Does Remote Work Really Kill Teamwork? What I Learned Watching My Daughter’s Zoom Class
Last spring, I sat at the kitchen table with my work laptop on the left and my daughter’s school iPad balanced on a stack of cookbooks. She was in third grade, and her teacher had just announced breakout rooms. “Okay, everyone, go talk about the water cycle with your group,” the teacher said cheerfully. My daughter stared at the screen. Her little face was perfectly still, her finger hovering near the mute button.
I knew exactly how she felt. An hour earlier, I had been on a video call with my own team, and our project manager said, “Let’s all jump into the shared doc and collaborate on this section.” There was a long pause. Someone coughed. Then a message in the chat: “I can work on the intro if you want.” No one responded. The doc stayed empty for another ten minutes.
It would be easy to say remote work kills team collaboration. But watching my daughter in those early weeks, I started to think that’s not quite right. Remote work doesn’t destroy collaboration. It destroys the casual, accidental kind—the stuff that happens when you walk past someone’s desk, or wait together for the copier, or stay after a meeting and say, “Wait, what did you mean about the budget?” That ambient interaction disappears. What’s left is the deliberate kind of collaboration, and that kind takes more effort, more intention, and a lot more patience.
For kids, this was even more obvious. In a real classroom, collaboration happens sideways. It’s the kid who leans over to borrow a pencil and ends up explaining a math problem. It’s the group huddle around a tray of beans and cotton balls for a science experiment. It’s the whispered “I don’t get it” during independent reading. None of that translates to a Zoom grid. When my daughter’s teacher put her in a breakout room, there were no shared materials, no physical proximity, no accidental glances at a partner’s work. There was just a small rectangle with a few tired faces, waiting for someone to talk.
But after a few weeks, something shifted. Her teacher started giving breakout rooms a very specific prompt. Instead of “Talk about the water cycle,” she would say, “Each person shares one thing evaporation makes you think of, then pick your favorite and put it in the chat.” That tiny bit of structure helped. The kids still felt awkward, but they had a script. They weren’t just performing collaboration; they were doing it in small, concrete steps.
I noticed my own team do something similar. Our boss began ending video calls with a simple routine: everyone typed one sentence into the chat about what they were working on next. It wasn’t a big discussion. It didn’t replace the hallway chats. But it gave us a shared starting point. We could see each other’s thinking without having to schedule another meeting.
That’s the part I keep coming back to as both a parent and someone who works from home: collaboration is still possible, but it needs scaffolding. For adults, that might mean shared documents with a clear question at the top, or a rule that everyone writes a quick thought before the meeting starts. For kids, it means breaking collaboration into tiny steps. A parent helping a child with remote schoolwork can do the same thing—not by saying “go work on the project with your group,” but by helping the child write one question to ask a classmate, or setting up a shared notes page with just two columns.
One afternoon, my daughter’s teacher tried something she called a “collaboration circle.” Each kid got a slide in a shared presentation. They had to add one fact about condensation and then leave a comment on someone else’s slide. My daughter was nervous about writing something that might sound “wrong.” I sat next to her, reading the comments out loud. One kid wrote, “good job, but I think it’s when gas turns into water.” Another kid replied, “that’s what I meant lol.” My daughter laughed. She typed her fact, deleted it, typed it again, and finally pressed send. She wasn’t really collaborating yet. But she was participating, which is the first step.
That’s the other thing remote work taught me: we often confuse being quiet with not working. On video calls, the people who talk first get heard. The ones who type in the chat, or wait until after the meeting, are sometimes seen as less engaged. But in my daughter’s case, the chat was her favorite place. She could process what other kids said, think about her answer, and then write it without everyone staring at her. Some kids are the same way with remote learning. They don’t want to unmute, but they’ll write a thoughtful response if given the chance.
So does remote work decrease productivity? It depends on what you’re measuring. My daughter definitely got more math problems done at home because no one was tapping her shoulder every few minutes. But one day, she had to build a simple machine with two classmates, and it took forty-five minutes just to decide who would bring the rubber bands. In an office, that decision would have happened in under a minute. For adults, I’ve seen the same pattern. Deep, focused work often gets easier at home. But tasks that need quick decisions, brainstorming, or emotional reading get slower.
I don’t think that means we should all march back to an office or a classroom and pretend remote tools don’t exist. It means we need to stop pretending that collaboration happens automatically just because people are in the same virtual room. It doesn’t. But it can be taught, the same way we teach kids to take turns or share ideas.
Now, when my daughter has a breakout room, I don’t hover as much. I let her fumble through the first few seconds of silence. I’ve learned that silence online isn’t the same as silence in person. Sometimes the kids are actually reading the chat, thinking about what to say. Sometimes they’re just staring off-screen, sure. But so do adults in meetings. I’m okay with that, mostly.
At home, we still have our kitchen table setup. The iPad is still propped up on cookbooks, and my laptop still dings with messages. Some days, my daughter talks the whole time in her breakout rooms. Other days, she barely says a word. My own team still has meetings where we all type into the chat and nobody feels fully satisfied. But I’ve stopped expecting what you get being in the same room. Instead, I’m learning to notice the quiet ways people show up—a written comment, a shared slide, a small message that says “I’m here, I’m thinking, I just need a minute.”
That might not be collaboration the way we once defined it. But it’s something, and it’s still growing.
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