Distance doesn't have to cost you candor. In one firm, remote work is where it got built.

You open the weekly video call and, before the agenda starts, two people on your team are talking about something that has nothing to do with the quarter. You have a full list. You have to decide, in about ten seconds, whether to let it run or to start.

A new paper in Organization Science bears on that ten seconds. It is by Vanessa M. Conzon of the Carroll School of Management at Boston College, titled "Repatterning Interactions in Remote Work Environments: Bolstering Psychological Safety Through Mutually Humanizing Self-Disclosure," and the journal's record dates it to October 2026. One caution first: the paywall kept me from the full paper, so everything here comes from the published abstract.

The method, as the abstract describes it: a seven-year longitudinal qualitative study of a professional services organization that shifted from an in-person work environment to a remote one, drawing on 275 interviews and approximately 330 hours of observations. That is one organization, studied closely and for a long time. It is a process study, not a measurement of how common the pattern is. The abstract is labelled as accepted for the journal's special issue on psychological safety, and I did not find a count of groups or teams in it.

The question the author asks is how psychological safety gets built when people work remotely, given that existing research suggests remote work makes the relevant interactions harder. The answer she reports runs the other way:

I find that remote work supports interactional patterns that facilitate self-disclosure among group members. Learning more about one another, workers become mutually humanized, and psychological safety is bolstered.

Conzon, published abstract, Organization Science

Two details in the abstract matter for a leader. First, the abstract describes this as a "distinct group-initiated process" and says it expands theorization "beyond its current focus on leader-initiated social learning." The mechanism she identifies, mutual humanization through self-disclosure, was not something a leader installed. Second, the abstract says the improved psychological safety came with associated practices that helped people coordinate on work tasks while sustaining flexibility in where and when they work, and that group members attended to and accomplished both work tasks and nonwork activities.

What the abstract does not contain is any account of how large the effect was, or what happened in comparable organizations that stayed in person. Because I only have the abstract, I cannot say whether the paper handles those points elsewhere. Treat the finding as a carefully documented case, not a rule.

Why this lands differently at the top. Everyone in the building watches how the person at the top spends the first minutes of a meeting, and reads it as a statement of what the meeting is for. A leader who moves straight to the agenda is not being cold. But the position amplifies the signal: when the senior person closes off the loose talk, the group learns that disclosure is a cost, and it moves elsewhere or stops. A peer who does the same thing sends a much smaller message. The study describes a process that the group carried; the person at the top mostly decides whether that process is allowed room.

The part the research doesn't say, but that I'll say plainly: the paper does not tell you to add small talk to your calls, and it does not show that a protected five minutes would produce the same result. That is my inference from a single case. What I take from it is narrower. If safety in a distributed group can be built from the bottom through people learning about one another, then the thing to avoid is the reflex that crowds that learning out. Those cautions are mine, not the author's.

One thing to do this week. Pick one recurring remote meeting you run. For its first few minutes, do not start the agenda. Watch who speaks, what they disclose, and whether the people who rarely talk later in the meeting talk here. Then note what happens to candor once the agenda begins. You are not trying to engineer anything; you are finding out what your group is already doing and whether your habits are in its way.

How a leader's own habits shape what the room does is the territory the Leadership Profile is built to map. If you want to see where yours sit, start at the Leadership Profile.