This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - Remote vs. In-Person Work: What the Research Says With Natalia Emanuel | 443

Episode Date: October 14, 2026

For years, remote work has felt like a win. No commute, more flexibility, fewer pointless hours spent proving we're working simply because someone can see us. And for women, especially caregivers, that flexibility can be a game changer. But what if there's a downside we're not talking about enough? In this episode of This Is Woman's Work, Nicole Kalil sits down with economist Natalia Emanuel, co-author of In Person: How Working Together Fuels Creativity, Productivity, and Growth, to challenge some deeply held beliefs about remote work. In this episode, they discuss: Why working face-to-face can improve learning, creativity, and career advancement. The surprising connection between remote work, isolation, and mental health. Why being in the office isn't the same as meaningful in-person collaboration. How remote work can disadvantage younger employees and those starting new roles. Why mentorship and workplace culture need to be valued and rewarded. The complicated trade-offs between workplace flexibility and caregiving responsibilities. Five factors organizations should consider when deciding how much in-person work is necessary. Why predictable schedules and workday social activities matter, especially for women. How AI could make human connection even more valuable. The answer isn't all remote or all in person. It's about being intentional with our time, challenging outdated workplace expectations, and creating environments where people can actually thrive. Thank you to our sponsors! To see what Scribe could look like for your team, head to https://scribe.how/TIWW  and mention TIWW for your first month of Scribe Capture free on select plans Protect your loved ones without spying on them. Go to https://heypolo.com/work or use code WORK and get 70% off your first year Connect with Natalia:  Website:https://www.nataliaemanuel.com/  Book: https://inpersonbook.com/  LI: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nataliaemanuel?trk=public_post_feed-actor-name  Related Podcast Episodes The Connection Cure: Social Prescribing, Loneliness, and Why Belonging Is Medicine with Julia Hotz | 373 The Power of Conscious Connection with Talia Fox | 263 Work Doesn’t Have to Suck: The Case for Fun, Joy, and Better Results with Bree Groff | 382 Share the Love: If you found this episode insightful, please share it with a friend, tag us on social media, and leave a review on your favorite podcast platform! 🔗 Subscribe & Review:Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I am Nicole Khalil and you're listening to the This Is Woman's Work podcast, where the mission is to redefine what women's work looks and feels like. And the strategy is to bring you experts, research, lived experience, and information that helps you decide what's right for you, which means we have to be willing to consider information that challenges what we already believe. And I'll admit today's topic challenges the hell out of me. Because I have long believed that having the option to work remotely is better for women. I believed it before COVID, and COVID only reinforced it for me.

Because the traditional model of work, be the first in and the last out. Work hard, but mostly make sure your boss sees you working hard. Don't let having kids interfere with your 7 a.m. meeting, your 6 p.m., happy hour, or the client dinner that gets you home at 9 p.m. And for the love of God, don't mention the conflict. Just make it work.

Dress professionally, the time and cost associated with getting ready for work. All of that traditional model wasn't exactly designed with women in mind. So yes, I've been frustrated by the return to office mandates, by the assumption that if somebody isn't watching us, we must not be working, by the very real inefficiencies that commuting creates, especially for caregivers. So imagine my resistance when today's guests reached out with the research showing that working together in person actually matters, not as an opinion, not as a CEO preference, as a research and data-driven conclusion. We're talking Harvard and Princeton educated economists telling me something that I did not want

to hear, but apparently need to. Because if we're going to challenge outdated beliefs about work, we have to be willing to challenge our own, too. Natalia Emanuel earned her PhD in economics from Harvard, continued her research at Princeton, and is the co-author of in-person, how working together fuels creativity, productivity, and growth. Her research with Emma Harrington has been published in Science, the quarterly Journal of Economics, and featured by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Economist, MPR, and many more. Their research suggests that remote work comes with costs to creativity, connection, mental health, and career growth that we do need to understand. Does that mean

