Redefining productivity: Managing distributed teams in the hybrid work era

Remote work isn’t just an option anymore. For many, it’s become a way to access a broader talent pool, offer more flexibility to employees, and stay competitive when hiring. More than half of employees with remote-capable jobs have a hybrid arrangement, according to Gallup, making this type of arrangement increasingly desirable.

But with hybrid (or distributed) work comes a reckoning. The traditional tactics you’ve used to support teams and keep them productive were built with the office in mind. Some of them still might apply with a distributed team; many of them don’t. That means you need to redefine productivity if you’re going to manage a distributed team.

Here’s how.

Why a traditional productivity mindset doesn’t work with distributed teams   

How do you measure productivity when everyone’s in the office? If you’re like most managers, you’ve relied on performance reviews and the level of activity in the office. When you can see your team working on an important project, you feel like they’re productive. If they’re spending a bit too much time around the coffee maker, you start to think about ways to get that productivity back up.

Everything changes when you have a distributed team.

The models and tactics that work for people who work in the office 40 hours a week don’t work for those who work remotely—whether they’re hybrid or fully remote. You can’t just get a sense of your team’s productivity by walking around the office and having informal conversations. Worse, performance reviews and similar measurements fall prey to visibility bias, which undervalues the contributions of employees who aren’t in the office as often.

Making the shift from a traditional productivity mindset isn’t just fairer to your distributed workforce; it’s a competitive advantage. You’ll get more out of every team member because they’ll have the support they need to excel.

What distributed teams need to be productive   

With the right support, distributed teams can be just as productive as teams that work in the office full-time—if not more. Here’s what they need.

Clear outcomes   

One of the most challenging aspects of managing a distributed team is getting a sense of their output. That’s why you need to make the shift from tracking “busyness” metrics to tracking deliverables:

• Give team members ownership over outcomes: When team members own the outcome of their work, they’re naturally more invested and better able to communicate the results of every activity.
• Use goal-setting frameworks: Frameworks like OKRs (objective key results) and SMART goals allow leaders to clearly define productivity goals for their team, even when they’re working remotely.
• Create measurable deliverables: Using quantitative metrics to measure actual outcomes (e.g., number of blog posts written, number of bugs fixed) gives you a better sense of your team’s productivity.
• Time-box major initiatives: Instead of measuring productivity as a continuous effort, give clear beginning and end dates for important projects.
• Align outcomes with business goals: By aligning the work employees do with broader business goals, you both increase their productivity and create clear ways to measure their contributions to the organization.

Proactive visibility   

It’s a lot easier to get visibility on work that happens in an office than in a home office. That’s why you have to be more proactive about building and maintaining that visibility:

• Implement regular check-ins: Proactively choose a cadence at which team members should report on their work, whether that’s daily, weekly, or monthly.
• Share work updates asynchronously: Synchronous communication (e.g., meetings, water cooler conversations) isn’t as efficient for distributed teams. Prioritize asynchronous communication channels, like chat apps and other collaboration tools.
• Use project management systems: Project management tools can easily serve as a single source of truth for distributed teams, and they’re a strong communication channel for project updates, team processes, and more.
• Build in milestone reviews: When your teams reach important milestones, it’s important to check in to hold retrospectives covering how everyone works, what they can improve, and where they’re excelling.
• Document decisions: In an office setting, getting reminders about an important decision is as simple as reaching over and tapping someone on the shoulder. With a distributed team, document important decisions in a platform that everyone can easily access.

Measuring what actually matters   

The metrics you use to measure productivity can have almost as much of an impact as anything else you do. That’s because the metrics most organizations use don’t measure actual productivity as much as how busy people are. To make sure you’re actually measuring productivity, try:

• Tracking delivery against commitments, with metrics like velocity, quality, and timeliness.
• Assessing actual collaboration effectiveness through response times and collaboration patterns.
• Monitoring innovation and problem-solving with metrics like the number of initiatives created and solutions generated.
• Evaluating customer and shareholder impact through business outcomes and customer satisfaction surveys.

Redefining the way you work for productive distributed teams   

To make your distributed teams more productive, you need to take organization-wide action. If you’re managing a small team, start with your own team, report the results, and slowly spread adoption from there. If you’re in a leadership position, you can implement these changes more broadly.

Strengthening communication   

On too many teams, communication is taken as a given. People are rarely proactive about the communication channels they use, the messages they’re communicating, or ensuring they get the response they need. With distributed teams, these communication issues are magnified. Here’s what you can do:

• Choose the right channels: Asynchronous communication channels like chat apps and other collaboration tools are great for sharing messages in a way that’s easy to refer to at any time. But that doesn’t mean they’re always the right choice. Be intentional about picking the communication channel that fits your message.
• Establish norms: Define how teams should communicate, that way everyone can have the same expectations. Otherwise, distributed teams will communicate in whatever way best suits them in the moment, potentially creating misunderstandings.
• Overcommunicate: Distributed teams have far fewer opportunities for communication than in-office teams. Encourage them to communicate as much as they need to, get confirmation from the recipient, and be more proactive about ensuring their messages are understood.

Ritualizing collaboration   

Rituals don’t need fancy robes and Latin. In the office—whether it’s the company’s or your home —the right rituals can streamline collaboration and improve productivity for everyone, no matter where they’re working from. In simple terms, that just means ritualizing aspects of collaboration you’d usually take for granted. For example:

• Meeting cadence: In offices, meetings are often unplanned, happening based on emerging collaboration needs. Because remote and hybrid meetings require more preparation and support, you need to plan the cadence of each meeting in advance. You also need to be more ruthless about which meetings are really necessary.
• Documentation culture: Distributed teams need more rigorous documentation on essential processes, since they don’t always have access to the right expert. Build the expectation that everyone documents the work they’re responsible for.
• Time zone considerations: When just a few team members are in a time zone vastly different from the others, it’s easy for the contributions to go unnoticed. Make a habit of rotating meeting times, recording sessions, and providing participation options that account for time zone differences.
• Social connection: In-office work involves multiple opportunities for accidental social contact, which distributed teams just don’t get. Be intentional about building rituals that encourage social connection between team members.

Improving your approach to management   

Some of the adjustments you’ll need to make when managing distributed teams have less to do with work styles and tech stacks. Here’s how managers need to shift their approach to better support remote and hybrid work arrangements:

• Coaching over monitoring: The tendency to monitor mouse cursors and hours spent in collaboration tools with remote workers tends to be counterproductive. Instead, managers should focus on working with team members to chart a path towards doing their best work.
• Autonomy with accountability: With more autonomy, hybrid and remote workers are free to do their best work without any micromanagement. By making them accountable for final deliverables without watching their every move, they’re more inclined to reach new productivity goals.
• One-on-one consistency: It’s all too easy for an overwhelmed manager to miss a few one-on-one meetings. In an office setting, catching up on these meetings is as simple as grabbing an employee and asking them when they’re free. With distributed teams, you have to be more intentional about prioritizing these meetings.

Lead distributed teams to new heights   

Having a distributed team comes with significant advantages, like getting access to a broader talent pool and protecting the work-life balance for employees. But to keep these teams productive, managers and leaders have to redefine how they approach productivity. It starts with a mindset shift, tracking actual outcomes over metrics that reflect busyness rather than true productivity. From there, the way you collaborate has to change as well, from being more proactive about communication to serving in a coaching role rather than purely monitoring activity.

With the right approach, distributed teams won’t just match in-office teams. They’ll eclipse them.