When managing remote employees, a people-centric strategy is more important than ever. Read on for five key tips to being a successful manager.
Blaise Radley
Editorial Strategist
Workday
Employees that work from home are now a common and permanent part of the working world. In 2025, more than three quarters of U.S. employees worked remotely at least some of the time, with a growing share in hybrid arrangements, evidence that remote work is no longer just a pandemic experiment, but a structural shift in how work gets done.
However, many approaches to remote work lack the structure necessary to succeed—and that’s not surprising. In most cases, remote models grew out of the urgency brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. Now, leaders must address the challenges of managing a remote team head-on, rather than operating on emergency-era blueprints.
For companies who want to keep their remote employees engaged, video conferencing and home office stipends are no longer enough. To build trust, organizations must be proactive in fostering psychological safety, a genuine sense of belonging, and meaningful connections, regardless of an employee’s location.
More than three-quarters of U.S. employees work remotely at least some of the time.
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Managing a remote team requires a shift from managing activities to managing outcomes. To lead distributed teams effectively, managers must move beyond traditional oversight and embrace a culture of trust, transparency, and data-driven agility.
These five tips provide a practical framework for leading remote teams with a focus on high performance and employee well-being:
In a physical office, managers often rely on visual cues to gauge productivity. Remotely, trying to replicate this through micromanagement or monitoring hours worked damages the employee experience. Instead, align with the principle of integrity by trusting your team to own their results.
How to apply it: Move away from tracking green dots on chat apps. Instead, establish clear outcome expectations and metrics to measure them. When employees know they’re trusted to manage their own time, they feel more empowered and perform better. If a deadline is missed, approach the conversation with curiosity rather than accusation to identify blockers.
Remote work can make it difficult to "read the room." To maintain high engagement, leaders must use workforce analytics to stay aligned with their team’s sentiment and capacity in real-time. That doesn’t mean time tracking—it means staying tuned in to employee sentiment.
Managing remote teams requires a shift from managing activities to managing outcomes.
In remote settings, information silos can be the enemy of progress. You must intentionally design a digital environment where the right information is accessible to the right people at the right time. Teams work best when they’re all on the same page.
How to apply it: Audit your tech stack to ensure your HCM and project tools are integrated. Ensure that each project has a single source of truth—one document or platform where the latest strategy, timeline, and owners live. This reduces "work about work" (i.e. searching for files or asking for updates) and leaves more room for creative problem-solving.
It’s easy for remote team members to feel isolated from their peers. To bridge this gap, leaders must model psychological safety. When leaders are transparent about their own challenges—be it "Zoom-fatigue" or balancing childcare—it gives their teams permission to also be human.
How to apply it: Start your weekly syncs with a personal/professional check-in. Share a win and a challenge from your week before diving into the agenda. This builds the camaraderie and social capital that’s sometimes been lost for remote workers without a “water cooler" environment.
Constant meetings are the leading cause of remote burnout. To respect your team’s autonomy and focus, prioritize asynchronous communication (updates that don't require an immediate response). This allows for deep work and accommodates different time zones.
No matter where they work, it’s people—not processes—that drive a business forward.
Talent is a company’s most vital asset—it is people, not processes, that drive a business forward. In an era where remote and hybrid models are the standard, mastering remote team management is the key to long-term employee retention and engagement.
The five practices outlined in this guide share a singular goal: maintaining visibility and connection without the benefit of proximity. By establishing clear decision boundaries, shared reference points, regular connection, and realistic capacity planning managers can effectively replace the informal context that teams naturally rely on in person.
Remote leadership is not a "set it and forget it" task—it’s an ongoing commitment. When intentional communication and follow-through are embedded into the culture, remote teams remain aligned, agile, and high-performing.
Top talent is at risk: 75% of industries currently show an increase in high-potential voluntary turnover. Learn key strategies to retain your strongest performers in this Workday report.
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