The days of fully remote work appear to be well and truly over – whether employees like it or not. From Meta to Morgan Stanley, many companies have called their staff back to the office upwards of three days a week, with some pushing for full five-day returns. 

A big reason cited for this shift? More in-person interactions, which lead to better collaboration, foster stronger relationships and build trust and rapport among colleagues. But does simply being in the same physical space truly result in more spontaneous interactions? And do individuals have an accurate sense of how often they actually engage with their colleagues? Findings from my recent research, published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, suggest that this may not be the case.

The value of acquaintances

In the opening sequence of the 1991 animated version of “Beauty and the Beast”, the protagonist, Belle, goes about her day while meeting and conversing with fellow villagers. While decidedly less schmaltzy, many of us have similar interactions in real life. These make up an important part of our social networks, both within and beyond the workplace.

Most relationships with co-workers fall into the bucket of “acquaintances”: You may not consider them close friends, but you’ve interacted with them enough to develop some form of relationship. Existing research suggests that these weak ties can be surprisingly powerful. They can broaden social networks, create a sense of community and help individuals forge new close connections. Importantly, acquaintances may possess knowledge or information that cannot be found within one’s existing inner circle, which can be especially important in a workplace context.

Unlike close relationships – characterised by greater familiarity and intimacy, knowledge of each other's schedules and planned meetings – interactions with acquaintances are more uncertain in nature and tend to be spontaneous. You might run into them while taking the lift or grabbing a coffee, but are less likely to block out time to catch up with them. This unpredictability means that we may not have a clear sense of how often these chance encounters actually happen.

In my research, I theorise that people believe they interact with acquaintances more frequently than they actually do – a misjudgement I dub “the small-world illusion” – and thus overestimate the frequency of these moments of in-person connection. If so, bringing workers back to the office might not deliver the full benefits that leaders expect – what we want is productive interactions between people, not just having them in the same physical space. 

The small-world illusion

To explore this, I conducted several experiments to investigate whether people overestimate the frequency of interaction with acquaintances, why this might be happening and the consequences. First, participants named several acquaintances and close connections, then predicted whether they would see them over the next few days. Across three studies, people consistently overestimated how often they’d interact with acquaintances – but not with close connections.

Next, I looked specifically at workplace dynamics. Participants listed the co-workers they usually interact with at the office on a regular basis. For each colleague listed, they indicated whether that person was a stranger, acquaintance or close friend and estimated how many days they’d interact with them in the following week. These experiments showed that participants did not have as many close connections in the workplace as outside of it. Furthermore, as with previous experiments, they saw acquaintances less frequently than they predicted.

What’s behind this disconnect? Later experiments suggest that it could be due to availability bias: When we think about interacting with acquaintances, we tend to recall moments when we did see them, and not the times we didn’t. Indeed, participants could think of ways they could cross paths with acquaintances in the near future more easily than ways they might miss each other. This also led them to overestimate opportunities for receiving help or support from acquaintances.

Bridging the gap

To realise the promise of in-person interactions, companies must do more than just call employees back to the office and leave it at that. Merely showing up from Monday to Friday doesn’t guarantee connections. If people sit at their individual workstations all day and don’t actually interact with each other face-to-face, the cons of returning to the office may well outweigh the pros.

So, what can organisations do? For starters, be intentional about creating opportunities for in-person interactions, be it through planned team huddles, informal coffee chats or social events. Another tactic is to devise norms that facilitate help-seeking and help-giving behaviour between colleagues. For instance, you could encourage employees to respond to help requests within a certain timeframe or make it clear that they should get assistance from a co-worker if they are unable to solve a problem or complete a task.

Encouraging familiarity and intimacy (in a professionally appropriate context) among colleagues is another approach. This would not only strengthen workplace ties but also improve the accuracy with which people judge how often they really interact with each other. Without taking these steps, simply being in the office may not move the needle on fostering connection, collaboration or community.

When we overestimate how often we interact with acquaintances, we may have a false sense of the strength of these relationships and fail to take the necessary steps to sustain or revive them (such as creating conditions that are conducive for chance encounters). And if both parties overestimate how often they interact with one other, they could be equally caught off guard when the relationship ends sooner than they expect or due to factors such as changes in routines or schedules. 

Part of our social world, including our workplace interactions, hinges on chance encounters. In these uncertain situations, our social world may not be as small as we think – and without effort and planning by both organisations and employees, we may be missing out on the very encounters we’re returning to the office for.