Choosing a Remote Model: Three Real Options and One Fake One
Fully remote, hybrid and office-first are genuine choices with different costs. 'Flexible' is not one of them.…
Guides
Everything published here, grouped by the problem it addresses. Written for the people who own the outcome rather than for a general audience.
Policy and structure
09
Writing a Remote Work Policy People Actually Follow
Most policies are written to protect the organisation and read by nobody. What belongs in one that gets used.…
Time Zones: Designing for Overlap Instead of Hoping for It
Distributed teams fail on time zones more often than on any other dimension. The design decisions that prevent it.…
Deciding Which Roles Can Be Remote
The question is rarely about the job title. It is about which specific activities in the job degrade at distance.…
Return-to-Office Mandates: What Actually Happens
The predictable consequences of a mandate, who leaves first, and how to do it without the avoidable damage.…
Structuring a Distributed Team
Team size, reporting lines and boundaries behave differently when nobody shares a room.…
How Much Office Space Do You Actually Need
Most organisations hold space sized for an attendance pattern that no longer exists, and measure it badly.…
Four-Day Weeks and Compressed Hours in a Distributed Team
Reduced or compressed schedules interact badly with distributed work unless the coordination is designed.…
When to Bring Everyone Together
In-person gatherings are the highest-value thing a distributed organisation buys, and most are designed to waste them.…
Hiring and onboarding
09
Hiring Remotely: What Actually Changes
The process looks the same and behaves differently. Where remote hiring breaks, and what to do about it.…
Assessing Someone You Will Never Meet
Video interviews strip out most of the signal people rely on. What to substitute, and which habits to drop.…
Remote Onboarding: The First Thirty Days
In an office new people learn most of what matters by accident. Remotely, nothing happens by accident.…
Location-Based Pay or a Single Rate
Both approaches are defensible. Neither is painless. What each one costs you in practice.…
Hiring Across Borders: What You Are Actually Signing Up For
The mechanisms for employing someone in another country, what each costs, and the risks people discover late.…
Why Remote Hires Leave in the First Six Months
The reasons are consistent, mostly avoidable, and almost never the ones cited in the exit conversation.…
Writing a Remote Job Description That Filters Correctly
Most remote postings attract the wrong volume of the wrong people because they omit the four facts candidates need.…
Internal Mobility When Nobody Sees the Vacancy
In an office, people hear about openings and move sideways. Remotely, both halves of that stop happening.…
Hiring a Manager for a Distributed Team
Managing at distance is a different job, and the interview process that identifies good office managers does not identify good rem…
Management practice
12
Running One-to-Ones When You Cannot See the Person
In a distributed team the one-to-one carries the whole weight of the relationship. Most are wasted on status.…
Measuring Performance Without Presenteeism
Activity is not output. Most remote performance problems are measurement problems in disguise.…
Asynchronous Communication: What It Actually Requires
Async is not 'fewer meetings'. It is a different discipline, and doing it badly is worse than not doing it.…
Meeting Hygiene for Distributed Teams
Remote teams accumulate meetings faster than office ones, for a reason worth understanding.…
Building Trust at Distance
Trust in a distributed team is built by consistency rather than by contact, which is why forced socialising does not work.…
Managing Underperformance Remotely
The problem is usually detected late, discussed badly and documented poorly. Each of those is fixable.…
Career Growth When Nobody Sees You Work
Promotion has always been partly about visibility. Remote work removes the incidental kind and replaces it with nothing.…
Running a Project When Nobody Shares a Room
Project work depends on constant small corrections that used to happen for free. What replaces them.…
Giving Feedback Remotely
Written feedback reads harsher than intended and video removes the repair mechanisms. What to adjust.…
Joining an Existing Remote Team as Its Manager
The first ninety days of managing a team you have never met, where none of the usual observation is available.…
Conflict Between People Who Never Meet
Disagreement escalates faster in text and gets resolved later. What a manager should do differently.…
Team Rituals That Survive Distance
Most attempts to recreate office culture remotely fail. The ones that work share a specific property.…
Tools and operations
09
The Distributed Team Tool Stack
Six functions need covering. Most organisations buy twelve tools and cover four of them badly.…
Documentation as Infrastructure
In a distributed team, undocumented knowledge is not just inconvenient. It is a single point of failure with a name attached.…
Security Basics for Distributed Teams
The office perimeter is gone. What actually replaces it, and which precautions are theatre.…
Equipment and Home Office Stipends
What to provide, how to handle it as an allowance, and the questions that cause trouble later.…
Response Times and Communication Norms
Most remote friction comes from unstated expectations about when a reply is due.…
Choosing a Knowledge Base and Getting People to Use It
The tool is not the problem. Most internal knowledge bases fail for three reasons and none of them is the software.…
Incident Response for Distributed Teams
When something breaks and nobody is in the same room, coordination is the hard part, not the fix.…
Recording, Notes and What to Keep
Distributed teams either record nothing useful or record everything and find none of it.…
Access Management and the Joiner-Mover-Leaver Process
The unglamorous process that determines whether your former employees can still read your systems.…
Employment and compliance
09
Multi-State Employment in the US
One remote hire in a new state creates obligations there. What they are, and why the surprise usually arrives at year end.…
Contractor or Employee: The Classification Question
The label on the contract does not decide it. What the tests actually look at, and what getting it wrong costs.…
Expense Reimbursement for Remote Workers
In some jurisdictions reimbursing home working costs is an obligation rather than a benefit. Where the line falls.…
Working Time, Availability and the Right to Disconnect
Remote work erodes the boundary between working and not. In several jurisdictions that boundary is a legal one.…
Data Protection Basics for Distributed Teams
Employing people across jurisdictions changes where data is processed, and that changes your obligations.…
Health and Safety Obligations for Home Workers
The duty of care generally does not stop at the office door. What that means in practice for a home worker.…
Accommodations and Accessibility in Remote Work
Remote work removes some barriers and creates others. Both need attention, and the second is usually ignored.…
Burnout in Distributed Teams
Remote work changes both how burnout develops and how long it stays invisible. What managers can actually watch for.…
Offboarding Someone You Never Met
Departures handled remotely go wrong in specific ways: knowledge vanishes, access persists, and the ending is abrupt.…