for his father. And importantly, because help circulated this way, Brooke said, a task no longer “stopped dead in the water” when one person could not get to it.
This deeper collaboration did not seem to come at the expense of getting tasks completed. As an employee I’m calling Charles explained, having co-workers sharing details about their personal lives has “helped us to work more effectively in a lot of ways.”
Crucially, these improvements were experienced by people with many different living arrangements – young and old, those with and without kids or partners, men and women. And these benefits were positively reinforcing. For instance, sharing more meant learning more about others, which further reinforced psychological safety.
My findings suggest that remote work can be a benefit that employers and employees may overlook. Rather than treating time out of the office as a cost to social connection among employees, they might treat it as a way to grow personally and get to know co-workers better. This article originally appeared on The Conversation. You can read it here.
