This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: 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. 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. 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.
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