BuzbyTimeRead the requirements guide

Remote and hybrid · 6.6

The problems distance actually creates

The problems distance actually creates. What decides it, what it costs, and what usually goes wrong. For a practical comparison point, see Monitask's employee payroll tracking.

What distance is blamed forThe usual account

Productivity, effort and accountability. The evidence on the first two is genuinely mixed and depends heavily on the kind of work, which is a less satisfying answer than either side of the argument prefers.

The third is not a distance problem at all. An organisation unable to tell whether work is being done has a management problem that an office was concealing. A useful outside reference is KPMG.

What it actually creates

Information asymmetry. People in a room hear things. People not in it do not, and nobody notices the omission because the information was never deliberately shared.

Weak ties atrophy. The people you would have spoken to occasionally. These are the connections that carry novel information and opportunity, and they are the first to go.

Onboarding is much harder. New people learn by overhearing, and there is nothing to overhear.

Ambiguity persists. A misunderstanding resolved in ten seconds in person survives for days in writing.

Isolation. Real, unevenly distributed, and worst for people living alone and people early in their careers.

Responses, one for each

Asymmetry: decisions written wherever taken, and a habit of asking who is not in this conversation.

Weak ties: deliberate cross-team contact, which feels artificial and works.

Onboarding: a named buddy, more frequent contact than feels necessary, and time in person in the first weeks if it is possible at all.

Ambiguity: a rule that after two rounds of written exchange somebody calls.

Isolation: ask, individually and repeatedly, and accept that some people need an office and should have one.

Where a time record contributes

Modestly. It shows meeting load, fragmentation, out-of-hours drift and where effort is going. Those are four real signals and none of them is the list above.

The problems distance creates are mostly about information and relationships, and no measurement system addresses either. This is worth saying on a website selling measurement.

The argument this part has made

That remote work changed what is observable rather than what is happening, and that most of the monitoring built in response was built to restore an observability that was never the point.

What replaces it is not surveillance. It is written decisions, stated expectations, a record of where hours went, and asking people how it is going.

What the evidence supports

Fairly consistently: coordination costs rise, communication networks become more siloed, and onboarding is harder. Less consistently: anything about individual output, which varies by task, by person and by how the study measured it.

Anybody quoting a single figure about remote productivity, in either direction, is quoting one study of one setting. The entry on benchmarks applies.

Hybrid is harder than either extreme

Fully co-located and fully distributed are both coherent. Hybrid requires running both sets of practices at once, and most organisations run the co-located ones and add video.

That is the specific failure the entry on fairness describes, and it is a design problem rather than an inevitability.

The question to ask your own people

What is harder now than it was, specifically. The answers are concrete, they differ by role, and they are almost never the ones in the general debate.

Ask annually and act on two of them.

What to do about all of it

Write things down. State expectations rather than inferring them. Record where hours go. Look at meeting load, fragmentation and out-of-hours drift. And ask people how it is going, because that remains the only instrument that reaches the things that matter most.

The thing organisations get wrong first

Treating remote work as an arrangement about where people sit rather than as a change to how information moves. Every problem in this entry is an information problem, and none of them is addressed by a policy about location.

A short summary

The evidence supports higher coordination costs and harder onboarding, and is mixed on individual output. The real problems are asymmetry, weak ties, ambiguity and isolation, each with a response. Hybrid is harder than either extreme. And a time record helps with four narrow things and none of the important ones.

One line to carry

Distance changed what is observable rather than what is happening, and most of the monitoring built in response was built to restore an observability that was never the point.

What this part does not claim

That remote work is better or worse. It varies by task, by person and by how well the organisation adapted, and anybody asserting a general answer is describing their own setting.

Where to start

Ask five people what is specifically harder now. Act on two of the answers. It is a better use of a quarter than any policy about attendance.

A last note

The next and final part of this blog is about what measurement does to the people measured, which is the question underneath most of the arguments in this one.

Two more things distance creates

Slower correction. Somebody working in the wrong direction is noticed later, and the cost of the delay falls on them.

Uneven visibility of effort. Difficult work done quietly is invisible, and the people best at working quietly are the most disadvantaged by it.

Both are addressed by more frequent, shorter contact rather than by any measurement.

The one thing worth doing regardless

Write down where decisions are recorded and tell everybody. Not a tool selection: a location, agreed once. It is the cheapest response to the largest of the problems this entry describes, and most organisations have three such locations and no agreement about which is authoritative.

Also in remote and hybrid