Remote work isn't hard — it's socially unnatural
Why remote work is a social problem, not a tools problem.
Remote work changed the geometry of collaboration. The tools got better, but something else got worse: the invisible social glue that keeps teams coherent.
What gets lost
In co-located work, coordination rides on micro-interactions: glances, interruptions, overheard context, small jokes, friction, repair.
These aren't "nice-to-haves." They're how groups maintain shared mental models without constant verbalization. A glance can mean "are we still aligned?" A joke can signal "the pressure is high, but we're okay."
Remote work strips this away. What remains is scheduled communication—meetings, messages, documents. All signal, no noise. That sounds efficient. It isn't.
The three layers of collaboration
Teams operate on three layers:
- Information — docs, tickets, Slack, dashboards
- Trust — predictability, shared norms, psychological safety
- Energy — momentum, spontaneity, collective mood
Most remote work advice focuses on layer one. Better documentation. Clearer processes. Async-first workflows. All important. None sufficient.
Trust and energy don't scale through information. They scale through repeated, low-stakes interaction. The kind that happens naturally when you share space, but must be engineered when you don't.
Why rituals fail
Teams try to compensate with rituals: daily standups, virtual coffee chats, all-hands meetings. These help, but they're not the same.
The problem is performativity. When interaction is scheduled, it becomes a performance. People say what they think they should say. They optimize for brevity. They skip the exploratory, half-formed thoughts that lead to real alignment.
This is why remote standups feel hollow. It's not that people don't care. It's that the format doesn't allow for the kind of messy, unscripted exchange that builds shared understanding.
The social cost of efficiency
Remote work rewards clarity and punishes ambiguity. That's mostly good. But humans don't always have clarity. Sometimes you need to talk through a fuzzy idea. Sometimes you need to sense whether someone is struggling before they say so.
In an office, these moments are cheap. You turn around. You walk to someone's desk. You overhear a conversation and jump in.
Remotely, these moments require activation energy. You have to decide to reach out. You have to open Slack, or schedule a call, or send a message that might be interrupting. The friction is small, but it accumulates.
Over time, people stop reaching out for small things. They wait until problems are big enough to justify the friction. By then, it's often too late.
What actually works
The teams that thrive remotely don't just optimize processes. They engineer serendipity. They create containers for unstructured interaction.
Examples:
- Open voice channels — always-on Zoom rooms where people can drop in and out freely
- Public work sessions — scheduled time where people work in parallel, camera on, occasionally riffing
- Over-communication of context — not just decisions, but the reasoning behind them
- Intentional overlap — small teams work in tighter time zones, even if the company is global
None of this is revolutionary. But it's also not the default. The default is to assume async tools solve everything. They don't.
It's not a tools problem
We keep searching for the perfect remote work tool. Better video. Better async. Better presence indicators. These help at the margins. They don't fix the core issue.
The core issue is that humans are wired for proximity. We read each other through body language, tone, timing. We bond through shared rituals, inside jokes, repeated low-stakes contact.
Remote work doesn't make this impossible. But it makes it unnatural. It requires deliberate effort where proximity gave it for free.
The question isn't whether remote work can work. It can. The question is whether teams are willing to invest in the social infrastructure that makes it work—not just the technical infrastructure.
Most aren't. And that's why most remote teams feel lonely, misaligned, and fragile.