Remote Teams Need More Clarity and Feedback, Not More Trust

An office, through the sheer proximity between managers and their people, supplies continuous clarity about what to do and why, and feedback on how it is going. Remote work lacks both.

That’s why the key to making remote work effective is to supply these two much more deliberately than office work ever required.

The office’s continuous supply of clarity and feedback

Here are three common situations at the office:

• A manager overhears two employees talking at the coffee machine. He understands that they misunderstood something from the meeting that took place two hours earlier. He immediately resolves the misunderstanding by talking to them for thirty seconds.
• On Monday, a manager delegated the creation of an important report, due Friday. Today is Wednesday. As the manager walks by the employee’s desk, he stops for a second to ask how the report is going. The employee replies with a quick update and asks for a couple of clarifications, clarifications he would not have asked for if the manager had not stopped by.
• A manager sees a draft of a customer email on someone’s screen while passing by. The tone is too defensive, and one sentence could easily be misread. He points it out immediately, and the employee rewrites it in two minutes.

Most smoothly running in-office teams are actually running on a constant stream of small clarifications and corrections. Remote deletes this stream, so you have to produce it on purpose.

More precisely, this stream comprises two key ingredients: clarity and feedback. Each has to be rebuilt deliberately and more strongly than it would be in person, to overcompensate for the lower likelihood that questions are asked and that misunderstandings are resolved serendipitously.

Remote needs more clarity, not less

Since in remote work it is harder to serendipitously spot misunderstandings before it is too late, you should try to be superclear: don’t just aim to be clear enough so that you can be understood, but aim to be clear enough so that you cannot be misunderstood.

Three habits can help you get there.

1. Be concrete and use examples. Almost any task, except the most banal ones, can be done at different levels of quality and proactivity. But if you do not give them the specs, they will choose them for you. And if they do, they will almost certainly over- or under-deliver, both of which are bad.
2. Pre-empt likely misunderstandings. Before you finish, assume the other person will walk away with a slightly different picture than the one in your head. Ask yourself what they are most likely to get wrong, then add that detail before they have to ask for it.
3. Ask them to rephrase their understanding of what they have to do next. This is of paramount importance, because in person, you can read hesitation on a face or in body language and probe it, but remotely, you cannot, so you have to proactively create situations where doubt can surface.

A manager’s job is to prevent misunderstandings, not to clarify them after they have already cost a week. This is even more important in remote work, where misunderstandings or lack of buy-in can take weeks to surface.

Remote needs more frequent feedback, not less

Did you ever wonder why many people hate their job but love playing videogames?

One reason is that videogames provide instant feedback, all the time. If videogames only gave you feedback once a week, no one would play them.

And yet, that’s what work is often like. Remote work in particular.

So, give your people more frequent feedback.

First, whenever they do something important, or fail to do something important, let them know immediately, without waiting for the next scheduled one-on-one. Few things are more demotivating than doing something good and receiving no immediate feedback, or doing something bad and receiving no immediate feedback: both mean the task wasn’t important and/or the manager didn’t care. Either way, they’ll do less next time.

Second, do not reserve your feedback for milestones only: a metric, a project, a formal review. Instead, if you notice them doing something good, let them know, no matter how small it is. The more a manager notices the good, the stronger the incentive for employees to deliver it.

Third, whenever you delegate an important task, one or two working days after, make a quick call: “Any questions come up once you got into it?” This is fundamental because questions tend to surface only after someone starts the work, and by then, asking can feel awkward, so people guess instead. A brief check-in catches these doubts early. This is particularly important remotely, because the question that would have been asked across a desk now goes unspoken. Pro tip: prefer a call to a written channel, where people are quicker to hide uncertainty or respond with platitudes.

Don’t be afraid of micromanagement

The main reason remote managers hesitate to provide much-needed clarity and feedback is that they are afraid of being seen as micromanagers.

But the opposite of micromanagement isn’t good management; it’s lack of management.

And while it’s true that, in the short term, people like to be left alone, it’s also true that in the long term, people want to grow, avoid rework, and avoid embarrassment. For that to happen, they need to receive enough clarity and enough feedback. And to be useful rather than frustrating, feedback must come early enough not to feel like you misled them into wasting effort on the wrong path.

How to delegate to remote employees

Instead of assign, then wait, then evaluate:

1. Be superclear when you delegate: concrete, example-driven, and confirmed by having them rephrase their understanding of the task.
2. Check in with them early, one or two days later, before they spend too much time working in the wrong direction or with the wrong expectation.
3. Give frequent feedback throughout, not a single verdict at the end.

Doing these three does not mean trusting your team less. Instead, it allows you to rebuild the clarity and feedback a shared office used to supply for free, and that no remote tool provides on its own.

I wrote more about what changes when a team goes remote in my book Managing Hybrid and Remote Teams.

And if you want tailored help, check out my advisory work.