everyone belongs back in the office five days a week? God, I hope not. But it does mean that this conversation deserves more than mandates on one side and resistance on the other. So, Natalia, thank you for being here. And I think it's best we start with the research. What does it tell us about the things that we gain when we work together in person? Thank you so much for having me. And you're speaking right to my heart. I love to start with the research. So I want to sort of lay out three categories that I think are really important. The first one is learning. We do a much better job learning when we are in person. Then there's also creativity and then connection. And so I'll start with learning. We looked at this starting even before the pandemic. And we were focused on Fortune 500 workers. And some of them were with their team. They were in the same building sitting shoulder. shoulder to shoulder, and others of them were on the same campus in the office, but 10 minutes apart. And what you could see is that the people who were on the same campus but not with their team were getting less feedback on their work, less written feedback. And you can imagine that they also

were probably getting less verbal feedback. They weren't gaining as much tasks and knowledge just by watching other people do their job really well. And that's a problem that they were getting less feedback because that translated into doing their job less well, that the people who were far from their team happened to be, you know, creating more bugs, more hiccups. They were working on dead-end projects that didn't go anywhere or projects that were just so off the mark that they ended up being scrapped and it was easier to start from fresh. And that is, you know, costly to an organization, but also costly personally. That they ended up not getting as many promotions or finding the right next step. And so that was for us very concerning because it does mean that

there's something important about being in person for learning. And I'm going to take a quick detour here and underscore that this is about not being in the office per se because everyone we were looking at was in the office. This is about being in person shoulder to shoulder face to face with your team. So I'll pause there. That's sort of a learning piece. I'm happy to talk on the creativity and connection pieces as well. If you want to be. want me to just sort of keep going. Yeah, no, I do want you to keep going, but I like to, you clarified that we're not just talking about being in the office. I can't imagine that being physically in the office, but being on Zoom calls all day has that much of a great benefit.

What you're talking about is face to face, as you said, shoulder to shoulder, like interaction with the people you work with directly, your team, your leaders, the people you lead and whatnot. Okay. And I'd say even now that's really important because these days, it's actually harder. We did a survey just a few weeks ago of workers in the United States, 1,500 of them. And you could see in their last day in the office, only about half of them had an in-person meeting. Most people were still just commuting in to sit on Zoom meetings. 15% of them said that they didn't even have a casual conversation or chat with a colleague. And so for them, they're literally getting the worst of both worlds. They are, commuting in just to have a remote day. And that is not what we're going for at all. This is really about can you connect in person? What is speaking to my heart is this is less about mandates and like physical location and more about connection. I'm going to use the word community, but I mean it in the work environment. Okay. And it's, I don't think that's just the work environment, right? The workplace is the number one place that adults make friends these days. You know,

it's not your church, it's not your neighborhood, it's not your PTA. It is the workplace. And part of that is because it takes 160 hours on average to really build a robust friendship. And, you know, we spend a lot of time at work. And so when you're, you know, not having as deep of a connection and you're not really building up a 3D image of who your colleagues are, which often happens over Zoom, then it's harder to build those friendships. And it becomes lonelier. And it becomes a little bit, you know, more focused on just the humdrum parts of work. the task that you have to check off as opposed to being part of a team and part of a mission and part of, as you say, a community. Yeah. Okay. So I have plenty of questions, but I want to make sure you share about creativity and connection before I pepper you with them.

Great. Yes. The creativity one is actually one of my favorites. This, we could see Steve Jobs was CEO of Pixar back in the 90s and he was convinced that in its language, arbitrary collisions were the key to having, sustained creative ideas. And so he wanted to get everyone into one building. So he, you know, brought a former fruit canning factory to get everyone in one place. But he said that wasn't enough. He needed people to get up out of their seats in order to move around and bump into each other. And so his incentive of choice for getting people out of their seats was the bathroom. We said there's going to be one set of bathrooms and they are going to be in the central atrium. So multiple times a day, you have to bump into people. And there actually is data. behind his perspective, that when you see new people, people who are thinking about things in a

