Can Remote Work Work?

Short answer: yes. Long answer: read this.

Generally speaking, yes. I’m sure of it. But some companies and leaders are better suited for building remote teams than others. Aside from a few college internships, I have worked remotely my entire career. I have seen remote work done really well, and I have also seen it create some of the unhappiest and unmotivated teams you’ve ever seen.

The ability to build strong, trusting relationships is the central pillar of really any company culture, but it is especially important for remote teams. Unsurprisingly, this is no small task for employees who interact solely through screens.

As a consultant, I worked remotely but I was lucky to have a decent amount of in-person time with my coworkers when we were on the road visiting our clients. That certainly helped me get to know them better, although a lot of these “trips” didn’t necessarily have the luxury of giving us much time to “hang out,” aside from late night work sessions in hotel lobbies.

The proximity helped in those situations, but our client trips were rarely relaxed enough to actually get to know each other, and I would only have the opportunity to interact with a small subset of my team.

My direct report, for example, was always on a different client. We communicated entirely over Teams. I thought things between us were going well. Fine, even good.

Then we went on a team retreat.

At some point I found myself sitting with her on the rooftop of our villa, just talking. We covered all things from family and friends, to concerts, to navigating your twenties as a professional. That one conversation changed everything. I came away with a completely different understanding of who she was, how she thought about her work, what motivated her, and what stressed her out.

After that I wasn’t just assigning her tasks. I knew the best way to communicate with her, support her, and get the best work out of her. I had tried my best to build a relationship that went beyond surface level with her in the months leading up to that trip, but months over Teams didn’t come close to the effectiveness of one hour in person, just being human.

Beyond a mutual understanding of each other’s work ethic and preferences, we also were able to build trust over time.

A common thread among all functioning remote teams is trust. I’m not talking about the superficial kind built through check-ins and status updates because that does nothing but mark a to-do off a project managers list. I am talking about the kind of trust that allows employees to do their work without feeling watched or worried about handing off each and every assignment for review.

It sounds simple, but A LOT of leaders get this wrong and ultimately create disgruntled employees. When managers monitor their teams’ little green icons and wonder why someone’s has gone yellow for a few minutes too long or ask where they are and why their background looks different on a zoom call, that’s not management. That’s surveillance, and usually it says something about the leader, not the employee.

Maybe those employees aren’t the right fit. If that behavior shows up across the board, though, the more honest question is whether that leader should be running a remote team at all. Micromanagement and remote work are fundamentally incompatible.

Research from Harvard Business School found that employee monitoring actually decreases productivity and increases dishonest behavior over time. The signal of distrust erodes intrinsic motivation. The thing meant to enforce performance actively undermines it.

Without trust, there is a very low likelihood of a successful work-from-home culture. I’m not advocating for return to office, though. I do not believe that to be the answer. Nicholas Bloom at Stanford, probably the most cited researcher on remote work today, has found that fully remote teams underperform hybrid teams on collaboration and innovation, but outperform fully in-office teams on individual focused work. The answer is both. The focused, autonomous remote work should be protected, while still prioritizing intentional in-person time every now and then to build trust and connections that can’t be done with more screen-time.

That in-person time looks different for every company. It could be a retreat twice a year, regional team dinners once a quarter, an annual meeting that offers something more than an average dinner and the same speech the CEO has given the last 3 years. The format matters less than the intention behind it.

This is actually what led me to start studio jac. I kept watching remote companies try to solve the connection problem with better tools and more frequent check-ins, and it never quite worked. What they needed was better in-person experiences, designed around how humans actually connect rather than how companies “always have.” studio jac plans and produces those experiences, whether that’s a multi-day retreat, a team dinner, a brand activation, or an annual meeting.

So yes, remote work can work but it needs this piece, and many companies haven’t figured out how to do it well yet.