A team is a locker room. You can't build the kind of trust that survives a losing streak through a screen — my girls become a team on the bus, at the 6am practices nobody wanted to be at. Suffer together, win together. Remote work keeps the wins and skips the together.

The team-cohesion research actually distinguishes proximity from ritual — distributed teams with deliberate rituals (real onboarding, working agreements, regular offsites) match or beat co-located ones on trust measures. The bus builds your team because it's ritual, not because it's a bus. Offices mostly provide accidental proximity and call it culture.