Someone can spend eight hours in the office working on the wrong task. Another person can attend ten meetings without making a single decision. Someone can respond quickly to every message and still allow a critical deliverable to fall behind schedule.

Physical presence has always created a sense of control.

Managers could see people working, but that did not mean they could see what was actually happening in the project.

Then remote work arrived.

The chair was empty. The hallway was quiet. The green status indicator in Microsoft Teams became one of the few visible signs that someone was available.

That was when many companies discovered something uncomfortable:

They were not controlling their projects. They were controlling where people were.

What changes in remote team management?

Remote team management should not simply mean taking the management model we used in the office and moving it to Microsoft Teams, Slack, or Zoom.

When people no longer share the same physical space, many of the informal signals managers used to rely on disappear.

You cannot overhear a conversation in the hallway. You may not notice someone asking the person next to them for help. You do not automatically see that an employee has been waiting for an answer for three hours.

That means managing remote teams requires something that was already important in the office but becomes essential when people work remotely:

the work itself needs to become visible.

Goals, priorities, responsibilities, blockers, capacity, risks, and deliverables need to be clear enough that managers can understand what is happening without physically watching people work.

And this is where many companies start having problems.

Why are so many companies bringing employees back to the office?

Company culture, collaboration, team integration, and faster communication are among the most common reasons companies give for requiring employees to return to the office.

And I am not saying those things are unimportant.

Some conversations work better in person. There are moments when putting everyone in the same room speeds up a decision. Some professionals also develop more effectively when they have frequent contact with the rest of the team.

But, in my opinion, there is another reason that is not always discussed as openly:

Many leaders want to regain a sense of control over their teams.

The logic seems simple:

If I can see someone working, then I know they are being productive.

The problem is that this logic was never accurate.

A Microsoft Work Trend Index study on hybrid work revealed this disconnect. While 87% of employees reported that they were productive at work, 85% of leaders said the shift to hybrid work made it difficult to feel confident that employees were being productive.

Microsoft called this phenomenon “productivity paranoia”: leaders fear that productivity has declined because they cannot physically see people working.

In other words, employees believed they were delivering results.

Managers were not sure.

You might say:

— All right, Erik. Then we just need to bring everyone back to the office, and the problem is solved.

Easy, right?

Not exactly.

Returning to the office does not fix a poorly managed team

A poorly written task remains poorly written inside an office.

An overloaded employee remains overloaded even when sitting ten feet away from the manager.

A forgotten dependency continues to delay the deliverable.

A disorganized backlog remains disorganized.

And a project that is spending twice its planned budget will continue to reduce the company’s profit margin, regardless of where the team is working.

Physical presence can make communication easier, but it cannot replace planning, clear processes, priorities, performance indicators, or good decisions.

A study published in Nature about hybrid work followed 1,612 employees in a randomized hybrid-work experiment at a technology company.

The researchers found that hybrid work improved job satisfaction and reduced quit rates by approximately one-third, without negatively affecting performance reviews or promotion rates.

Does that mean every company should operate remotely?

No.

It simply means that work location alone does not determine productivity.

From my perspective, the most important question should never be:

Where is the employee working?

The question should be:

What is happening with the work and the project?

Remote work did not create the lack of control

I like to think that remote work did not create management problems.

It simply turned off the office lights and revealed that many leaders could not understand the work without physically observing the people doing it.

In an office environment, many problems are resolved informally:

• Someone does not understand a task and asks the person sitting nearby.
• Someone notices that a deliverable is late and speaks with the responsible person during lunch.
• A manager overhears a hallway conversation and discovers that the team has a blocker.

These interactions can help.

But they can also hide weaknesses in management processes.

When a remote team receives a poorly explained task, that task can remain blocked for hours:

• The employee sends a message.
• The person responsible for answering is in a meeting.
• The response arrives two hours later.
• The explanation does not completely resolve the question.
• Another message is sent.
• While waiting, the employee starts working on something else.

By the end of the day, two tasks are in progress and neither one is complete.

That is how remote team productivity begins to decline.

As I explained in the article Organizing Processes Is Always Difficult—but Breaking Them Is Easy , changing a process in a document is easy.

The difficult part is getting people to understand, accept, and follow that process every day.

