Connection > Location

I lead an engineering organization spread across multiple time zones, continents, and just about every mix of remote, hybrid, and in-office that exists. For years, whenever a peer CTO asked how the team was doing, the conversation defaulted to location. How many days are people required in? Is fully remote actually working for you? I’ve started pushing back on that question, because I think it’s the wrong one.

Ryan Pendell’s analysis of Gallup’s global workplace research gave me language for something I’d been circling for months without naming it. He calls it “the remote work paradox,” and once you see the shape of it, the remote-versus-office debate looks like it’s measuring the wrong variable entirely.

Pendell’s analysis sorts workers into four groups: fully remote, hybrid, on-site remote-capable, and on-site non-remote-capable. Globally, fully remote workers report the highest engagement of any group, at 31 percent, compared with 23 percent for hybrid workers, 23 percent for on-site employees whose jobs could technically be done remotely, and 19 percent for those whose jobs can’t.

Here’s the paradox: those same fully remote workers are less likely to say they’re thriving in their lives overall (36 percent) than hybrid workers or on-site remote-capable workers, both at 42 percent. The group posting the best engagement numbers is posting some of the worst wellbeing numbers. A leader who only watches an engagement dashboard is reading half the story and mistaking it for the whole one.

This is the trap in the remote-versus-office debate. Neither side of it predicts wellbeing cleanly, and neither side predicts engagement cleanly either. Location correlates with both outcomes, but it isn’t causing either one. Something underneath the location variable is doing the actual work.

The engagement side of the paradox, Pendell argues, comes down to autonomy. Remote workers shape their own schedules, reach a flow state without interruption, and use their time more efficiently, and that shows up directly in how engaged they feel. But autonomy has a cost on the other side of the ledger: without shared structure, coordinating with a team you rarely see becomes its own source of stress, and digital collaboration isn’t always smooth, especially on work that requires heavy coordination.

This is where I think a lot of hybrid leadership goes wrong, including some of my own early instincts. We solve for autonomy (flexible hours, async-first communication, fewer standing meetings) and quietly assume that’s the same as solving for connection. It isn’t. Autonomy is about control over your own time. Connection is about whether anyone would notice, and care, if you disappeared for a week. A team can have abundant autonomy and almost no connection at all.

The leadership implication is uncomfortable: giving people more freedom doesn’t automatically make them feel more tied to anything. If coordination is where the friction actually lives, coordination is where the redesign has to happen, not by adding meetings, but by making handoffs, context, and checking-in deliberate instead of incidental.

The most useful point in Pendell’s piece isn’t about the calendar; it’s about what an office quietly hands you for free. Camaraderie. The running joke that started three weeks ago. The lunch nobody scheduled. Remote workers lose access to that scaffolding, and Pendell notes that isolation, left unaddressed, feeds loneliness and can tip into sadness and anger. He also points to something I hadn’t considered: sharing meals with other people predicts overall wellbeing about as strongly as income does.

That one reframed how I think about my own team’s rituals. We’ve built plenty of structure around delivery (sprint cadences, standups, retros) and almost none around the unstructured stuff that happens naturally when people share a building. Those informal moments aren’t a nice-to-have layered on top of the work. Pendell’s data suggests they function closer to a wellbeing input, one that hybrid and remote arrangements quietly remove unless someone deliberately puts it back.

Putting it back is a leadership decision, not a facilities decision. It has to be someone’s job to manufacture the equivalent of a hallway conversation on purpose: a standing unstructured call, a rotating pairing system, or just protecting the first ten minutes of a meeting for nothing work-related. The office never had to try. Hybrid leadership does.

Gallup’s most recent State of the Global Workplace report extends the story in a direction that complicates it further. Leaders report the highest engagement of any group in the organization, and also the highest stress, anger, sadness, and loneliness of any group. Gallup’s own Vibhas Ratanjee named the gap directly in a recent Forbes piece: leaders come out roughly ten points lonelier than the people they lead.

This is the part of the human connection framework that usually gets skipped. We talk about connection as something a leader provides, a benefit designed and distributed downward. Gallup’s data says the leader is frequently the most isolated node in the system, visible to everyone and genuinely connected to almost no one. A framework that treats the leader purely as the supplier of connection, never as someone who also needs it, will eventually run out of a leader who can supply it.

This is particularly relevant in hybrid organizations, where the leader is often the one person expected to be everywhere: in the office when it matters, on the call when it doesn’t, present for every team’s rhythm but embedded in none of them. A human connection framework for hybrid leadership has to include the leader’s own connection, or it’s just a delegation of loneliness.

None of this resolves into a policy you can put in a handbook. Three days in the office, or five, or zero, isn’t the lever. The lever is whether someone has taken responsibility for the parts of human connection that don’t happen automatically anymore: the coordination autonomy quietly erodes, the camaraderie the office used to hand out for free, and the leader’s own need for the same thing they’re building for everyone else. Gallup’s data suggests the payoff for getting it right is durable: among fully remote workers who are both engaged and thriving, only 38 percent are job hunting. Everyone else is somewhere north of that. If you’re building the coaching-first leadership culture that tends to go with this, I wrote about the research behind that shift in Coach, Don’t Command.