Remote employees need better management, not more surveillance
Slack lights up at 9:07 a.m. with a two-line message from a manager: “Let’s tighten the plan. Circle back today.” In a home office, that can read like a fire drill. In an office, the same ambiguity may get resolved with a hallway question, a whiteboard sketch, or a quick clarification. Remote and hybrid work put more pressure on managers to make expectations explicit.
Flexible work has become a durable part of the labor market. According to a recent Gallup report, 52 percent of U.S. employees with remote-capable jobs work hybrid and 26 percent work fully remote. And employees place substantial value on flexibility. A 2025 National Bureau of Economic Research study of U.S. tech workers estimated that workers would accept an average 25 percent pay cut for partly or fully remote roles.
Pew Research Center likewise found that most hybrid workers prefer to remain hybrid, while many workers who rarely or never work from home would choose at least some remote work if they could.
But a Founder Reports survey of 1,000 U.S. remote and hybrid employees shows where managers still fall short: Eighty-five percent of respondents said clear communication from managers matters, but only 51 percent said their manager provides it. Just 40 percent said they receive clear feedback.
The problem is easy to recognize: When people cannot rely on proximity for context, vague direction becomes expensive. That does not mean every job should be remote, of course, or that location never matters. It means leaders should stop treating attendance as a substitute for management.
The practical response starts with written clarity. Managers should put goals, decision owners, deadlines, and definitions of “done” in shared documents rather than leaving them scattered across meetings and chat. This does not require turning every decision into bureaucracy; it requires making important context durable enough that employees do not have to reconstruct it from memory or guess what a manager means.
Managers also need response rules. Employees should know which channel fits an urgent issue, when silence means “keep going,” when a decision needs escalation, and how quickly a manager will respond. Those rules prevent routine uncertainty from becoming a stream of pings while still giving employees a clear path when work truly gets stuck.
Feedback needs the same discipline. Gallup’s updated research on manager feedback reports that 80 percent of employees who received meaningful feedback in the previous week were fully engaged, regardless of where they worked. A weekly check-in can therefore stay short: confirm priorities and surface blockers, discuss one recent example, and agree on the next action. Remember: the value comes from consistency and specificity, not from adding another long meeting.
Managers should also separate accountability from surveillance. Remote employees need clear standards, but constant status checking often signals that the standards themselves are weak. When a manager defines the output, the deadline, the decision rights, and the escalation path, employees can act with more autonomy while the manager retains visibility into whether the work is moving.
It is essential that managers of hybrid teams are able to distinguish coordination from mere presence. Some work benefits from people being together at the same time, whether in a room or on a call. Other work improves when employees can focus independently. The manager’s job is to identify which tasks require synchronous collaboration; schedule that coordination deliberately, then leave the rest of the week open for execution. This approach gives office time a purpose instead of turning attendance itself into the purpose.
The best evidence for hybrid work points in the same direction. A Stanford-led randomized experiment at Trip.com found that employees working from home two days a week quit at a 33 percent lower rate while productivity and promotion rates held steady. That result came from a structured hybrid arrangement, not from abandoning coordination. Flexibility worked because the organization paired it with a workable system.
Leaders deciding where people should work need to consider the job, the team, customer needs and the value of in-person collaboration. But the harder management question comes after the schedule is set. Can employees tell what matters, who owns what, when decisions need to happen, and how they will know whether they succeeded?
Remote and hybrid work make weak management more visible because employees have fewer informal ways to repair ambiguity. Strong managers respond by making direction durable, feedback timely, and accountability explicit. That is the operating system that lets flexible work deliver loyalty and output rather than confusion and churn.
Gleb Tsipursky, Ph.D., serves as the CEO of the future-of-work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts and wrote “The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results” and “ChatGPT for Leaders and Content Creators.”
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