Remote work hasn’t broken leadership–it’s just made your habits impossible to hide, and easier to improve.
Hybrid and remote work are no longer side experiments. Recent research suggests that “hybrid work” is best understood as a constant switching between locations (home/office), modalities (face-to-face/digital) and timing (synchronous/asynchronous), rather than a simple “two days in, three days out” rule. A 2024 article in Human Resource Management Review describes this as a three-dimensional framework of hybrid work and shows how poor design across those dimensions can create unnecessary coordination costs and inequities.
At the team level, a 2024 review in Small Group Research notes that hybrid teamwork is now "critical" but still under-designed. Other research suggests many organizations copy office-era habits into Zoom, then wonder why collaboration and cohesion suffer.
At the same time, leadership actually matters more when people are remote. A 2023 study in Frontiers in Psychology found that positive leadership behaviors (clear praise, personal thanks, help with obstacles) had a stronger impact on employees’ energy (“vigor”) when those employees worked from home compared with when they were in the office. And across a large sample of remote university workers, a 2024 study in Educational Management Administration & Leadership showed that “e‑leadership” (leadership delivered mainly through digital tools) significantly boosted engagement, well-being and citizenship behaviors.
So, the question isn’t “Can remote teams perform?” (they clearly can). It’s: How do you lead when almost everything your people experience from you arrives through a screen?
Below are six evidence-backed moves you can make leading hybrid or fully remote workers.
- Treat energy and well-being as a core remote KPI
- Make the “rules of the game” visible with a team operating agreement
- Lead with trust, not surveillance
- Build psychological safety on purpose, screen by screen
- Become a true digital leader, not just a leader on Zoom
- Design hybrid patterns and structures as a retention strategy
How do you lead when almost everything your people experience from you arrives through a screen?
Treat Energy and Well-Being as a Core Remote KPI
Your behavior has extra impact on people's energy when they work remotely, so design your leadership around sustaining vigor, not just output.
That Frontiers in Psychology study of 186 leader–follower pairs found that positive leadership (defined as specific praise, personal appreciation, emotional support and concrete help) was strongly linked to employees’ vigor, and that this effect was especially strong when people were working from home and had a longer relationship with their leader.
Similarly, a 2024 survey of 445 remote higher-education workers found that e-leadership (leader trustworthiness, clear digital communication, good coordination) significantly improved work engagement, well‑being and organizational citizenship behaviors. And a 2024 study of 559 employees found that middle managers' digital leadership boosted work engagement by increasing empowerment and affective commitment.
What this means for you in practice
This week you can:
- Upgrade your 1:1s from status to energy. Dedicate the first 5-10 minutes to a simple question:
- "What's one thing I could remove or adjust to make next week easier?" Then act on at least one thing quickly, so people see their voice has impact.
- A quick tip on this: make space ahead of time to take action after your 1:1; you don't want to tell them you'll take care of something and then put it off until later.
... act on at least one thing quickly, so people see their voice has impact.
- Model healthy boundaries in a visible way. Remote workers report blurred boundaries as a major strain. Instead of midnight emails, use scheduled send and state your norms explicitly: “I work odd hours sometimes; I don’t expect replies outside your normal working time.”
- Give micro-recognition in writing. Evidence on positive leadership emphasizes specific, behavior‑based praise: “The way you rewrote that client email made the risk trade‑offs much clearer,” not “Great job as always.” Written recognition in a remote team is “searchable encouragement.” People re‑read it when they wobble.
- Treat well-being as the fuel for performance, not a perk employees get once the work is done. In remote surveys, burnout often shows up as reduced trust, communication, and performance. A 2025 study of 421 remote workers found that burnout and distress undermined trust and communication in remote teams, while supportive leadership helped prevent this spiral.
Your mental model should be: energy is the engine that makes remote performance possible.
Make the “Rules of the Game” Visible With a Team Operating Agreement
Hybrid and remote teams don’t stumble into good coordination; you have to co‑design how work happens across place, time and tools.
Lauring and Jonasson’s 2024 review in Human Resource Management Review argues that hybrid work must be understood across three dimensions:
- Location (office vs. various remote locations)
- Modality (face-to-face vs. digital/virtual)
- Temporality (synchronous vs. asynchronous work).
Handke and colleagues’ 2024 review of hybrid teamwork synthesizes the virtual‑teams literature and concludes that without explicit structures, hybrid teams face predictable problems: misaligned expectations, invisible overload, and uneven participation between on‑site and remote members. A 2024 study of employees in a hybrid SME found exactly these issues (communication, coordination and sense of connection) were the main pain points post‑pandemic.
What this means for you in practice
Create a one‑page Team Operating Agreement with your team that covers:
- Where we work. Outline the typical patterns (e.g., “Most of us are at home Monday/Friday, anchor days Tues–Thurs”) and clarify expectations around ad‑hoc office days. This matters for fairness: you don’t want private “hallway decisions” that remote people never see.
- When we're available.
- Define core collaboration hours that overlap across time zones.
