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Notes on co-location and work from home

Co-location has always been a part of the LeSS rules. This is, even though, LeSS has been practiced in distributed product development, in products with remote workers, and during the COVID work-from-home period. LeSS puts an emphasis on collaboration and learning, and in our experience, these often suffer when people are not in the same physical location. Thus we hope every group involved in a LeSS adoption will ask themselves: “How can we work towards maximising the benefits of co-location on collaboration and learning”. Many companies are not willing to make though decisions to benefit from co-location.

Co-location is not useful when your office environment is not set-up for that. Similarly, working from an office is not useful when all your team members are working in other locations. Spending the entire day in the office having video calls wih people in other places is not something we encourage. For us, co-location means that a team sits together at the same table, and the other teams located in the same physical location are close (hearing distance) to them. Co-location is about organisational decisions to maximise the benefits of collaboration and learning through co-location.

Co-location is an organisational design decision. It is always the choice of the organisation.

Note: Properly set-up hybrid work still leads to some of the benefits of co-location.

Summarizing studies on remote/distributed/WFH work and co-located work

We try to learn from experience, case studies and research. Experience needs to be challenged with research and research needs to be challenged with experience. For this reason, we collected different research studies on this subject and have used GPT to summarise them and make conclusions across these research studies. We excluded opinions pieces, news articles, blog posts and tweets.

As this became too big for one page, we’ve split the details now out into three different sections: (1) related to product development, (2) related to education, and (3) general studies.

Conclusion

After generating this page, we prompted ChatGPT 5 to do a research on this page and references. We provided the following prompt:

What are the main impacts on teamwork and learning?

The following was part of the result (after first, yet again, summarising all case studies):

Synthesis of Key Patterns Across Studies

Consistent Themes in Teamwork and Learning

Several clear patterns emerge regarding teamwork under remote work. Almost every study noted the loss of spontaneous, informal interactions, which in normal offices serve to build camaraderie, share quick updates, and solve problems on the fly. This led to weaker team cohesion and social connection in many cases, as people felt more isolated or siloed from their colleagues. Communication had to become more deliberate and structured, usually via digital tools and scheduled meetings, which kept work moving but often at the expense of creativity, agility, and the richness of face-to-face dialogue. A related theme is diminished trust and team spirit – without regular in-person contact, teams had to work harder to maintain a sense of trust and shared purpose.

On the learning front, many studies highlighted reduced informal learning opportunities. Mentoring, coaching, and on-the-spot feedback were harder to come by in remote settings, impacting newcomers and junior staff the most. Onboarding new employees became a notable challenge in several cases, as it’s tough to integrate someone into the team and culture purely over video calls. Likewise, knowledge sharing often suffered – without hallway conversations or overheard discussions, employees had fewer chances to pick up insights outside of formal meetings. Over and over, the research underscores that casual “water-cooler” exchanges play a big role in both team cohesion and learning; when those vanished, organizations saw hits to collaboration quality and the ease of skill transfer. Social isolation and a weaker sense of belonging were repeatedly mentioned, which not only hurts teamwork but also deprives people of the confidence and networking that fuel professional growth.

Method of summarising

The research article was fed to GPT and the following prompts were used:

Provide a one paragraph summary about the context of this study.
Provide a two paragraph summary of the main conclusions of the study.
Provide a one paragraph summary of the effects of remote working on team dynamics.

The summaries of the product development remote work studies can be found here

The following studies were used:

The summaries of the remote education and training studies can be found here

The following studies were used: