Excerpt adapted from “In Person: How Working Together Fuels Creativity, Productivity, and Growth” by Natalia Emanuel, Ph.D. ’21, and Emma Harrington, Ph.D., ’21. Published in the United States by Crown Currency, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
From a sky bridge suspended above Pixar’s central atrium, Steve Jobs, then CEO of Pixar, looked down at the people bustling below. Animators drifted along, lost in thought. Engineers zipped through with purpose. Writers meandered along unhurriedly, while sound engineers kept a steady rhythm. Many paused to chat, just as Jobs was doing with his guest, New York Times reporter Rick Lyman, who had come to see Pixar’s new headquarters.
The scene below was no accident.
A few years earlier, when an architect of Pixar’s headquarters asked Jobs how many restrooms the building should have, he expected an answer in the dozens. Jobs had a different idea. He wanted one, a huge one.
When the architect asked where it should go, the answer was immediate: the atrium. That way, Jobs reasoned, if an animator needed to take a bathroom break, she would have to wind through the building to the one big bathroom in the central atrium. She might then have a quick, unscripted conversation with someone along the way, at the sinks, or, yes, even side by side in the stalls.
Lyman, the visiting journalist, raised an eyebrow. The logic was sound, if a bit crass. Jobs smiled and explained, “We wanted to find a way to force people to come together, to create a lot of arbitrary collisions.” Judging by the bustling atrium, it seemed to have worked.
Jobs was a believer in serendipity — but also in the science of engineering it. His goal was to create a building that fostered random collisions and unexpected interactions. “If a building doesn’t encourage that,” he said, “you’ll lose a lot of innovation and the magic that’s sparked by serendipity.”
Pixar moved into its new headquarters in 2001 after several early successes with computer-generated animation: “Toy Story” in 1995, “A Bug’s Life” in 1998, and “Toy Story 2” in 1999. “Monsters, Inc.” was slated to come out later that year. Buoyed by these blockbusters, Pixar had grown to 550 employees, even as competitors were winding down their animation teams. Twentieth Century Fox had closed its hand-drawn animation division, and Disney had laid off animators. The industry seemed to be shifting from pencil-drawn frames to computer-generated worlds, a future Pixar had bet on from the start.
Yet Pixar’s success was still far from guaranteed. When investors first saw a rough reel of “Toy Story,” they found Woody so “abrasive and unlikable” that they nearly pulled the plug on their $30 million stake in the film. The film’s art director, Ralph Eggleston, later traced the problem to “writer’s room banter.” Siloed together, the writers had tried to impress one another with clever dialogue, creating a brainy and edgy Woody instead of a relatable one whom audiences would come to love. This lovable version of Woody was the one who saved “Toy Story,” turning it into an Academy Award–winning blockbuster earning more than $400 million worldwide.
The siloed writer’s room banter was a predictable outcome of Pixar’s previous headquarters, where employees were scattered across shabby office parks, often separated from one another by busy roads. Workers had to “scurry like squirrels to avoid the fast-moving traffic” to meet up with other teams. Many decided not to take the chance. As a result, teams were cut off from one another. Writers quipped with writers, animators sketched with animators, and engineers white-boarded with engineers. On any given film, the pods shrank further still, as animators on one film were siloed from those on another.
For Pixar’s new home, they acquired 16 acres just north of the Bay Bridge, the site of a former Del Monte fruit-canning factory. Writers would finally be able to talk to animators without having to dart across busy roads like skittish squirrels.
Still, getting people into one space, free from the buzz of oncoming traffic, was only half the battle. The harder problem was designing a campus that didn’t just permit interaction but made it unavoidable. John Lasseter, who directed “Toy Story” and “A Bug’s Life,” envisioned a traditional Hollywood-style studio, with separate bungalows devoted to individual movies scattered across the grounds. But Jobs worried that such a layout would simply re-create the silos from Pixar’s previous headquarters, where physical separation made everyday interaction harder than it needed to be. Instead, he pushed for the other extreme: one huge building for all 550 employees.
But Jobs didn’t stop there. Bringing everyone into the same building was just the first step; the space itself needed to be engineered to spark spontaneous encounters. His solution was a massive central atrium that funneled people together as they moved through the building. The goal was to break down silos — writers with writers, animators with animators, engineers with engineers — and generate creative frictions across disciplines, where ideas could be challenged, sharpened, and ultimately improved. Lasseter, initially a skeptic, quickly became a convert. “Steve’s theory worked from day one,” he recalled. “I kept running into people I hadn’t seen for months. I’ve never seen a building that promoted collaboration and creativity as well as this one.”
Jobs knew that serendipitous, face-to-face encounters are a powerful catalyst for fresh thinking. He also sensed something that science now confirms: Humans are wired to connect in person. When we communicate face-to-face, our brains light up like Christmas trees in sync with one another, firing up our creativity and empathy. When we interact digitally, we only get about a tenth of this neural synchrony. In-person interaction also releases more endorphins that build trust and regard, giving us, literally, better chemistry with one another.
