Jul 31, 2026
Remote work didn't break communication. It revealed where it was already broken.
What managing and hiring remotely during COVID taught me about context, ownership, and communication.
COVID changed the way we worked almost overnight.
People who had spent years sitting together suddenly weren’t.
New engineers joined teams without ever meeting their manager in person.
A quick question that would normally take thirty seconds became a message.
A conversation that would have happened while walking to lunch now needed a calendar invite.
At first, it felt like the problem was remote work.
I don’t think it was.
Things that were obvious stopped being obvious
When everyone sits together, you pick up a surprising amount of context without trying.
You hear a product conversation.
You know why something was delayed.
You understand that a particular decision is temporary.
You can tell when someone is stuck.
None of that gets written down.
Remote work takes much of that away.
Suddenly, if the context isn’t explicit, people simply don’t have it.
That made me much more conscious about how much information teams were relying on through proximity.
Hiring made this even more obvious
We hired people during that period who had to become productive without the usual informal onboarding.
There was no sitting beside someone and asking questions all day.
Documentation mattered more.
Written decisions mattered more.
Having a clear owner mattered more.
Even something as simple as explaining why a piece of work existed became more important.
People could execute a task without understanding the larger context.
That’s dangerous at scale, and it’s part of why attrition was a real problem in that stretch too — people who don’t understand why their work matters don’t stay long, no matter how well they’re executing it.
Remote work changed what good management looked like
I became much more deliberate about communication.
Not more communication.
Better communication.
There is a difference.
More meetings don’t solve missing context.
More Slack messages don’t solve unclear ownership.
A daily status update doesn’t solve a team that doesn’t understand the goal.
The things that helped most were usually simple:
Clear ownership.
Written context.
Decisions that could be found later.
Regular but purposeful conversations.
And making it safe for someone to say, “I don’t understand why we’re doing this.”
I don’t think remote work is the lesson
The bigger lesson for me was that proximity hides organizational problems.
When people are sitting next to each other, you can compensate for unclear communication with conversation.
When they’re distributed, you can’t.
That doesn’t mean remote teams need more process. It means they need better context and clearer ownership — and that turned out to matter well beyond the remote years. We kept the written-decision habit long after people were back in the same building, because it was never really about the room. It was about whether the reasoning survived past the conversation that produced it.
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