“The things you learn by being present are not on anyone’s curriculum. Which is exactly why losing them is so hard to see.”
The menace called COVID-19 changed the world. It changed the way we did business and introduced more opportunities for remote work. Suddenly, employees found themselves in an unfamiliar environment. An environment which was forced upon them. Many were initially fine with the changes. It allowed them to be closer to family or loved ones more often. The hassle of battling daily traffic and chaos just to get to work was no longer a problem. This also meant lower costs both for companies and employees alike. Some of the biggest gains were seen in productivity, since officegoers saved time for commute and could use that time in productive ways. Productivity can be measured in many ways but to simplify things, let’s just look at the key aspects of higher productivity. Tasks completed. Emails answered. Meetings attended. By most of those metrics, many of us became more productive when we started working from home. No commute. Fewer interruptions from colleagues walking past. Back-to-back calls without a conference room to fight over.
The shift to remote work during the COVID-19 lockdown and its aftermath has been one of the most studied phenomena in modern organizational psychology. Some long-term trends and post pandemic data from 2021-2026 indicate that over the years there has been an increase in employee productivity. While this number differs from industry to industry, in 2022 remote workers reported being 9% more productive from home than the office. The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) noted that industries with higher remote work absorption saw faster growth in total factor productivity between 2019 and 2021.
But we’re not here to debate all the disadvantages of remote work or even a hybrid work environment. These are subjective topics and many will have strong opinions on them.
There is one single disadvantage of remote work, which is hard to deny. Osmosis.
Osmosis is like the room that teaches us. Learning through osmosis is what happens when one stays in the room long enough that the room starts teaching them. No formal lesson. No slides. Just listening, watching and absorbing. One day we realize we are using words, ideas, and instincts that were never directly explained to us. It’s exactly what happens in an office environment. One does not always have to be part of a training program to learn or absorb ideas. This absorption can happen by listening or participating in formal or informal discussions.
Think of it as a background software update It’s like our brain runs silent updates in the background. We don’t click “install.” We do not even see the progress bar. But after enough exposure, our thinking gets sharper and responses get faster. We have upgraded without noticing. You can also call this subconscious learning.
Working from home denies us the opportunity of learning from Osmosis. Online Teams or Zoom meetings or even WhatsApp Group Chats can only provide part of that learning experience. The dynamics of talking to people in person is completely absent. In today’s scenario, many companies have moved to a hybrid work environment, where people need to come to the office at least a couple of times a week. This largely addresses the issue. But, to think of it, all those who started their career during or around the pandemic, when remote work was the only option, really missed out on learning through Osmosis. They had no option but to depend on their own willingness to learn as well as corporate initiatives, to stay ahead of the curve. But, as explained above, learning through Osmosis is vastly different and cannot be compared with classroom-training. These scarring effects will be felt for a long time to come by the generation that was impacted the most.
I spoke to a colleague a few days ago and we debated on this very topic. He was a proponent of remote work and often argued that the productivity benefits outweigh the demerits. He believed being part of a virtual meeting is just as effective in meeting the team objectives, as is being present in a physical one. The question is that we are not just talking about productivity goals now, are we?
To understand the gaps or missed opportunities that lack of learning through Osmosis presents, let us look at a couple of scenarios:
Scenario A
A mid-level analyst watches her director take a call from a client who has just discovered a processing error. She is not on the call but happens to be sitting nearby, working on something else. She watches the director acknowledge the error without defensiveness, offer a clear timeline, and somehow end the call with the client thanking him. She has just attended a masterclass in managing difficult conversations. She did not sign up for it. It was not on her development plan. But she will carry it for the rest of her career. Her remote counterpart, equally capable, has never seen this done, and the first time she faces it herself, she is improvising from scratch.
Scenario B
A fresh graduate joins an insurance company. In an office, within two months, she has heard how senior adjusters talk to difficult claimants, seen how her team lead handles an irate broker, and watched a senior analyst quietly restructure a report ten minutes before a client presentation. She absorbs tone, judgment, and situational awareness, without a single training module covering any of it. The same hire, onboarded remotely, completes every compliance course on schedule. Several months in, her manager wonders why she still struggles to read a room.
Scenario C
In an operations centre, the process improvement team is redesigning a workflow. In an office environment, someone from that team might wander past the operations floor, overhear a supervisor venting that the last redesign created a bottleneck no one from Process Excellence ever saw because they never actually watched the work happen. That complaint, never formally raised, never documented, becomes the most important input into the new design. Remotely, it never travels. The redesign launches. The bottleneck returns.
Let me get one thing straight. This is not an argument against remote or hybrid work. The benefits are real with better wellbeing, accessibility and even for productivity of a certain kind. But the conversation about what has been lost has been underpowered. We have measured what we gained because it was easy to measure. We have not adequately measured what we lost because it was never in a spreadsheet to begin with.
Hybrid may not have solved it.
The hybrid model was supposed to be the best of both. In practice, it has often delivered neither. On the days people are in the office, meetings are still largely virtual, because half the attendees are at home. Conversations that used to happen naturally at desks now need to be scheduled. The office becomes a place for focused individual work rather than the ambient social environment where osmosis happens.
Worse, the osmotic learners and the osmotic teachers are often not in the office on the same days. The senior director is in on Tuesdays. The junior associate comes in on Thursdays. They share a floor twice a month, briefly, often in back-to-back meetings with no time to simply exist in the same space.
The risk is generational. Early-career professionals who joined organisations during and after the pandemic have built their professional identities without the invisible scaffolding that office proximity once provided. They are not less capable. But they are carrying gaps they may not know they have, in an environment that may not know how to fill them.
What can we do?
If we are serious about developing people, not just making them productive what we need is to design explicitly for what osmosis used to deliver by accident. That means creating conditions for unstructured proximity, even in a structured world. It means rethinking what “in the office” days are actually for. And it means being honest that a calendar full of productivity and a career full of learning are not always the same thing.
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