different way, who have not thought about the problem that you're thinking about, you end up having a lot more creative friction that leads to these breakthroughs. And so when people are coming up with ideas, they tend to come up with 14% more ideas when they're brainstorming in person than if it's over Zoom. And 18% more creative ideas when other people have evaluated, you know, is this idea really innovative. And so that ends up being really important for, are you aiming for these breakthroughs, not just, you know, checking things off your list, but are you really going for just a completely novel way of doing something? Then being in person and having those arbitrary collisions ends up being really helpful. Again, millions of questions. What about connection? So connection,

I think we touched on almost a little bit before, which is that you can see in these surveys that when people are fully remote, they feel that their work is less important for the mission. They feel that they are less connected to their team. And that ends up wearing. That means that it's less exciting to give your whole and your all to something that doesn't feel as important and doesn't feel as collegial. Okay, so there are clear upsides for being in person. What are some of the downsides of being remote? You mentioned a few, but I want to hone in a little bit on the mental health part? Well, let's start there. Sure. So one of the pieces of research that we did was we were looking at people who are in occupations that could be done remotely, you know, think software engineer

versus people who were in jobs that couldn't be done remotely. Think mechanical engineer or nurse or brain surgeon. And we were just tracking what was going on with people's self-reported mental health over time from before the pandemic when, you know, not that many people were working fully remotely or even partially remotely to after the pandemic when you see this big surge in remote work. And after that time, you know, since and again, we're ignoring everything that happened in the pandemic. We're just looking before the pandemic and then like 22 on onward. And you can see that everyone's mental health took a little bit of a nose dive, but it was particularly for the people who are in remotable jobs. Their mental health really deteriorated quite a bit. And it's not just in

self-reports. It's also in seeing a mental health professional, also in taking prescriptions. medications for anxiety and depression. And one of the reasons why you see that is you see a big uptick in isolation, in spending your whole day alone. There's a 50% increase in not seeing anyone else in their day. And that really does wear on people. No doubt. Even people, like I'm a diehard introvert and I noticed that that takes its toll when you're just home by yourself all day. when I was single, that would have been, I think, even harder. One of the other things that jumped out at me, you talked about how remote work can hurt learning and career growth or even just being separated from your team. But one of the things you talk about is that leaders often pay the biggest price with remote work.

Tell us about that. Right. So you can imagine that sometimes CEOs might be remote because it's more attractive to be by the seaside and your yacht. And then it's sort of not that surprising that if they're remote, they're not going to do so well. But some people might be remote just because that's what works for their families. They want to stay near their in-laws or what have you. So even those people, what happens when you see a CEO come in who is remote because they want to stay near their loved ones, you still see that the valuation of the company, as evaluated by the stock market,

goes down by about 10 to 15 percent. And you see that employee ratings on Glassdoor go up in terms of them saying, oh, this person's out of touch. You have a lot more of that sort of sense that the CEO doesn't really know what's going on. And in fact, you see a lot more of their investments seem to be short-term investments rather than really investing in the ongoing health of the company. And so even though these CEOs that are remote actually tend to have better resumes, they tend to be more likely to have gone to Ivy League colleges or has spent more time in the C-suite. They actually don't tend to do so well for the company relative to someone who maybe has less pretty resume but is on the ground really connecting with their people, understanding what is at the core

of this company and how to fuel it. Yeah. Okay. I want to dive deeper into some of this, but I just feel the need to really reinforce what you're talking about when you mean in person because I just fear this like everybody needs to be in the office Monday through Friday eight to five and it is what it is. But that is not at all. But that is not at all what you're saying. So when you are talking about these positive outcomes of being in person, what is the in person part of that look like? What do you mean? I think it's the

