Connection at work

You may think working from home is a recent invention, but for most of history it was the norm. Industry was done in the home (and by the whole family!), and even farming was usually close to it, and it took the Industrial Revolution to start pulling work out of the house at scale. What’s less obvious is that some of the most productive collaboration in history also happened at a distance.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, scientists and philosophers across Europe formed the Republic of Letters, a self-styled community held together by the postal service. Voltaire and Leibniz each wrote close to 15,000 letters, and people like Locke were bound to them by a shared belief that knowledge should rest on experiment rather than authority.

It was people at the centre who made it work. Henry Oldenburg, a German expatriate in London and the first secretary of the Royal Society, was one of the principal hubs of correspondence between England and the continent. In 1665 he launched Philosophical Transactions, turning private letters into a public record, and he translated and published the microscope observations of Antonie van Leeuwenhoek. It wasn’t one seamless network, either. Mapping projects at Stanford found that even Locke’s correspondents formed clusters with few links between them, more patchwork than web. Which is exactly why people who bridged the gaps mattered so much.

The fact that people 300 years ago managed to be hugely creative while communicating mainly by letter does put one more Zoom call in context. Mind you, I’m sure there’s something to be said for being left alone to actually get on with things, and that tension is the real question.

There were plenty of monks and nuns in relative isolation for centuries before this, and we didn’t see the same explosion of ideas. Monasteries preserved a great deal of knowledge, but they were largely closed worlds. What changed was reach and diversity: people in different countries, disciplines and faiths could find each other and build relationships across distance. It wasn’t the only factor, since printing, patronage and trade all mattered, but it was a big one.

It was slow and fragile, too. When England and the Dutch Republic were at war in 1665, the letters between Oldenburg and Spinoza went quiet for about a decade. Connection at a distance works, but it takes effort.

The same pattern shows up today. A study of more than 61,000 Microsoft employees used the shift to firm-wide remote work in 2020 as a natural experiment. Collaboration networks became more static and siloed, with fewer bridges between different parts of the company, and time spent collaborating across groups fell by about a quarter. Connections within groups actually got stronger. It was the links between them that withered. It was a forced, pandemic-era shift, so it’s no verdict on remote work in general, but it’s a clear warning about what gets lost by default.

The benefits of connection at work are well studied, from stronger collaboration and job satisfaction to better wellbeing and productivity. So how do you build it, and not just within a team but across the organisation?

Create the space and opportunity for connection. Think consciously about how people communicate. Is there space for conversation outside work priorities? Are there places for people to talk about their interests, and do they ever bring together people who wouldn’t normally cross paths? Interest-based channels, cross-team introductions and making it easy to see who knows what are all cheap ways to be your own Oldenburg.

Take team building seriously. A meta-analysis of team-building studies found a moderate positive effect on team outcomes, strongest for how people feel about the team and how well it works together. Minimal-pressure fun with a shared challenge is a good way to get there, and it’s worth doing once or twice a year, especially for remote teams. There’s an argument it’s easier for remote companies, budget permitting, because you can plan longer and more varied stretches together and give people plenty of chances to build relationships.

Lead by example. Regardless of whether your role reflects seniority, you can set the tone of conversations, spot shared interests in a team, show appreciation for others and gently pull like-minded people together.

Trust across teams takes years, not weeks. I saw this first-hand when I joined IriusRisk. There was a real air of frustration, both within the product teams and in the customer-facing teams who depended on them. With the product teams, rebuilding trust and overhauling how we worked took months. With the customer-facing teams it took years. I built far more transparent communications so they could see what we were doing and why, and with my team joined many customer calls so they could see we understood customer pain too. Neither was clever. Both were slow, one conversation at a time, until the proof outweighed the scepticism.

None of this works in the wrong culture. In a toxic one, people will still build connections, but in opposition to management rather than in collaboration to produce quality work. Left alone, the frustration I described above hardens into exactly that: us versus them. Same relationships, same effort, opposite outcomes. Connection is an amplifier, so it’s worth checking what it’s amplifying.

References

1. Dishman, L. (2019). No, remote work isn’t a “new” perk. Fast Company.
2. Jacobs, F. (2024). The Enlightenment had its own internet: The Republic of Letters. Big Think.
3. Henry Oldenburg. Spinoza Web.
4. Mabe, M. (2015). Henry Oldenburg and the invention of journal publishing. STM Association.
5. Henry Oldenburg. Lens on Leeuwenhoek.
6. Yang, L., Holtz, D., Jaffe, S., et al. (2021). The effects of remote work on collaboration among information workers. Nature Human Behaviour. Summary: Berkeley Haas newsroom.
7. Houston, E. (updated 2025). The importance of positive relationships in the workplace. PositivePsychology.com.
8. Klein, C., DiazGranados, D., Salas, E., et al. (2009). Does team building work? Small Group Research, 40(2), 181–222.