More than ten years ago, I started working in international teams, often in a hybrid setup. I noticed a recurring pattern. When collaboration became difficult, people started working in silos, or team culture and performance fell short of expectations, the remote nature of the team was often seen as part of the problem.
If you've worked in a remote or hybrid team, you'll probably recognise this scenario: People found themselves working in silos. Collaboration became harder, meetings multiplied, team culture weakened, and performance increasingly fell short of expectations. Because we were not sitting in the same office, the conclusion seemed obvious, remote working was the bottleneck, and clearly it would all improve once we had the chance to meet face to face and iron things out.
The assumption was understandable: if only we spent more time together in the same room, collaboration would improve.
Over time, however, I realised that remote working wasn't usually creating the problem. Instead, it was exposing issues that had always been there but were now impossible to ignore.
In many ways, I have come to believe that remote working is one of the best stress tests for the quality of a team's culture, leadership and execution.
Collaboration was never about the coffee machine.
What we often don’t realise is that when people work together in the same office many inefficiencies are absorbed by coincidence. For example, the conversation at the coffee machine where you could clarify a misunderstanding, or quick chats in the hallway that surface a concern, and the saving grace version, overhearing a discussion and realising that you were supposed to contribute.
These moments are valuable, of course. But they can also mask deeper issues, because if collaboration only works because people happen to bump into each other, then the collaboration itself was never really designed.
In my experience, the absence of these informal moments in remote teams does not create dysfunction, it reveals where clarity, ownership and connection were never made explicit in the first place.
In many organisations, proximity has become a substitute for process. Leaders assume communication is working because people are constantly talking. Teams assume collaboration is working because people are constantly available.
Remote working exposed the difference between communication by proximity and communication by design.
I believe remote working removes the safety net of accidental communication, leaving us with the functional reality of what remains: the quality of the systems and leadership, and the relationships a team has intentionally built.
In my experience, struggling remote teams usually miss one of three things.
A shared purpose
Successful teams know who their customer is, what challenge the customer is trying to solve, and they know how the team creates value and what success looks like.
Being clear on these points is fundamental to success in any role or team. And yet, when people are asked these questions, the answers are often surprisingly inconsistent. Not because they haven't spent enough time together physically, but because they are not aligned on what they are trying to achieve together.
Without this shared understanding, people naturally stay busy. Instead of moving in the same direction, they spend more time coordinating, clarifying and compensating for misalignment. The result is a team that is busy, but not as effective as it could be.
Explicit ownership
To work effectively in a remote environment, teams must make ownership explicit. This means ensuring that everyone understands what they are responsible for, what decisions they are empowered to make, and where accountability begins and ends.
This is one of the reasons fully remote organisations such as GitLab have been so influential in shaping modern ways of working. When people cannot rely on overhearing conversations or stopping by someone's desk, expectations, responsibilities and decisions have to become visible. Clarity cannot live in people's heads, it has to be built into the way the organisation operates.
Human connection
One of the most common concerns about remote working is that it weakens human connection. This matters because strong working relationships are built on trust, and trust underpins almost every aspect of effective collaboration. It allows us to speak openly, challenge ideas constructively, ask for help when we need it and rely on one another to deliver.
There is still a widespread belief that this kind of trust can only develop when people work side by side. My experience has been the opposite.
As Simon Sinek's work on leadership repeatedly emphasizes, trust is built through the small, consistent behaviours that show people they matter. Physical proximity may create more opportunities for those behaviours, but it doesn't create trust by itself.
Trust does not emerge because people sit in the same building. Trust emerges because people intentionally invest in understanding one another by spending time in one-on-one conversations, understanding each other’s motivations and ambitions, being transparent about goals and decisions, sharing information openly, and discussing plans before they become individual projects.
The strongest remote teams I worked with did not leave connection to chance. They designed for it.
What the best remote teams did differently
The best teams I worked with addressed these three areas deliberately. They had absolute clarity on the value they created and the outcomes they were working towards. They made ownership visible, allowing decisions to be taken by the people closest to the work instead of involving everyone in everything. And they invested intentionally in trust and connection.
They also established clear meeting rhythms:
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- a short weekly check-in focused on priorities, expectations and connection;
- monthly reviews focused on objectives, bottlenecks and learning;
- quarterly sessions to bring in customers, experts or other perspectives;
- annual reflection sessions before setting new goals.
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Ironically, a lack of clarity often triggers more communication, with calendars filling up with meetings, wider groups being invited into discussions, and an increasing demand for updates and reporting. This often leaves leaders dissatisfied with progress, prompting them to involve even more people in an attempt to accelerate delivery.
But this complexity rarely creates clarity, in fact, I have often seen the opposite happen. More information, more meetings and more stakeholders created less ownership and slower decision-making. As with process optimisation: before we optimise a process, we first ask whether it should exist at all. The same principle applies to collaboration. Making unnecessary meetings shorter or more efficient doesn't solve the underlying problem. First ask why the meeting is needed. Clearly, activity is not the same as progress.
The best remote teams I have worked with trusted one another and so they did not feel the need to have everyone in every meeting. And they did not need physical meetings to fix broken processes. They used them for what they are best suited for:
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- building deeper relationships;
- brainstorming;
- showing vulnerability;
- celebrating achievements;
- creating energy.
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Being together was the icing on the cake, not the condition for success.
What is the better question?
Today, many organisations still question whether remote or hybrid working really works and I believe that is often the wrong question. The better question is:
How clear are we about what we are trying to achieve, who is responsible, and how we support each other in getting there?
Because remote working does not create culture problems, it reveals them. That may sound uncomfortable, but it is also good news, because it means the solution is usually much closer than we think.
Quality pioneer W. Edwards Deming once said, "A bad system will beat a good person every time." In my experience, that is exactly what many organisations discover when they move to remote or hybrid work. The issue is rarely a lack of talent, commitment or effort, the issue is that distance exposes weaknesses in clarity, ownership and connection that were previously hidden by proximity.
Organisations rarely lack talented people. What they often lack, especially during periods of growth and change, are the systems and ways of working that allow those people to succeed consistently.
Clarity. Ownership. Connection.
Those are the foundations that determine whether teams thrive, whether they work in the same office, across countries, or somewhere in between.