easiest to imagine. Not that I'm trying to roll back the clock to 2019 when, you know, it was, as you say, you know, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. five days a week, that's not at all what I have in mind. Rather, what I have in mind is that the times that we are in person, we are actually in person. Our phones are away. Our computers are away. We are connecting with real eye contact as opposed to this sort of awkward piece where I'm looking at the camera or not looking at the camera but then can't see your eyes, that we are really actually connecting as humans with one another, that we are going to the coffee machine or the water cooler or just sort of giving a head nod as someone goes into the elevator. This is very much the sort of type of human interaction that you

would prioritize by being in person. But I agree, as you said, the in person phrase has been co-opted to mean in office. And I really want to make the distinction that we're not just talking about in office 24-7. It's about when you are in the office, you should be in person. Okay. So then a follow-up question there is, you know, I could see some people being on right, we're going to stack meeting on top of meeting, on top of meeting. We're just going to be in person all day, the whole day, no breaks, nobody pees, right? Like, so when we are in person, is this about meetings, brainstorming, connection, informal, formal, any recommendations or any insight that your research shows there? Exactly, as you say, I think especially when it's a scarce

resource, right? When it were not in person all the time, there is this impulse to say, okay, I got to maximize. I need to have all of these meetings. But that precludes these arbitrary collisions that came from Steve Jobs putting the bathrooms in the atrium, that you actually do want to be encountering people. You want that sense of serendipity. And if you don't have that sense of serendipity, you don't get the creative ideas from talking to someone who's going to see it a different way. You don't get the sort of learning from how someone else does something, and you don't get that understanding of this is another person and how their life fits together and how their work fits in their life. And so you don't get that dimensionality, that sense of

connection. In fact, going to lunch together, talking about life together, that sort of small chit chat in the meeting before the meeting actually starts, even if you're only talking about what are your plans for the weekend or how is that concert you went to, those things end up mattering quite a bit for a sense of cohesiveness and for then doing better. You know those tasks at work that somehow only one person on your team knows how to do? So when someone new joins or needs help, the team ends up relying on that one person instead of having a process everyone can follow. Yeah, that's not exactly scalable, which is why I'm excited to partner with today's sponsor, Scribe. Scribe is a Scribe is a

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location if they need help. And one subscription covers your whole family. So yes, our teenagers, but also aging parents, partners, siblings, whoever it is that you want to stay connected to with unlimited members and groups. Protect your loved ones without spying on them. Go to heypolo.com slash work or use code work and get 70% off your first year. Again, heypolo.com slash work or promo code work for 70% off your first year. It reminds me of, you know, my version coming up in corporate was golf, right? That was a great way to be in person and talk business, but have the distraction and the, not being so formal.

Now, I didn't play golf and that created some issues on its own, but I guess my question is, How valuable are some of these outside the office but work in person type activities or events? I think they can be really, really helpful. Golf allows you to have a conversation about work, but it also allows you just to bond and talk about your other pieces. For me, this is not golf. It's the every other Thursday, there's a craft lunch that I go to where people bring their knitting and they're sewing. Oh, my God, I love that. Yes, it is sort of the opposite of golf, except for,

for that it is a time when you have sort of something to distract you, something else to talk about that allows people to have meaningful conversations that feel a little bit less intense. You know, you're not making this meeting capital M, you know, with an agenda, but you are able still to connect in a meaningful way. And so, yes, it is very productive to be able to have those conversations and especially when you can sort of have the little lever that allows you to make it a little more informal. Yeah, I love that. Is there a sweet spot?

What does the research say about how often we actually need to be together? It totally depends on the organization. There is no one size fits all. And so we try to distill this down to five concrete items that sort of we're hoping would be the foundation for a productive conversation about what share of your work really needs to happen in person and face to face. And those five things are connection. You know, number one is how important is connection for your line of work?

Is it all about the handshake? Is it all about really making a deep relationship with your clients, your collaborators? If so, you probably want to do that in person. Number two is about creativity, right? Do you need to have the new idea? Do you need to be iterating in order to get to your innovation? If so, that sort of back and forth really happens a lot better in person. Number three is how high are the stakes? Do you absolutely need someone to be able to ask a stupid question

because otherwise the consequences are dire? Then that should probably be in person because asking the stupid questions over, you know, email or zoo or more slack is just much harder. Then number four is how experienced is your team, right? If people are fresh on the job, have no idea what they're doing are really, you know, like enthusiastic young puppies, then you need a little bit of sort of training and in person is helpful for that. But if they're sort of old hat, you can do this blindfold with your hands tied behind your back, then sort of giving people the space to execute totally makes sense. And you know, you don't need as much of that mentorship and training per se. And then the fifth thing is sort of how hot is the labor market? If it is really hard to find a

single person, then maybe you need to cast a wider net. And so having a little bit less time in person might actually make that more feasible to get the person that you really need. And so those are the sort of concrete pieces that we hope would allow for just a conversation that's not based only on gut, but is instead based on the sort of cohesiveness of the team. I do want to say that I think there's another conversation that needs to happen, which is about what are we solving for in remote work, right? Is this a caregiver issue, right? Is this that, you know, you want to be there for pickup. You want to be there for the soccer game. If so, one day a week might not be the right solution.

Maybe it's you should leave work at three or four so that you can do pickup and then do that extra chunk of work after bedtime, right? Or is this a team where really they want to be hiking in Joshua Tree or is Yellowstone? In which case, again, one day a week, probably not helping you so much, but, you know, maybe a week in August where everybody can be remote and some people will be zooming in from Bali and other people from Joshua Tree, you know, because they're into hate that might work better. And so having a conversation of what is the goal with remote. at work, how are we going to sort of use that flexibility? If it is just periodic focus time, sure, maybe one day a week does work. But I think having that deep understanding of what are we trying to get out of here really ends up being very important. I love everything about that because it's both practical and actionable. My next question, you addressed a little bit already, but I just want to dive a little deeper on. One of the things that I do very clearly see that remote work creates problems around is for our younger workers or those starting new roles or new jobs. You talked already about learning and how experienced your team is. But I guess my question is,

what are the challenges, what's being lost when people start their careers or their new roles remotely? One of the lawyers we talk to, she always gives advice to her young colleagues saying what you want to do to really be successful here is become a barnacle, like attach yourself to someone who is three, five, ten years ahead of you so that you can understand everything they're doing. And she gives an example of in her first case, right out of law school, she happened to be partnered or the partner on the case was a man named Carl who, she said, just had the most theatric flare, that sometimes he would sort of have confidence

rolling off him in waves and just sort of say, this is how it's going to be. And other times, he was sort of enter a negotiation really timid, sort of shrunken into himself. And that she said, look, law school was great. It never taught me feeder. And there are so many things that you don't know that you don't know that you would learn just by seeing other people do their job amazingly. And those are the things that really get lost when you are working remotely. Couldn't agree more. And I think one of the challenges that organizations have is getting those more veteran experienced people to choose to come into work so that they can have that impact on the newer team members. Because I think we all would acknowledge or mostly agree that this is beneficial for somebody new on the job

or new in this job, whatever that might be. But if the value is connecting with those more senior experienced people and they've, quote, unquote, earned the right to not be in the office so much. How do we navigate through that? Like, how do we ask those people? Yeah, remote work sort of changed the goalposts a little bit. With remote work came a real big increase in performance pay in saying, I'm going to set the metrics and, you know, you're going to hit those targets and I'll pay you accordingly. And that made it a lot of sense. We can't incentivize inputs because I can't see when you're doing the work. So I can't say, oh, if you put in the time, then you get the bonus. And so instead, we're going to say, oh, if you do X, Y, Z, you create this number of reports, serve this number of

clients, then we'll give you the bonus. But that means that a lot of those intangible things, like mentorship, like contributing to a positive culture, those things are very hard to put a number on and often get sort of washed away. And those aren't in people's, you know, performance pay metrics. And so then, of course, it's not surprising that a mid-level person doesn't necessarily want to come in and do a job that they're not necessarily being incentivized to do. And so having a real honest conversation of this actually is a value of ours. And yes, I know I want you to sort of check the boxes, but sort of being able to say, we are going to incentivize these intangible things, these things that make it a place you want to come into. that ends up being really important. And so I think remote work actually did sort of poison that well a little bit,

but it's something that's reversible that we can say, actually we do value culture, actually we do value mentorship, and we are going to sort of put our money where our mouth is. Yeah. One of the things I often talk about with my husband is these more in-person, we talked about golf or and I loved your craft lunches or happy hours or what have you. Why do those things have to happen outside of normal working hours? Why can't they be part of the, you know, eight to five time frame?

Because I do think that negatively impacts caregivers. And so I guess my question is, are there things that the people who are asking you to come in person should be mindful of to make it available, attractive, effective for those who are caregivers? So I do think to the extent that you can have them be craft lunches rather than, you know, craft dinners. That's, that's better. Exactly as you said. The other piece that I think matters a lot is the predictability, right? Can you schedule this client dinner? Not the day before when it's really hard to find a nanny, but a month before when you can say, okay, grandma's going to come over. The neighborhood kid is going to come over. And can you do that with lead time? Because, one of the things, this was a completely different context, but I was studying bus and train operators and when they accept overtime. And there was absolutely no difference in accepting overtime when it was three months in advance. Then men and women accepted overtime exactly the same amount. But when it was the day of or the day before, women just totally dropped off. They were not accepting that overtime. And

that really shows up in your paycheck. And for them, it really showed up in their pension. And that is sort of costly. So I think the key component here is can you just give people lead time? A big fat amen to that. And I would like that message to be sent to schools as well. Because the last minute stuff makes me crazy. One last question for you. As AI continues to get better and better at doing a lot of our work, does our ability to connect in person become more or less valuable? My guess my bigger question is, is AI affecting the need for us to be in person. One of my favorite set of AI scholars have this quip of

if the love letters all sound the same because of AI, then you'd better do really well on the first date. And I think the same thing happens for us that the things that remote work tends to be really good for are well-defined, discrete tasks that an individual is doing. But the same thing's true of AI, that AI is really good at solo tasks that are well-defined, and discreet. And so the things that remote work is not so good at are the same things that

AI is not so good at. And those are connecting, establishing trust, establishing rapport, resolving differences, making sure that everyone's aligned. Those are things that are best done in person and that AI is not very good at substituting for people. And so in this sort of brave new world of AI, it becomes sort of even more important to have some of that in-person connection. And so you have seen that the companies that have really invested in AI, you see that they're not posting fully remote jobs nearly as much as other companies. And so it doesn't mean that sort of some amount of remote work is untenable, but it does suggest that this fully remote job is likely to be a job that you were probably going to be sending to AI at some point soon.

Natalia, this has been fascinating. I have learned so much and you've completely, I don't know, shifted my perspective on being in person and I am super grateful. So I want to remind you the listener to go get the book. It's called in person. It's available on Amazon or wherever you buy books. Let's keep our local bookstores in business. And I would encourage you to not just buy a copy for yourself, but for your CEO who's mandating you be in the office all day every day. or for your leader who's debating about what level of hybrid work to offer or really anybody on your team who is really questioning the value of being in person and what can be done remote. So Natalia, thank you, thank you, thank you for your incredibly important work and for being here today. Thank you so much. This was an amazing conversation. All right, friend, as you know, I initially resisted this conversation because I wanted the data to confirm what I already believed. It didn't. And that's kind of the point. We don't learn by only listening to people who agree with us. And we don't make better decisions by ignoring information because it's inconvenient.

In this case, as in most cases, it isn't an all or nothing situation. It isn't all in person or all remote. It's understanding what we gain from flexibility, what we lose when we're apart, and being much more intentional about when and why we come together. Because, redefining woman's work requires us to question the old rules. And sometimes it requires us to question our own. That is woman's work.