When managing remote teams, unclear processes quickly become blocked tasks, unanswered questions, unnecessary meetings, rework, and delays.

How to manage remote teams without monitoring employees

When I talk about control in remote team management, I am not talking about installing software that takes screenshots of employees’ computers.

I am also not talking about measuring how often someone moves the mouse, how long they remain online, or how many messages they answer during the day.

That type of employee monitoring may show that someone was sitting in front of a computer.

It does not necessarily show whether that person created value or moved the project forward.

For me, managing a remote team means being able to answer:

• What was supposed to be delivered?
• What was actually completed?
• Which tasks are behind schedule?
• What is blocking the team?
• Who has too much work?
• Where is rework occurring?
• How much is the project costing?
• Is the delivery deadline still realistic?
• Does the project still have a healthy profit margin?

If the manager can answer these questions, they have some level of control over the work and the project.

But if the manager needs to call every employee into a meeting and ask, “How are things going?”, that control probably does not exist.

The difference may seem small, but it is not.

Surveillance watches people. Management watches results, risks, capacity, costs, and workflow.

Remote teams need autonomy — but they also need direction

One of the strongest arguments in favor of remote work is employee autonomy.

And I agree that professionals need autonomy.

But autonomy does not mean working without goals, responsibilities, expectations, or boundaries.

As I wrote in the article Workplace Autonomy: What No One Tells You , autonomy must be designed.

People need to understand what they can decide independently, what must be aligned with the team, what needs to be escalated, and which risks they are authorized to take.

In a distributed or remote team, this becomes even more important.

When responsibilities are unclear, an employee may make a decision they were not authorized to make—or avoid making a decision that was already their responsibility.

In both situations, the project slows down:

• Leaders begin to believe they need more control.
• Employees feel they have less autonomy.
• More status meetings are created.
• More approvals are required.

Little by little, remote work becomes a digital version of in-office micromanagement.

The problem is not where your remote team works

Before deciding that a remote team must return to the office because productivity has declined, I would ask a few questions:

• Are the tasks clearly defined?
• Are the priorities clear?
• Does the team understand what it needs to deliver?
• Are too many tasks in progress at the same time?
• Are people allocated to the right projects and activities?
• Are any team members overloaded?
• Are project dependencies documented?
• Are important decisions recorded?
• Is rework increasing?
• Are risks identified before or after they become problems?

If the company cannot answer these questions, the problem may not be remote work.

The problem may be management.

I believe many companies are trying to solve a visibility problem by changing where people work.

But putting everyone in the same building does not automatically create effective management.

It may make some problems easier to notice.

It does not necessarily make them easier to understand or resolve.

From managing presence to managing with evidence

The office taught us to confuse movement with productivity:

• People walking in and out of meetings.
• Computers turned on.
• Office lights remaining on late into the evening.

All of this creates the impression that work is moving forward.

But projects are not completed through impressions.

They are completed through deliverables.

In remote team management, we need to move away from presence-based control and adopt evidence-based management:

• What was planned?
• What was delivered?
• How long did it take?
• What problems occurred?
• Where are the current risks?
• Who needs support?

These are the questions that actually matter when managing remote teams.

Remote team management is not management from a distance

For me, this is the central point.

Good remote team management does not try to compensate for physical distance by increasing surveillance.

It creates a system in which goals, responsibilities, priorities, capacity, risks, costs, and deliverables are visible enough that managers can make decisions without constantly watching people.

This also changes the role of management tools.

Jira, Azure DevOps, ClickUp, Monday.com, Asana, and other platforms already contain enormous amounts of information about how work is progressing.

The challenge is turning that data into answers for the people who need to make decisions.

This is the type of visibility Saint Jude is designed to provide: consolidating project data to help managers and PMOs identify risks, bottlenecks, capacity problems, costs, deviations, and predictability issues before they become visible only at the final deadline.

The goal is not to determine whether someone moved their mouse for eight hours.

The goal is to understand whether the project is moving in the right direction.

In the next article, I will focus specifically on productivity: which metrics I would monitor, where I would look for bottlenecks, and how to track a remote team without turning management into micromanagement.

Continue reading: How to Stop Micromanaging: Track Productivity Without Watching Your Team.

What about your company? Does it really know how to manage remote teams—or has it simply lost the ability to see where people are working?

See you next time!

Erik Scaranello