Working from home has obvious advantages. There’s no commute, no crowded train, and no need to spend your morning getting ready for an office. You can work in comfortable clothes, take care of household chores during breaks, and enjoy a quieter environment.
But there may be a downside that’s harder to notice: remote work can make it harder for colleagues to help one another.
New research from Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli and University of Texas at Austin communications professor Y. Jasmine Wu suggests that remote and hybrid work can weaken what researchers call “relational capital.”
In simple terms, relational capital is knowing who to contact when you need help, feeling comfortable asking that person, and trusting that they will respond.
The Problem With “Just Send a Message”
For their study, Cappelli and Wu conducted 38 group interviews in late 2023 involving approximately 760 employees at a multinational financial services company operating in the U.S., U.K., and India.
The researchers found an important distinction between completing your own work and helping other people complete theirs.
Employees generally felt that their individual responsibilities and performance targets were getting done. But less visible activities—such as answering a colleague’s question, helping a teammate solve a problem, or mentoring a new employee—were easier to postpone.
These tasks often depended on personal relationships rather than formal job requirements.
And when those relationships weakened, getting help became more difficult.
The company encouraged employees to communicate through Microsoft Teams. But sending a message didn't guarantee a quick response. Some employees responded immediately, while others prioritized their own workload and waited until the next morning.
That difference mattered.
Employees who already knew each other could often pick up the phone and get an answer quickly. People without established relationships had a harder time getting assistance.
For new employees, the problem could be particularly serious. One relatively new hire who had not developed workplace friendships reportedly spent three months trying to get an answer to a question.
A Cycle That Can Make Things Worse
The researchers identified a potentially damaging feedback loop.
When someone repeatedly reaches out and doesn't receive a timely response, they may become less likely to ask for help in the future. That reduces interaction between colleagues, which makes the relationship weaker—and makes future communication even harder.
In an office, some of these relationships develop almost accidentally.
You sit next to someone. You ask a quick question. You have a conversation while getting coffee. You discover that a colleague in another department knows how to solve a problem you've been struggling with.
Those interactions can seem insignificant.
But collectively, they create a network of people who know one another and are willing to help.
Remote work can remove many of those spontaneous opportunities.
More Meetings Don't Necessarily Fix the Problem
The answer isn't simply to schedule more video calls.
Employees in the study described large virtual meetings where cameras were often turned off and participants sometimes worked on other tasks at the same time. In some cases, additional meetings were needed because important information had been missed.
That can create another problem: instead of making work more collaborative, communication becomes more transactional.
You send a message. Someone responds—or doesn't. You schedule a meeting. Someone attends—or multitasks through it.
The informal human connections that make collaboration easier can gradually disappear.
Remote Work Isn't Bad for Everyone
The researchers aren't arguing that everyone should return to the office.
Some employees actually benefited from less face-to-face interaction. Participants suggested that remote work could be particularly comfortable for introverts and could reduce some of the challenges experienced by women and minority employees.
Working from home can also make it easier to concentrate, especially for people with a quiet and private workspace.
The real issue may therefore be less about remote versus office work and more about how organizations design their working environment.
Why Hybrid Work Can Still Fail
A hybrid model might seem like the obvious compromise: employees get the flexibility of working from home while still having opportunities to build relationships in person.
But hybrid work only works if people actually have meaningful opportunities to interact.
In the company examined by the researchers, employees were encouraged to focus heavily on individual deliverables. Office space had also been reduced, and shared desks made it difficult for colleagues to consistently sit near one another.
Attendance requirements were not always enforced consistently either.
That created an awkward situation: an employee could make the effort to commute to the office and discover that the colleagues they needed to work with weren't there.
In other words, simply requiring people to come into the office isn't enough.
What Companies Could Do Differently
Cappelli and Wu suggest several ways organizations could rebuild workplace relationships.
First, companies could coordinate office days so that entire teams—and the people they regularly depend on—are present at the same time.
Second, organizations could use those days for collaborative activities rather than simply expecting employees to sit at their desks.
Third, new employees need structured opportunities to meet people outside their immediate teams. Building a professional network shouldn't depend entirely on whether someone happens to sit next to the right person.
Perhaps most importantly, organizations need to recognize that helping colleagues is real work.
Answering questions, mentoring new employees, sharing knowledge, and assisting teammates may not always appear in an employee's individual KPIs, but they can be essential to keeping an organization functioning.
Companies could therefore consider incorporating collaboration and mentoring into job descriptions, performance evaluations, and promotion decisions.
The Bigger Lesson About Remote Work
The study has important limitations. The researchers relied on interviews at one multinational financial services company, so the findings don't prove that remote work caused the problems they observed or that the same issues exist everywhere.
Other factors may have contributed as well, including workplace policies introduced during the pandemic and changing attitudes toward employee well-being.
Still, the research highlights a problem that can easily be overlooked.
Productivity isn't only about completing your own tasks.
Organizations also depend on people answering questions, sharing knowledge, mentoring newcomers, and stepping in when someone needs help.
Remote work can provide employees with valuable flexibility and autonomy. But companies have to deliberately create the relationships and systems that an office once helped build naturally.
The goal shouldn't necessarily be to eliminate remote work.
It should be to make sure that flexibility doesn't come at the expense of collaboration.
After all, working from home might mean wearing pajamas to the morning meeting.
But helping a colleague still needs to count as part of the job.