Beyond the Office: Rethinking Proximity in Modern Work
By Jenny Vazquez-Newsum, Principal at Dowling Street
I keep having versions of the same conversation with leaders and managers.
Sometimes it’s a remote team that feels like onboarding has become impossible. Sometimes it’s a hybrid team that’s technically “back,” but still spending most of the day on video calls. Sometimes it’s a co-located team where everyone sits in the same building and still struggles to coordinate across functions, or understand what other people are actually doing.
The details shift, but the underlying frustration remains consistent. Something feels strained. People are working, but they’re interpreting each other more than understanding each other.
Oftentimes, the diagnosis lands in the same place: we need more proximity.
What people usually mean is physical proximity. More days in-office. More overlap. More shared space.
But the more I sit with these conversations, the more I think we’re solving for the wrong thing.
The Two-Dimensional Interpretation
We've flattened a complex, multi-dimensional challenge into a binary: together or apart. In-person or remote. Present or absent.
That framing is appealing because it produces clear actions. If something is breaking down, you can mandate a return. You can pick anchor days. You can increase the number of “touchpoints.” You can make a calendar change and call it a cultural solution.
It looks like leadership because it’s visible. It’s enforceable. You can measure it. It looks like leadership because it’s visible. It’s enforceable. You can measure it. But as organizational psychologist Gleb Tsipursky has written in Harvard Business Review, visibility often distorts judgment rather than improving it. Proximity bias leads managers to overvalue the contributions of people they physically see, mistaking presence for performance.
The thing most leaders are actually worried about isn’t whether people are physically together. It’s whether people understand each other. It’s whether the work is coordinated. It’s whether there’s trust. It’s whether the team can move without constant checking, correcting, or misinterpreting each other.
Physical proximity can support that, sometimes. It can also fail to produce it entirely.
Relational proximity is a different thing. It’s not about location. It’s about shared understanding—context, constraints, a sense of how decisions are made, and what matters. It’s also about whether people feel safe enough to be honest about what they don’t know and what isn’t working.
Those are not guaranteed by bodies in the same room.
What Proximity Actually Does
Proximity—real proximity—shapes how we see.
When you’re close to someone’s work, you start to notice what isn’t written down. You understand the tradeoffs they’re managing. You see how they prioritize and where they get stuck. You catch small signals that tell you something is off long before it becomes a project delay or a people issue.
You don’t just learn what someone delivered. You learn how they think.
This is why managers often say remote work is hard. Not because the work can’t be done remotely, but because the type of understanding they used to assume was happening now feels thinner. They’re missing context. They’re missing interpretive cues. They’re missing the informal ways people used to build a shared picture of reality.
But here’s the part that often gets overlooked: physical proximity didn’t always create that understanding either. It just made it easier to believe it existed.
I’ve worked with teams who shared the same floor, sat through the same meetings, and still couldn’t explain what other functions actually did. They were surrounded by colleagues and still operating with minimal shared context. Physical presence gave them the optics of connection while masking real distance.
Remote work didn’t create relational gaps. For many organizations, it revealed them.
The Safety Mechanism
There’s another layer to these conversations, and it’s usually operating quietly in the background.
When trust is low and uncertainty is high, proximity becomes a safety mechanism. People stay close to what they know. They rely on familiar collaborators. They narrow their circle, reducing the number of relationships they have to manage.
This is human. It is also rational, in the short term.
But it has consequences. The organization starts to fracture into smaller worlds with their own language, assumptions, and narratives. Research from Microsoft, published in Nature Human Behaviour, found that as remote work increased, collaboration networks became more siloed—fewer weak ties, fewer cross-functional bridges, more tightly clustered communication. In other words, people talked more within their immediate circles and less across them.
Departments grow more inward. Cross-functional work becomes harder not because people are stubborn, but because they no longer share enough context to interpret each other accurately. Intent gets misread, delays get moralized, and silence becomes a story.
Physical proximity can soothe that instinct, but it can also intensify it, depending on how it’s used. When people return to the office and still don’t understand each other, they often feel the gap more sharply. The closeness makes the distance obvious.
That’s when cynicism sets in.
When Proximity Erodes
Sometimes physical proximity, especially when mandated, becomes a substitute for clarity.
If leaders aren’t sure how to rebuild trust or increase collaboration, requiring people to come in can feel like doing something. It introduces structure. It creates the appearance of movement. It can even reduce certain coordination issues for some teams.
But when physical presence is mandated without a clear purpose—and without practices that build understanding—what you often get is performance. People show up, they look busy, they attend more meetings, and they leave with the same unanswered questions they had before. It becomes presence without connection.
We saw a version of this long before remote work. Open offices were designed to increase collaboration. But research from Harvard Business School professor Ethan Bernstein found the opposite: when two Fortune 500 companies moved to open offices, face-to-face interaction actually decreased by roughly 70 percent, as employees withdrew into digital communication to regain a sense of privacy and control. For many people, these environments increased surveillance and distraction. Being visible did not mean being understood. It often meant being watched.
And when the environment signals “visibility matters,” the safest move is to look productive rather than to actually take the relational risks that build proximity: asking hard questions, admitting confusion, naming tension, sharing incomplete thinking.
Physical proximity can’t compensate for that. In some cases, it reinforces the worst version of it.
