Remote work, once a niche practice reserved for freelancers and digital nomads, became the norm almost overnight during the COVID-19 pandemic. Major corporations across the globe had no choice but to embrace working from home. For a while, it seemed like the future of work had arrived early.

However, we’re now witnessing a growing divide between employees, who want to continue working remotely, and employers, who are increasingly attempting to roll back their pandemic-era policies. This raises the question: What went wrong with remote work? Is it really bad for productivity?

Having worked remotely for over a decade and being deeply interested in productivity, I’ve often explored these topics in my writing for the Breaktime Reflections newsletter, and I believe the answer isn’t simply yes or no. Over the years, I’ve connected with hundreds of other remote workers. While many, including myself, have thrived, delivering exceptional work globally, the transition has also negatively impacted productivity for some.

This isn’t surprising, as remote work can blur the lines between professional and personal time, leading to stress, longer hours, and burnout. There’s a right way and a wrong way to approach remote work. Here’s how to set remote workers up for success:

Check what you monitor

One of the primary arguments in favor of returning to the office seems to be based on the notion that if someone can be supervised, they are less likely to slack off. I would question whether total time spent “working” is really the best indicator of productivity.

An expert may be able to deliver as much in one hour as a beginner may deliver in four. When you work with remote teams, I find that the following tend to be better indicators of true productivity:

• Adherence to deadlines
• Availability for calls and team discussions during regular working hours
• Quality of output
• Quality of internal feedback and communication

Workspace conditions

As I’ve said before, I have been working remotely for more than 10 years. But for the first two, I must admit that I was struggling to be productive. It took me a while to figure out and develop the right habits and working conditions to get it right.

What I’ve learned is that the following are quite critical when working from home:

• It’s really important that your “office” room, where you spend your time working, is not your bedroom and is not a shared room. It’s crucial to work from a space where you are free from distractions and the noise of what others may be doing around the house.
• It’s important to maintain a consistent schedule. It doesn’t have to be 9-to-5, but it’s essential to ensure that you’re working more or less around the same hours as your colleagues, partners, or clients so that you can connect with them in real time to discuss work.
• It’s very important to have a fast PC and internet connection that enables you to work at least as easily as you would in a traditional office.

Collaboration & tracking tools

From a management perspective, it’s crucial to ensure that your team has the tools they need to collaborate effectively in real time. Some key tools include:

• Video conferencing tools (Teams, Zoom, Google)
• Secure chat (Teams, Slack, etc.)
• Scheduling tools (i.e., a shared calendar so that it’s easy for colleagues to check each other’s availability for calls)
• Real-time collaboration (i.e., Mural, Miro, etc.)
• Project Management (i.e., Jira, Coda, Airtable, Notion, etc.)
• Secure cloud storage (OneDrive, Google Drive, etc.)

Ways of Working

It’s important to understand that with a shift as big as moving from in-person to remote working, ways of working will need to be adjusted as well. You won’t have the opportunity to just look over at your colleague’s desk and head over for a quick work-related chat if they are available. You don’t get the benefit of spontaneous in-person collaboration. But from a management perspective, you can work those kinds of sessions into your team’s schedule. That can mean:

• Ensuring regular meetings between key team members that enable them to discuss pressing topics
• Encouraging team members to schedule their own ad-hoc meetings with each other without always involving their managers or needing approval or coordination. Make it easy, and it will happen more.
• Depending on company culture, team dynamics, and so on, you may also want to think about how you can integrate gamification into meetings and other initiatives aimed at increasing active participation from each member.

Team Building

One thing will always remain true: you will never be able to build personal relationships and develop team dynamics as well online as you can offline. However, this can be achieved in many ways besides simply going to the office. It can be achieved through team-building activities, internal events, workshops, hackathons, etc.

In other words, the occasional team activity isn’t about the usual day-to-day work but is focused on building better connections and improving team collaboration and dynamics. If done right, even meeting just once a year can help build lasting relationships between coworkers. To conclude, I hope you found this article helpful. If you liked it, remember that you can subscribe to Breaktime Reflections here for my weekly newsletter discussing Productivity and Leadership.