The appeal of working from home is well documented: no traffic jams, no 30-minute ride on a packed train that leaves you tired before the day begins. Instead, there is the home setup—pajamas, a pet nearby, and, if the work finishes early, time for laundry, vacuuming, or a stretch on the couch with Netflix. On the surface, that seems far better than passing the time gossiping with coworkers.

But some of those workplace conversations employees were glad to escape may have been doing a job of their own. New research from Wharton management professor Peter Cappelli and Y. Jasmine Wu, a communications professor at the University of Texas at Austin, suggests that working remotely can weaken "relational capital"—academic shorthand for knowing whom to ask for help, feeling comfortable asking, and having a colleague willing to answer. That kind of capital rarely appears on a performance review, which is part of why its erosion can go unnoticed until help is hard to get. Workers may not miss the office small talk, but they may miss how easy it once was to get a quick question answered.

For the paper, "How Remote Work Is Reshaping the Office," published online in July in California Management Review, Cappelli and Wu conducted 38 group interviews in late 2023 with roughly 760 employees at a multinational financial services company in the U.S., the U.K., and India.

When employees said the work was getting done, they generally meant their own assignments and key performance indicators (KPIs). Helping a colleague or showing a new hire the ropes was easier to push aside. Those tasks had often depended on personal relationships rather than formal job requirements, and the researchers found that those relationships were weakening.

Sending a message was easy; getting an answer was another matter. The company encouraged employees to use Microsoft Teams, but while some replied promptly, others put their own work first. Many defaulted to an "If it's the end of my day, I wait until morning" attitude.

Knowing someone helped. The researchers found that employees who called familiar colleagues got help quickly, while requests to others were more likely to be delayed. That is especially difficult for newcomers who have not yet built relationships at a company—a problem Cappelli has previously flagged for entry-level workers. In the study, one relatively new hire with no workplace friends reported trying for three months to get an answer.

The authors describe a negative loop: delayed responses can make people less willing to reach out again, which ultimately erodes the relationship further.

More meetings did not necessarily mean more connection. Employees described larger virtual meetings in which participants kept their cameras off and did other work, sometimes requiring follow-up meetings to cover what had been missed. Cappelli and co-author Ranya Nehmeh made a similar complaint in their book In Praise of the Office, writing for Fortune that remote work is making the workday longer and more transactional.

Who remote work helps

It is not all bad. Some respondents saw less in-person interaction as a plus for women, minorities, and introverts. Working at home can also make it easier to concentrate—provided employees have a private space.

If employees enjoy working from home, wouldn't a hybrid model be the ideal way to balance that preference with the need for face-to-face contact? Not as this company ran it. Starting in the pandemic, supervisors were told to focus on individual deliverables. The company also cut office space to save money, leaving too little room for everyone to come in on designated office days. Shared desks made it harder to sit near the same colleagues regularly, and attendance requirements were inconsistently enforced. Employees could make the commute only to find their colleagues were not there. The details suggest that whether hybrid work preserves connection depends less on the policy itself than on its execution—coordinated days, adequate space, and consistently applied expectations.

The authors acknowledge that the interviews alone cannot prove working from home caused these problems, even though they believe it contributed. The study also cannot establish how widespread the problems are. They note that a self-care norm that took hold during the pandemic—when the company encouraged employees to prioritize their own well-being—may also have played a role.

To help colleagues reconnect, the authors recommend coordinating office days so that teams and the colleagues they rely on actually show up together, and scheduling collective activities for those days. New hires, they add, need more structured introductions to people beyond their own teams.

Helping colleagues keeps a company running, so it should not be treated as something people will do out of friendship alone. Cappelli and Wu argue that assisting colleagues mentoring new hires should be part of job descriptions and performance criteria, so those tasks do not get pushed aside under remote work. Promotion decisions, they add, should also consider more than individual KPIs. Whether employers follow through by writing collaborative work into job descriptions and appraisals is the practical test of the paper's argument.

Cappelli, whom Fortune has called Wharton's "great contrarian," insists he is not against remote work. "The idea that remote work is obviously a good thing isn't true," he told Knowledge at Wharton.

Employees "seemed to highly value the ability to work from home," the authors wrote. The challenge for management is making room for both the flexibility employees want and the teamwork the company needs. The dress code can be pajamas—but helping a colleague still counts as work.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com.