Your office is a crutch

Your office acts as a crutch, propping up your organization despite your failures as a manager.

When you fail to communicate goals, people recover by talking to each other on their way to lunch. When documentation isn’t clear, someone gets a tap on the shoulder for clarification. When performance reviews are vague, proximity bias fills the gap—you might just promote whoever’s most visible around the office. You don’t need to worry about building rapport; the team mostly accomplishes that themselves by hanging out at the office and beyond. Our social nature acts as a safety net against organizational gaps.

Once you go remote, that safety net is gone.

This means you have to be mindful about every process. From effective onboarding to maintaining quality documentation, from building rapport to evaluating performance—the water cooler can no longer cover your tracks. You must build processes to ensure these things happen intentionally.

Initially, this means more work. But being intentional about designing your processes (and observing and tweaking them as you grow) will create a more resilient organization. One that works by design, not by accident.