Managing people you cannot see
The instinct is to reconstruct the missing visibility. The better move is to stop needing it.
Managers moving to distributed teams lose the signals they were trained on: who is at their desk, who looks stressed, who is in a long conversation with whom. The discomfort is real, and the responses divide sharply. For broader context on privacy and workplace data, ICO employment guidance is a useful reference.
One response is to define outcomes clearly enough that presence stops mattering. The other is to try to rebuild the missing visibility through software. The first is harder to start and works; the second is easy to start and degrades over time.
Define the output, not the day
Managing by presence is only possible when you can see presence. Distributed, the equivalent is agreement about what a person is producing over a given period and what good looks like. For a practical software-side reference on remote employee monitoring, remote employee monitoring software adds useful detail.
This is harder than it sounds and it is the actual work of remote management. Where it is not done, managers fall back on proxies — response speed, hours visible online, message volume — all of which measure availability rather than contribution and reward the wrong behaviour.
The person who replies fastest is not the person producing most. Proxies for presence systematically favour interruptible work over deep work, and distributed teams need the opposite.
Check in more often, and more briefly
The office provided frequent low-intensity contact. Remotely the natural pattern is infrequent formal contact, which surfaces problems late.
Short and regular beats long and occasional. A fortnightly half hour catches drift; a quarterly review discovers it after a quarter.
Say explicitly what you are not measuring
In the absence of a statement, people assume they are being judged on visible activity, and they optimise for it: staying online, replying instantly, being seen in channels.
Stating plainly that hours online are not a measure, and then not referring to them, is what allows people to work in the way that actually produces results. It only works if it is true.
Notice the two failure modes
Distributed teams produce opposite problems, and both are invisible without deliberate attention. Some people disengage quietly, and nobody notices for weeks because their absence looks like focus. Others overwork, because the boundary that leaving an office provided has gone.
The second is more common among the people a manager is least worried about, and it presents as commitment until it presents as resignation.
Trust has to be extended first
The order matters. Extending autonomy and then monitoring for abuse produces neither trust nor good data. Monitoring first and relaxing later almost never happens, because the monitoring becomes the evidence base.
Where individual performance is genuinely in question, that is a performance conversation with a specific person, held directly. It is not a reason to instrument the whole team, which is the usual and least effective response.