“There’s just a difference between sitting in a pew and sitting on your couch.”

This came up during a senior capstone presentation this week examining the challenges of online church. Their research kept circling back to one idea:

Environment impacts experience.

Watching a church service online is not the same as sitting in a beautiful sanctuary surrounded by people. The lighting is different. The distractions are different. The expectations are different. Even your posture is different.

And as often happens, my brain immediately went to remote work.

There’s a difference between sitting at your dining room table and sitting in an office full of people typing, talking, venting, laughing, and occasionally wandering over to someone’s desk to say, “Do you have a second?”

The office shapes behavior.

It creates social cues and informal rules about responsiveness, productivity, professionalism, and even what counts as a “good day.” At home, many of those cues disappear and we create our own norms.

And that’s where I see organizations struggling right now.

When fully remote employees and in-office employees are operating under completely different informal expectations, conflict is inevitable. One group thinks the other isn’t communicating enough. The other thinks they’re being micromanaged. One sees flexibility while the other sees unfairness.

Same organization. Different environments. Different experiences.

Which brings me back to the church conversation.

The students were not arguing that online church is bad. They were recognizing something more basic and more human:

where we are shapes how we engage.

Whether it’s a pew or a couch, a cubicle or a kitchen table, environment is never neutral. It teaches us what to expect, how to behave, and how connected we feel to the people around us.