Remote and Hybrid Work
Remote & Hybrid Work
What is remote work?
- A mix of remote and office work
- Performance-focused, trust-based management is essential
- Design remote communication intentionally
Once work goes remote or hybrid, what managers can verify by eye is forced to shift from attendance to deliverables. Seeing someone at their desk or a monitor lit late at night used to be supporting evidence in evaluations; now only agreed outputs and deadlines remain. A bigger change is how information flows. When the context overheard from the next desk and the background shared over lunch or in the smoking area disappear, information that isn’t recorded doesn’t exist. So the real work of going remote isn’t the approval that permits working from home; it’s building a habit across the organization of writing down meetings, decisions, and progress.
In practice, remote work is not treated as one thing but broken into stages. Fully remote (no office at all), remote-first (remote by default, with gatherings when needed), hybrid (2–3 set office days a week) and office-first (home working only by exception) each call for different policies and costs. Hybrid itself splits again into anchor days, where the whole team comes in on the same days, and self-selected schedules, where each person picks their days. Even with the same 'three days in the office,' what separates the two is whether the days line up. With self-selected days, people often come in and still don't meet their teammates, so the reason to come in disappears on its own. One more point: flexibility of place and flexibility of time are separate axes, so designing them together with elective working hours or staggered start times makes it easy to miss working-hours management obligations.
The most common misconception is that performance-focused management simply means adding more metrics. Install tools that track mouse movement and logged-in time, double the weekly reports, and people spend their time looking busy while trust erodes fast. Another is proximity bias. When good assignments and good ratings go to whoever is visible, remote workers end up in a structure where they are penalized for a choice the policy itself allows, and eventually nobody uses it and the policy exists only on paper. If six people gather in a meeting room, two join by video, and those two never get a word in, that organization's hybrid model has already failed.
Inwoo LeeExpert in leadership, communication, and performance management
John KimInstructor John Kim, CEO of Nanum Consulting and author of “B2B Marketing Design”Made possible by advances in communications technology, it spread rapidly worldwide after the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.
Consider a hypothetical case. Company A, a B2B software firm with 320 employees, ran a hybrid model with three self-selected office days a week for a year. Yet 12 of the 14 people promoted in the first half had been in the office four or more days a week, and in the remote-heavy engineering division, 7 people left voluntarily within six months.
- The HR head ran an anonymous all-employee survey, and 62% answered 'I came into the office and none of my teammates were there.' The reason to come in had disappeared first.
- The CTO fixed each team's anchor days (set office days) at Tuesday and Thursday, and added a principle: 'On office days we only hold meetings and reviews; the other three days everyone focuses on their own work.'
- They also changed the meeting rules: if even one person was remote, everyone in the meeting room joined from their own laptop too. They started with making every face on the screen the same size.
- At the evaluation calibration session, the head of HR drew a line: 'Days in the office can't be used as grounds for a rating.' The 11 team leads then re-set their ratings using only quarterly deliverables and review records.
- Six months later, voluntary departures in the engineering division fell from 7 to 2, and 5 of the 11 people promoted in the second half came in only one or two days a week. The link between days in the office and evaluation had been cut.