The Hidden Cost of Solving the Wrong Thing
Here's what the two-dimensional flattening obscures: the challenges organizations are facing right now aren't primarily about physical arrangement. They're about trust deficits, context gaps, and the breakdown of shared understanding.
These gaps existed before. They were just masked by the rituals of physical co-location—the meetings, the hallway conversations, the visual confirmation that everyone was "there." Those rituals created a sense of connection that was often more perceived than real.
What's happening now isn't that remote work created these gaps. It's that the absence of those masking rituals made the gaps impossible to ignore.
Harvard Business Publishing recently described hybrid work as introducing “new hazards” for leaders—missed contextual cues, proximity bias, and weakened informal knowledge transfer. The challenge isn’t location itself, but how much of our coordination relies on unexamined habits of co-location.
The manager who tells me that managing remotely is difficult isn’t really struggling with geography. They’re confronting the fact that much of their organization’s context has never been made explicit. For years, shared understanding was assumed to emerge through proximity. It felt like people “picked things up.” Now, without that illusion of osmosis, the absence of intentional context-sharing is harder to ignore.
The leader frustrated that their team doesn't collaborate well across locations isn't facing a coordination problem. They're facing a trust problem. Or a clarity problem about who needs to understand what, and why. Physical proximity used to paper over these gaps. Now it can't.
Proximity as Practice
At Dowling Street, we're a fully remote team. We don't have an office. We've never had one.
And yet, relational proximity is something we experience daily. Not because it's easy or automatic, but because we've prioritized it. Built it intentionally.
We create proximity through process. We have regular practices where we share not just outcomes but also our thinking—how we approached something, what we struggled with, and what changed our perspective. We make our work visible to each other in ways that build context and understanding. We establish rhythms that create predictability and trust.
But perhaps more importantly, we build proximity through the nature of our work itself. We go deep with clients. We spend time understanding not just what organizations are trying to accomplish, but how they think. What they value. What fears drive their decisions. This requires us to be proximate—not physically, but relationally. We have to develop shared vocabulary, build trust, and earn the right to ask difficult questions.
Proximity, in this sense, isn't a place. It's a practice. It's something you build through repeated, intentional action.
Building for Relational Proximity
If the goal is relational proximity, the work changes. It becomes less about where people sit, and more about what people can see and say.
Here are a few practical starting points.
Make thinking visible, not just outcomes.
When you share an update, don’t just report what happened. Share how you arrived there. What you considered. What you ruled out. What tradeoffs shaped the decision. Over time, this builds shared logic, one of the fastest ways to reduce misunderstandings and build trust.
Design for context transfer, especially across functions.
Instead of asking, “How do we communicate more?” ask, “Where are people missing context that they actually need?” Then build targeted mechanisms—cross-functional reviews, working sessions, decision logs, brief weekly context shares—that reduce reliance on guessing.
Treat management as context-building.
People don’t just need tasks and deliverables. They need the invisible map: the history behind decisions, the language that signals priorities, the norms that shape how choices get made. For years, much of this traveled informally through proximity. If your management approach depended on that, you’ll feel its absence now. The solution isn’t more days in the office. It’s making context explicit and portable.
Reduce productivity theater.
Pay attention to what you reward. If you reward visibility, you’ll get performance. If you reward clarity, you’ll get shared reality. Relational proximity collapses when people feel watched more than they feel supported.
Become proximate to what you avoid.
Most organizations have predictable distance patterns: functions that don’t understand each other, groups that don’t trust each other, leaders who rely on secondhand narratives instead of direct exposure. Ask yourself where you’re not close enough to understand, and then build contact that is about learning, not surveillance.
The Leadership Shift
The skill organizations need right now isn’t managing remote work. It’s building relational proximity in whatever arrangement you have.
That requires different questions from those most return-to-office debates are built on. Not “How often are people in?” but “How well do people understand each other’s constraints?” Not “Are they communicating?” but “Is the communication building shared context?” Not “Are they present?” but “Can they tell the truth about what’s happening without fear?”
Physical proximity is easier to mandate. Relational proximity is harder to build.
But it’s the thing leaders are reaching for when they say, “Something is missing.”
So maybe the question isn’t how to rearrange where people work.
Maybe it’s this: what distance has always been here—between teams, between functions, between leaders and the work itself—and why did we mistake a shared building for shared understanding?
If this moment has done anything, it’s made those gaps harder to ignore. That’s uncomfortable.
It might also be useful.
Sources:
Harvard Business Publishing Corporate Learning. 2023. Bridging the Distance: Four Imperatives for Leaders of Hybrid Teams. https://www.harvardbusiness.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/10/CL_Perspective_Bridging-the-Distance_Four-Imperatives-for-Leaders-of-Hybrid-Teams.pdf.
Tsipursky, G. 2022. What Is Proximity Bias and How Can Managers Prevent It? HBR. https://hbr.org/2022/10/what-is-proximity-bias-and-how-can-managers-prevent-it.
Walsh, Colleen. 2019. Hate your open office? Harvard Gazette. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2019/11/why-open-offices-hurt-collaboration-and-what-can-be-done-about-it/.
Yang et al. 2022. The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers. Nat Hum Behav. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-021-01196-4.