Why Proximity Builds the Kind of Team That Notices
A few weeks ago, I had the chance to engage in some very interesting people watching. In a hotel lobby, a group of colleagues had gathered from across several states for a work dinner. One of them, Leslie, realized she’d lost her phone, probably left behind in the Uber that brought her to the hotel. She was from out of state, didn’t know the city, and had no way to reach anyone: not Uber, not family, not her people back home. She said as much to the group, more than once. A couple of people suggested calling Uber, someone mentioned a nearby T-Mobile, and the group (Leslie included) headed to dinner with the problem still unsolved. In an elevator later that night, I asked one of them what had happened with her friend’s phone. She didn’t know. She’d already stopped thinking about it.
Something about that interaction stuck with me because I think it points to something unique about how distributed teams work, and particularly about what can get lost when we know our colleagues primarily in 2D, either due to hybrid work or just having offices all over campus.
The research on why we help isn't always the flattering version
There is a body of thinking about what motivates us to help another person, and those motivations split roughly three ways.
Some people are altruistically motivated. They will spend their own time, social capital, energy, or resources to help another person simply because helping is the right thing to do. The people who operate this way often seem to assume everyone else would do the same thing, which can make for an interesting surprise when they discover that everyone else, in fact, would not.
Some people help because they can see how helping another person benefits them, too. A colleague’s win becomes their win. A favor now becomes a favor banked for later. We can be perfectly comfortable acknowledging that mutual benefit exists: I can help you with this, and it works for me too, so let’s figure it out together. When both people understand the arrangement, that kind of help can be remarkably durable.
And then there are people motivated by something closer to competitive drive. They like being The Helper because there is status, satisfaction, or emotional reward attached to being the person who solves the problem. You probably know someone like this. They are terrific when there is a crisis and everyone needs somebody to swoop in and save the day. The boring, ongoing support that nobody notices and nobody applauds may be a little less appealing.
All three motivations show up in our workplaces (and life!), including our campuses, and probably in all of us to varying degrees depending on the situation.
None of them quite explained what I watched happen with Leslie’s group. These were colleagues who knew one another and worked together, yet Leslie’s problem never became the group’s problem. Everyone registered it, offered a few ideas, and kept moving.
So what makes us cross that line from knowing someone has a problem to feeling invested enough to help solve it?
Affiliation is the actual mechanism
Affiliation has a lot to do with it.
We help the people we feel close to, and closeness gets built out of the little things. You know someone’s coffee order. You know their kids’ names. You know what they look like when they are stressed, even when they insist they are fine. You know which meeting they dread every month and which campus issue is going to send them directly to your office afterward because they are going to need to TALK ABOUT IT.
That kind of knowing gets built in hallway conversations, on the walk back from a meeting, during the three minutes before everyone officially gets started, and in all of those incidental interactions that happen when people occupy the same physical space. Nobody puts “develop meaningful affiliation with colleagues” on the meeting agenda. You simply accumulate it, a few minutes at a time.
Leslie’s colleagues knew her the way remote colleagues often know one another, through shared work, scheduled meetings, Zoom thumbnails, and whatever running inside joke the group had developed about a guy from Iowa.
There is another layer of knowing someone that makes their problem start to feel a little bit like your problem. It is the layer that makes you sit down next to Leslie and say, “Okay, we are going to figure this out before we go to dinner.” Proximity builds that layer inherently.
What this means for distributed teams — and what to build instead
As Leader-Bosses leading remote or distributed teams, the loose, organic affiliation that develops among people who regularly share physical space does not automatically reproduce itself when everyone is working from somewhere else. If we want that kind of connection on a distributed team, we have to create the conditions for it.
You probably have someone on your team who already does some of this naturally. They remember birthdays, and partner’s names, and the pets who regularly show up on Zoom. They notice that somebody has been unusually quiet for the last two meetings and send a message afterward to ask if everything is okay. Those people supply a piece of a team’s connective tissue as part of their personality.
Appreciate the heck out of those people, and pay attention to what they are doing. One naturally warm person cannot carry the affiliation of an entire team. The goal is to make the noticing structural so it becomes part of how the team operates instead of something that depends on having the right personality in a Teams meeting.
A few ways to do that in practice:
Schedule the non-task time. Give people a few minutes at the beginning of a meeting to talk about how they are doing. I mean how they are doing, beyond a status update cleverly disguised as concern. It may feel a little contrived at first, especially for those of us who have been conditioned to believe every minute on a meeting agenda must be ruthlessly productive. Let it be awkward for a while. With enough repetition, eventually it just becomes how your team operates.
Favor consistency over production value. A short, recurring huddle without deliverables attached can build more connection over six months than one beautifully produced offsite where everyone gets a branded notebook and participates in a team-building exercise they will never speak of again. Affiliation is built through repetition, which means the ordinary interactions have a chance to compound.
Borrow the behavior, even if it is not your instinct. Every team seems to have at least one person for whom this kind of connection comes naturally. Watch what that person does. Which questions do they ask? What do they remember? When do they follow up? How do they notice when someone needs something? You can borrow the behaviors that help them connect with people.
Go looking for the quiet signal. The people who need support are often not the ones who will volunteer that information, especially when most of your interactions happen through a screen. When we are physically together, proximity gives us information without requiring anyone to announce it. Someone looks a little off walking into a meeting, and the colleague sitting next to them notices. Someone lingers after everyone else leaves the conference room. Someone who usually has plenty to say has been unusually quiet all morning. Distributed work removes a lot of that ambient information, so Leader-Bosses have to create deliberate ways to notice the people who have not given them anything obvious to notice.
None of this requires a new program, a budget line, a task force, or another standing committee. These are small behaviors repeated often enough that people begin to know one another beyond the work assigned to them.
Over time, those accumulated moments are what make someone else’s problem feel a little bit like your problem, too. And when Leslie loses her phone in a strange city and has no idea what to do next, somebody sits down next to her to help figure it out.
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