- Specify what's not expected (e.g., "No response required outside your standard working hours unless explicitly agreed for a time-critical incident.").
- Which channels we use for what. For example:
- Slack/Teams for quick questions and social chatter.
- Email for external communication and decisions.
- A shared project tool as the canonical source of truth. The goal is that people aren't constantly scanning five apps to stay "caught up."
- How we run meetings. Agree on:
- Maximum default meeting length.
- When cameras are optional vs. expected.
- How remote participants will be included if some are in a room (e.g., everyone joins from their own device; in-room people don't "side-talk").
... hybrid patterns drift, and your agreements should too.
You can draft version 0.1, then use a 45-minute working session to critique and improve it with the team. Revisit quarterly; hybrid patterns drift, and your agreements should too.
Lead With Trust, Not Surveillance
Electronic monitoring reliably harms well-being and trust, and delivers little or no performance benefit. Default to transparency and outcomes, not bossware.
Glavin and colleagues’ 2024 article in Social Currents used survey data across occupations to examine perceptions of workplace surveillance. Higher perceived surveillance was linked to more stressors at work, greater psychological distress, and lower job satisfaction... a classic “stress proliferation” pattern.
A 2022 meta‑analysis of 70 samples in Computers in Human Behavior Reports found that electronic monitoring:
- Decreased job satisfaction
- Increased stress
- Increased counterproductive work behaviors
- Showed no meaningful relationship with performance
More recently, a 2025 study in Journal of Information Systems looked specifically at active monitoring in remote‑work scenarios and found that it reduced employees’ perceptions of employer trust, engagement and job appeal.
Default to transparency and outcomes, not bossware.
What this means for you in practice
- If you use monitoring, make it explicit, lawful, and developmental. Explain what’s collected, why, and how it helps employees (e.g., capacity planning, realistic workload), not only the company. Involve employee reps in metric design.
- Shift from activity to outcomes. Remote work amplifies the temptation to measure “online time” or keystrokes. The evidence suggests this erodes motivation without improving results. Replace this with clear goals (OKRs, project milestones) and weekly check‑ins on progress and obstacles.
- Use visibility for support, not suspicion. For example, instead of “I saw you were offline at 4pm,” say, “I noticed you’re juggling three major deliverables. Let’s look at what we can drop or sequence.” Same information, very different signal.
- Audit your own behavior. Do you send “Where are you?” pings when someone hasn’t replied in 10 minutes? Or do you assume positive intent and check their workload patterns first? Your micro‑behaviors teach people whether monitoring is about control or care.
Bottom line: if you wouldn't install a camera over every desk in the office, think very carefully before doing the digital equivalent at home.
Build Psychological Safety on Purpose, Screen by Screen
In remote and hybrid teams, psychological safety doesn’t emerge organically; you have to design for it through your words, rituals, and how you respond to risk‑taking.
A 2025 qualitative study of 20 managers leading hybrid teams identified a concrete set of leader competencies that build psychological safety: emotional intelligence, self‑leadership, inclusive leadership, and coaching/facilitation skills. It also argued that psychological safety must be treated as a strategic imperative, backed by performance systems that hold leaders accountable for it.
Lechner and Tobias-Mortlock’s 2021 article in Organizational Dynamics extracts practical guidance from virtual teams and concludes that psychological safety is less likely to develop by itself in virtual teams; leaders must proactively set norms, model fallibility, and invite voice.
The Ngubane & Mbokota study noted that psychologically safe environments in hybrid teams enable information sharing, innovation and active citizenship behaviors–echoing a broader body of research linking psychological safety to learning and performance.
... leaders must proactively set norms, model fallibility, and invite voice.
What this means for you in practice
You can strengthen psychological safety in remote/hybrid teams through three habits:
- Frame work as a joint learning challenge, not a test.
Start projects and change initiatives with language like:
"We're doing something we haven't done exactly this way before. We will miss things. Our job is to surface issues early, not hide them."
This "learning frame" reduces the perceived personal risk of speaking up. - Make voice both invited and structured.
As recommended in psychological safety playbooks emerging from virtual-team research, in remote meetings:- Use round-robins ("Let's hear briefly from each region before we decide.").
- Use chat or anonymous forms for sensitive topics.
- Voice your own view last so you don't anchor the group.
- Respond skillfully when people take risks.
The fastest way to destroy psychological safety remotely is to punish the first person who raises a difficult issue. Instead, practice a simple script:- Thank them ("I'm glad you raised that.")
- Explore ("Tell me more about where you're seeing this.")
- Translate into a shared problem ("Okay, so we have a risk around X. Let's figure out how we mitigate it.")
Also remember that psychological safety operates at the team and system level, not just in your 1:1s. The Ngubane & Mbokota framework emphasizes organization‑wide signals (e.g., including psychological‑safety metrics in performance reviews, training leaders on inclusive behaviors) as critical to sustaining it.
Become a True Digital Leader, Not Just a Leader on Zoom
Remote teams need leaders who are deliberate about choice, cadence, and “digital presence.” Charisma in video meetings isn't enough.
E‑leadership research reviewed in a 2020 Frontiers in Psychology paper argues that effective digital leaders do three things well:
- Build trust and a sense of presence despite physical distance.
- Communicate clearly and choose appropriate media.
- Use technology to support, not overwhelm, their people.
The e‑leadership study mentioned earlier found that digital leadership behaviors around trust, communication and coordination significantly improved engagement, well‑being and citizenship behaviors among remote employees. And a 2024 study on middle managers’ digital leadership showed that digital leadership raises work engagement by increasing empowerment and affective commitment, particularly when employees have higher emotional intelligence.
What this means for you in practice
- Curate your communication cadence. For a typical remote knowledge-work team, a useful rhythm is:
- Weekly: short written update from you (priorities, key decisions, risks).
- Bi-weekly: team meeting focused on collaboration (not status reading).
- Monthly: "Ask Me Anything" or open Q&A.
This provides predictability and reduces background anxiety; ideally this can go away and be replaced with a feeling of safety from employees where they can ask you anything at any time.
- Match channel to complexity.
- Use asynchronous channels (docs, recorded explainers) for updates, status, and anything people may need to revisit.
- Use synchronous time for decision-making, conflict, and relationship building. Being explicit about this (and modelling it yourself) reduces meeting sprawl.
- Use asynchronous channels (docs, recorded explainers) for updates, status, and anything people may need to revisit.
- Design your digital presence. Show up consistently in the channels that matter (e.g., commenting on key documents, visibly acknowledging good work in shared forums). Remote employees often infer your priorities from where they see you “show up” digitally.
- Invest in your own digital skills. Digital leaders don’t need to be tech gurus, but they do need to be competent in the collaboration tools their teams use. In e‑leadership literature, being slow or visibly uncomfortable with core tools sends a strong “I don’t value this setup” signal.
Design Hybrid Patterns and Structures as a Retention Strategy
Hybrid/remote patterns are not perks; they are a strategic design lever for retention, fairness and performance, and they respond well to experimentation.
A 2024 randomized controlled trial in a large technology company offers unusually strong evidence. Employees were randomly assigned either to work in the office five days a week or to a hybrid schedule (two days at home, three in the office). Over six months and subsequent performance reviews, hybrid workers had significantly higher job satisfaction and one‑third lower quit rates, with no negative effects on performance ratings, promotions, or objective code output.
A hybrid‑team review by Handke et al. concluded that well‑designed hybrid setups can capture flexibility benefits without sacrificing coordination, but only when teams are deliberate about patterns of co‑location, synchronous collaboration, and tool use.
Finally, a 2025 remote‑teams study by Cavudissa & Tam shows another angle: in fully remote teams, conflict and burnout erode trust, communication, and job performance, while supportive leadership and structured opportunities for social interaction help maintain both well‑being and results.
What this means for you in practice
- Start with a hypothesis, then experiment. For example:
- "We'll test two anchor days in the office and three remote days for six months."
- Track simple metrics: engagement scores, voluntary turnover, cycle times, and perceived collaboration quality.
- Protect fairness between remote and on-site staff. Remote workers often fear “out of sight, out of mind” for assignments and promotions. Use written decision rationales and transparent criteria for stretch opportunities; don’t allocate all visible work to those physically near you.
- Design meetings for hybrid reality, not the conference room.
- Make remote participation the default assumption.
- Use good audio and camera setups; avoid grouping whole teams into one echo-y meeting room where remote participants can't hear.
- Share agendas and pre-reads early, so people in different time zones can contribute asynchronously.
- Keep team sizes and span of control realistic. Coordination costs and psychological distance both grow with team size, and they grow faster when the team is highly distributed. Hybrid‑team research and broader team‑effectiveness work converge on the idea that smaller, well‑bounded units (often 5–9 people for complex knowledge work) are easier to keep aligned and safe enough to speak up.
In other words, treat hybrid design as an ongoing experiment you run with your team, not a one-off policy memo.
TL;DR:
- Make energy a leadership KPI. Use your 1:1s and rituals to actively manage workload, recognition and boundaries. Remote work amplifies the impact of positive, supportive leadership.
- Co-create a team operating agreement. Clarify where, when and how work happens across time zones, tools and locations so people can collaborate without guessing.
- Default to trust, not surveillance. The evidence shows monitoring hurts well‑being and trust and doesn’t reliably improve performance. Measure outcomes and be transparent about any data you do collect.
- Build psychological safety deliberately. Frame work as learning, invite and structure voice, and respond constructively when people take interpersonal risks, especially in remote settings where silence is easy.
- Lead digitally on purpose. Be thoughtful about channel choice, communication cadence and your “digital presence.” Invest in your own comfort with the tools your team uses.
- Design hybrid and remote patterns as strategy. Use experiments, data, and employee input to tune office/remote blends, meeting design and team structures for retention, fairness, and performance.
Pick one practice to test with your team this month. Treat it as a mini‑experiment: define what you’ll try, what you expect to see, and how you’ll know whether to keep, tweak, or drop it. Then iterate.
