Managing Underperformance Remotely

Handling underperformance is difficult in any setting. At distance it is harder for specific reasons, and understanding which ones helps.

Employment law varies considerably by jurisdiction. Process requirements, notice periods and documentation standards differ, and this is not legal advice. Involve whoever advises you on employment matters early rather than late.

Why it is detected late

In an office, a manager notices a pattern within a fortnight — the meetings missed, the work returned, the colleague quietly picking things up.

Remotely those signals are absent. What remains is delivery, and delivery lags. By the time it is visible in output, the problem has usually existed for months, colleagues have compensated for it, and resentment has accumulated.

The practical implication: you need earlier indicators than output. Response times drifting, questions stopping, commitments repeatedly renegotiated, colleagues routing around the person. None of these is proof. Each is a reason to have a conversation now rather than next quarter.

Rule out the fixable first

A substantial share of what looks like underperformance at distance is something else:

Missing context. They are doing the wrong work well because nobody explained the priority.

Being blocked and not saying so. The commonest remote failure, particularly in the first year.

Overload that is invisible. Nobody can see the queue.

Equipment or connectivity that makes the job harder in ways they are embarrassed to raise.

Something outside work. Health, caring responsibilities, circumstances at home. Remote work hides these completely.

Isolation. Withdrawal reduces output before it looks like a performance problem.

The first conversation should be diagnostic, not corrective. Ask what is making the work hard. The answer frequently resolves it.

Having the conversation

Video, not writing. This is the situation where synchronous matters most. Written performance criticism reads harsher than intended, cannot be adjusted mid-sentence, and gets re-read.

Book it properly. Not appended to a one-to-one. An unexpected serious conversation on video, with no warning and no way to leave the room afterwards, is worse remotely than in person.

Be specific and concrete. "Your work has slipped" gives nothing to act on. Name the instances, the dates, the expected standard and the gap.

Ask before concluding. Genuinely. You are missing most of the context that an office would have supplied.

Say what happens next, including timescales and what support is available.

Follow up in writing the same day. What was discussed, what was agreed, by when. Not as a threat — as a shared record, since neither of you can rely on a shared memory of a room.

The documentation problem

Remote managers document underperformance badly, and it causes trouble later.

In an office, evidence accumulates in the observation of many people. Remotely there is delivery data and your own notes, and if you did not take notes there is nothing.

Keep contemporaneous records from the first concern: dates, specifics, what was said, what was agreed. This protects the employee as much as the organisation — it prevents a vague impression hardening into a conclusion nobody can examine.

What not to do

Do not increase surveillance. It will not diagnose the problem and it will end any chance of the person telling you what is actually wrong.

Do not raise it with colleagues to check whether others have noticed. It travels, and it travels faster in a distributed team than you expect.

Do not let it run. The most common remote failure is a manager who finds the conversation difficult, avoids it for two quarters, and then acts abruptly. That sequence is unfair to the individual, damaging to the team that compensated, and frequently indefensible if it is ever examined.