Taelon Vorster,  founder of fully remote digital agency It Just So Happens, has managed teams across countries and time zones. She argues that too many businesses are recreating office culture online, with endless meetings, monitoring and rigid hours, instead of building the trust and systems that make remote work succeed.

Is it completely ironic that we were trusted more as schoolkids to manage our own homework than we are as fully grown adults to do the jobs we’re actually paid for?

Think about it. At six years old, you’re expected to go home, learn your spellings, finish your homework and turn up the next day having done it. Nobody needs to sit there watching you every minute. You’ve got a deadline, you know what’s expected of you, and whether you’ve done the work becomes pretty obvious when you sit down to take your spelling test.

Yet fast-forward a few decades into the workplace, and suddenly that trust seems to disappear. If your manager can’t see you, there’s a question over whether you’re actually working. If your Teams light isn’t green, what are you doing? There is even software businesses can install on people’s laptops specifically to monitor whether they’re active, which I find genuinely grotesque.

I actually think we sometimes have higher expectations of people working remotely than we do of those sitting in an office. Nobody questions somebody having a conversation by the water cooler, but if you’re working from home and someone hasn’t seen you online at midday, suddenly it’s, “Well, what have you been doing?”

It’s a strange double standard, and one I experienced myself earlier in my career.

I worked at a successful employer brand agency in London and was trusted to lead a client account billing around £1 million a year. I could manage senior clients, oversee the work and deliver what was expected of me, but I was still required to spend hours travelling from Surrey to the Midlands for regular in-person meetings, sometimes arriving for 8am and getting home incredibly late.

The irony was that some of my most productive hours were spent on those train journeys, when nobody was interrupting me or asking if I had five minutes for something that inevitably wouldn’t take five minutes.

It’s forced me to think very differently about how a business should operate, and I’ve learnt that making remote working successful has very little to do with where people are sitting.

Measure what people deliver, not how long they’re online

One of the biggest mistakes businesses make is confusing visibility with productivity. Just because someone is sitting at their desk for eight hours doesn’t mean they’re producing eight hours of brilliant work.

My most productive hours are ridiculously early. Between about 5am and 10am. Someone else might do their best creative thinking at four in the afternoon or come alive at eight in the evening, so why should we assume everybody works best during exactly the same eight-hour window?

Instead, focus on agreeing on deliverables and deadlines rather than expecting everybody to work identical hours. If someone has committed to completing something by Thursday, then that’s what we expect. Trust doesn’t mean abandoning accountability or letting deadlines go out of the window.

For business owners, I think that’s the starting point. Be absolutely clear about what needs doing, who’s responsible for it and when it needs to be finished. Then give people the freedom to work out how they deliver it.

Use time tracking to improve productivity, not police people

I’m not against time tracking, by the way. I use a time tracker myself, and we encourage our freelancers to do the same, but not because I want to know whether somebody has been sitting at their desk for eight hours.

I want to understand where people’s time is going, what’s taking longer than expected and whether we need to bring in additional resources. That’s useful information for any small business owner, particularly when you’re working with limited resources and trying to make sure people’s time is being spent on the right things.

There’s a huge difference between tracking time to make a business work better and using it to make employees feel as though they’re permanently under surveillance.

Make information accessible without another meeting

Working across different time zones has also taught us that you can’t build a business around everyone being available at precisely the same moment.

We’ve had to become very good at what is known as asynchronous working, which essentially means people can get on with their jobs without needing any body else to be online at the same time.

For our clients, we agree on regular meetings upfront, often scheduling them months in advance, and provide weekly status updates so everybody understands what’s happening.

We also make sure project conversations and updates are accessible to everyone involved, so when somebody finishes for the day, the next person coming online can understand where the work has got to, what’s outstanding and what needs their attention.

I think businesses should be making it as easy as possible for people to find information without having to ask for it. If there’s a deadline approaching, an approval outstanding or something holding a project up, the people involved should be able to see that for themselves. You shouldn’t need another meeting just to find out what happened in the last one.

None of this needs to be complicated. Clear responsibilities, shared information and regular updates can make an enormous difference.

The important thing is making information available rather than relying on somebody being online to explain what’s happening.

Remote working shouldn’t mean being available around the clock

There’s another expectation that I find particularly frustrating, and that’s the assumption that because somebody works remotely, they’re somehow always contactable.

As an agency operating across multiple countries and time zones, there might be somebody working somewhere in the world at almost any given moment, but that doesn’t mean every individual should be permanently switched on.

A message arriving on a Saturday might only take a couple of minutes to answer, but it can leave you thinking about work for the rest of the afternoon. Suddenly, the time you were supposed to be spending doing something completely different has been interrupted.

That’s why we’re so deliberate about agreeing on communication channels, scheduling meetings and setting expectations around when people are available.

I’d encourage any business owner managing remote employees to think about this, because giving people flexibility over where they work means very little if they never feel they can properly switch off.

Trust doesn’t mean everybody has to work the same way

Another thing we’re working on is understanding how each individual prefers to work and communicate, rather than expecting everyone to fit into the same mould.

Some people want detailed written instructions, while others would rather talk something through in person or a Loom  video. It might sound like a small thing, but understanding those differences can make a huge difference to how effectively people work together, particularly when they’re not sitting in the same office.

None of this means remote working is perfect, and there are certainly things about office life that I miss. Some people genuinely thrive in an office environment, and there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that.

But I think the mistake businesses make is assuming that because one way of working suits them, it should automatically suit everybody else.

If you hire somebody to do a job, give them clear expectations, the right tools, access to the information they need and the responsibility to deliver it. And, most importantly, trust them to get on with it.

Because if you can’t do that, remote working was never really the problem in the first place.

Website: itjustsohappens.agency