This is the power of what we call the Proximity Effect. When we work side by side, our brains sync up, making it easier to communicate, learn, and build on one another’s ideas. Being face-to-face breaks down silos, helps us spot connections we might otherwise miss, and leads to stronger, more creative solutions.
Pixar’s record reveals the power of the Proximity Effect. In the years after moving into its new headquarters, Pixar gave us “Finding Nemo,” the tale of a timid clownfish crossing an ocean of anemones to rescue his son; “Up,” in which a curmudgeonly old man sails away on a house buoyed by balloons; and “WALL-E,” the story of a robot whose bleeps and bloops tug on our heartstrings. If Steve Jobs were around today, he would likely tie these triumphs back to the big, light-filled atrium — a factory for the imagination.
Like Pixar in 2001, many companies today are standing at a crossroads, anticipating a future that looks radically different from the past. For many industries, countless market forces — from generative AI and outsourcing to geopolitical uncertainty — are proving to be as disruptive as animation’s leap from pencil-drawn frames to computer-generated worlds. As Pixar learned, the biggest danger at these junctures isn’t a shortage of technical skill. It’s isolation. When organizations retreat into silos, they risk creating solutions that look impressive on paper but feel hollow in practice, like a Woody who is clever and technically flawless but impossible to love. In periods of reinvention, what matters most is what happens between people: the sparks that fly when we work in person.
With no shortage of sophisticated communication tools, gathering together in person doesn’t always feel necessary. If technology connects all of us, who needs the office?
Imagine if Pixar had been remote all along. In theory, nothing would have stopped a sound designer from reaching out to a writer to get the bleeps and bloops just right for WALL-E’s interactions with his pet cockroach, Hal. An animator could have messaged an engineer to brainstorm how to make a character — a lamp, a toy, or a fish — wobble rather than sway across the screen. After all, everyone would have been just a ping away.
But while it’s possible for coworkers to reach out to anyone online, they rarely do it. Datasets across all sorts of organizations and industries show that we contact fewer colleagues when we work apart from one another.
Take the case of Microsoft. During the company’s transition to remote work, it tracked employees’ digital interactions — their emails, calendar invites, instant messages, and video calls. Researchers traced out the contours of these communication networks, documenting who communicated with whom, and found these networks shrank when the company went remote. Perhaps even more alarmingly, employees’ networks became more siloed. Microsoft’s equivalent of sound designers weren’t reaching out to writers, and animators weren’t touching base with engineers. Ties across teams and departments fell away.
As Pixar discovered, these cross-cutting collisions matter.
We have been working to understand the Proximity Effect for years by using data on hundreds of thousands of workers from companies ranging from Fortune 500 firms to startups. Our research consistently shows that the poet John Donne was right: “No man is an island.” Even when occupations seem extremely individualistic, like a customer service representative or a software engineer, each job is actually “a piece of the continent, a part of the main.” Our research shows that customer service representatives work faster and satisfy more customers when they can communicate easily with one another. Software engineers are less likely to introduce bugs into their computer code when they talk to other engineers about how their program fits into the broader codebase. These interconnections are even stronger for jobs that are obviously team-oriented.
Because no one is an island, organizations thrive when their people are together.
Remote work also makes us lonelier. Our research shows that it has taken a toll on the mental health of those who can work from the comfort — and solitude — of their homes. Part of this harm comes from missed connections. The office is the number one place adults form friendships. Another cost is lost meaning: Completing a task on your own can be satisfying, but accomplishing the same work alongside others is typically more fulfilling and motivating. Shared effort turns tasks into something larger than the sum of their parts.
Despite the huge costs of remote work — to learning, innovation, and connection — it is more common than ever. In 2019, 6 percent of Americans worked remotely; by 2026, roughly a quarter of Americans’ workdays were remote. Across the OECD, a set of wealthy countries, the current rate of remote work is more than four times what it was before the Covid-19 pandemic. When people do go into the office, they often commute just to spend the day on Zoom with distant colleagues, effectively re-creating isolation within the workplace.
We have sleepwalked into a new normal that will make us less creative, more isolated, and ultimately less fulfilled.
But advocates of remote work raise real concerns: Offices aren’t designed with everyone in mind. Working parents often pay a double tax, juggling the logistics of home while tethered to workplaces that assume someone else is handling the rest. People with disabilities face daily obstacles that drain their energy before work even begins. Working from home can ease these frictions, allowing people to focus on the job itself rather than on navigating spaces that were not built for them.
Engaging with the evidence forces us to grapple with uncomfortable trade-offs—and in doing so, to better understand one another’s perspectives. Luckily, the solution does not need to be an either/or that makes one group wrong and another right. Instead, we can focus on crafting careful policies that help people can have more in-person connection with those who matter, be they colleagues or kids. With this shared understanding and tailored approach, we help individuals, companies, and society not just function but thrive.
Copyright © 2026 by Natalia Emanuel, Ph.D. and Emma Harrington, Ph.D.