Remote work not working? Some people just don’t fit in remote-work
Check your setup before you decide that a remote teammate is not a fit: a written goal, a named person to ask and a promised answer time. If someone still misses goals under that setup, look at three traits we have seen in great remote workers: passion, proactiveness and self-discipline. Kipwise is a 100% remote team with teammates from the Americas, Europe, and Asia. This is what we have learned, along with the steps we add to our hiring process to find these traits.
Check the setup before you judge the person
Someone who goes quiet or delivers the wrong thing is not always a poor fit. The same symptoms come from a goal nobody wrote down, a question that sat unanswered, or a deadline that assumed overlapping hours the person doesn’t have. Give the teammate one task with a written goal, a named person to ask and an answer promised the same day, then see what happens. If they deliver, the setup was the problem. If they still miss, you have a fit problem, and the three traits below tell you where to look.
Three traits remote work depends on
Tools and processes alone will not help if a teammate lacks the traits remote work needs. Someone can do well in an office, or seem to, and still lack them. Unlike tactical skills these traits are hard to “train”, so the hiring process matters most: whether you hire the right person largely decides whether the team works.
1. Passion
Job ads list passion often, yet it rarely decides a hire because it is hard to measure, and in an interview it is easy to say you are passionate about something when you are not. At Kipwise we start looking for evidence at resume screening, such as side projects or work outside the job in the field a candidate says they love.
It matters more when the work is remote, because the line between personal and professional blurs. Someone who enjoys what they do is happy to do it in that blur and stays productive when nobody is watching.
To do
Ask each teammate which part of their work they would do unprompted, and give them more of it.
2. Proactiveness
Working remotely means you cannot see whether a teammate is struggling. You cannot see them scratch their head or hear them sigh, so remote teammates have to raise questions and ask for help at the right moment.
To test proactiveness, we give candidates a simple-enough task to simulate working together and leave the requirements less detailed on purpose, so a candidate is unlikely to finish without asking questions. On the call we stress that asking questions is welcome, so candidates know they won’t look stupid if they ask a lot.
This blurry-requirements tactic is useful for screening out candidates who look great on paper and in interviews but don’t work well remotely as a team. Some candidates completed the task in the wrong direction without asking anything. Some didn’t get back to us for over a week and tried to figure everything out on their own in very cost-ineffective ways. A simple “ask questions if needed” can go wrong in many ways when you are not sitting in the same office.
How questions are received matters as much as who asks them. If an answer takes two days or arrives with irritation, people learn to guess instead. