The debate around remote versus on-site work has often focused on productivity, flexibility, and culture. But beneath all the surface-level arguments is a more subtle — and more human — concern:

How does physical distance affect our sense of responsibility, empathy, and connection to others?

To answer that, it’s worth turning to one of psychology’s most unsettling studies: Stanley Milgram’s obedience experiment.

The Real Lesson from Milgram’s Experiment

In the 1960s, Stanley Milgram conducted a study to understand obedience to authority. Participants were instructed to administer what they believed were increasingly painful electric shocks to another person (an actor) when they answered questions incorrectly.

But the most revealing part wasn’t just that people obeyed — it was how their willingness to inflict pain increased as the distance between them and the victim grew.

• When the “learner” was in the same room, participants hesitated.

• When they could hear but not see them, they continued more easily.

• When the victim was completely remote, obedience rose significantly.

Milgram concluded that distance makes it easier to disassociate from the consequences of our actions. Less visibility = less empathy. Less connection = more compliance.

So What Does This Have to Do With Remote Work?

Let’s be clear: Remote work has unlocked flexibility and widened access like never before. But it’s also introduced new blind spots — particularly in how we relate to one another. The psychology holds:

• When we don’t see our colleagues face to face, we may be less attuned to their stress, burnout, or frustration.

• When decisions are made via email, not meetings, we may not fully grasp their impact.

• When we never “bump into” someone, we lose the micro-interactions that build trust and mutual understanding.

Remote work lowers friction — but unless we deliberately compensate, it can also lower empathy.

The Risk Isn’t Obedience — It’s Disconnection

Milgram’s experiment doesn’t mean we become monsters when we work from home. But it does suggest that distance can erode the emotional cues that normally keep us grounded in empathy, accountability, and care for others.

This is especially important in roles that involve power — whether you’re a manager giving feedback, a product leader making tradeoffs, or an executive restructuring a team.

When you’re remote, it’s easier to treat people like functions instead of humans. Decisions can feel abstract. Pain can become invisible. And good people can make harmful decisions simply because they don’t feel their consequences.

So Is On-Site Better?

Not necessarily. Being in the same room doesn’t guarantee empathy either — proximity can still coexist with disconnection.

But physical presence gives us more opportunities to notice, to sense, to check in, and to read the unspoken signs. It helps humanize colleagues who might otherwise fade into boxes on a screen or names in a Slack thread.

That matters — not because culture is fragile, but because empathy is context-dependent. And the less context we have, the easier it is to miss what someone else is carrying.

Building Empathy Into Remote Work

If we’re going to embrace remote or hybrid work — and we are — then we have to stop hoping that empathy will “just happen” across time zones and screens. Proximity once made it easier to feel what others were feeling. Now, empathy has to be designed into the system.

That starts with understanding something deeper: we’re social creatures because of the chemistry that drives us. As Simon Sinek explains in Leaders Eat Last, our ability to collaborate, empathize, and stay resilient together is shaped by four key neurochemicals. Some of that can be encouraged at a distance. Much of it can’t. Oxytocin — the chemical that builds trust — isn’t triggered by strategy docs or thoughtful Slack messages. It’s released through touch, eye contact, physical presence, and shared vulnerability. You can’t download that.

So we have a choice:

• We can pretend that thoughtful systems will keep people feeling seen, supported, and safe.

• Or we can admit that nothing replaces human connection — and design everything else around that loss.

We Don’t Need More Systems. We Need More Courage.

Courage to say: this isn’t enough.

Courage to close the loop with people who are suffering — even when it’s awkward, slow, or outside your scope.

Courage to be emotionally present when the screen makes it so easy not to be.

And courage to admit that some parts of leadership — the most important parts — cannot be done from a distance without loss.

Because Empathy Doesn’t Scale. It Shows Up.

The chemicals that make us human don’t care about your tech stack.

Milgram’s experiment reminds us that distance dulls empathy.
That’s not an argument against remote work — but it is a warning.

Because if we stop feeling what others feel, we don’t stop being human.
We just stop acting like it.

The real question was never “remote or on-site.”
The real question is: how do we stay human when proximity is gone?