A recent study from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York just relit the debate about remote work. As the study’s headline reads: “Remote Work Leaves Younger Workers Sidelined.”
Their analysis suggests that remote work accounts for roughly 64% of the increase in unemployment among young college graduates since the pandemic.
The reasoning is straightforward. New employees learn through observation, mentorship, and feedback. When people are distributed, those opportunities become harder to come by. So when a role opens up, an employer is more hesitant to hire people who haven’t yet proven themselves in a room.
The obvious takeaway is that in-person work matters. But before we insist that everyone returns to the office, it’s worth asking a harder question:
If — as the study suggests — a 20% reduction in feedback is enough to meaningfully affect development, hiring, and career outcomes, then what does that say about the amount of feedback organizations were providing in the first place?
Proximity is not mentorship
It’s easy to point to remote work as the culprit, but being in the same building does not automatically create learning. People can spend eight hours in an office, sit in back-to-back meetings, and leave without receiving a single meaningful piece of feedback.
The challenge may not be where people work—rather, it may be whether organizations have created systems that allow knowledge to move from one person to another.
The disappearing apprenticeship
We’ve all been aware of this discrepancy from the jump: learning often happens in ways that are difficult to measure.
- You overhear how someone handles a difficult client conversation.
- You watch a leader navigate disagreement in a meeting.
- You stay behind for ten minutes after a project review and learn why a decision was made.
These moments rarely appear on a calendar, but they are often where professional growth happens. Historically, organizations benefited from a kind of informal apprenticeship model. New employees absorbed knowledge simply by hanging around more experienced people. When offices first started going remote, the term “water cooler talk” was bandied about a lot. So this isn’t new information. Distributed workers are deprived of these moments. Only now, we’re realizing that this loss directly translates to the employment gap. The risk isn’t just that younger employees learn less. It’s that organizations become less aware of what they know.
Teaching creates knowledge
Most experienced professionals know more than they realize. One of the fastest ways to discover that is to explain something to someone else. The act of teaching forces us to articulate assumptions, identify patterns, and make instinctive decisions visible. Things we’ve done automatically for years suddenly become conscious. In other words, teaching doesn’t just transfer knowledge, it reveals it.
To put it another way: feedback benefits more than just the recipient. The person giving feedback often learns something too. They clarify their thinking, sharpen their judgment, and learn to better understand their own process. Without those exchanges, expertise slowly becomes trapped inside individuals rather than shared across teams.
The most expensive sentence in business
There’s a phrase that appears in almost every organization: “I’ll just do it myself. It’ll be faster.”
That may be the case today. The problem is that it borrows time from the future. Every time we opt to do a task ourselves instead of taking the time to teach someone else to do it, we willingly create another dependency. Every explanation we skip ensures we’ll have to answer the same question again later. Short term efficiency becomes long term stagnation.
Making feedback intentional
Whether teams are remote, hybrid, or fully in-person, the lesson is the same: learning cannot be left to chance.
Ask yourself:
- Where does feedback happen in your organization today — not in theory, but in practice?
- Are people expected to teach, or simply execute?
- What knowledge exists only inside a few individuals?
- When someone explains a decision, do they explain their thinking, or just the outcome?
These aren’t remote work questions. They’re culture questions. And the organizations navigating them well are the ones that have made feedback and learning a deliberate practice.
Small changes, real impact
The good news: this doesn’t require a full redesign. It requires intention. Here are some places to start:
- Add a ten-minute debrief after key meetings. Not a recap of decisions, but a conversation about the thinking.
- Hold standing feedback sessions. Not performance check-ins. Actual conversations about how work is going and what someone is learning.
- Ask for the thought process, not just the output. When reviewing work, ask, “why did you approach it this way?” as well as, “what would you change?”
Interested in learning how to create a culture of feedback? Reach out at info@snpnet.com to learn about classes like Meeting Facilitation or Delivering Hard Feedback.
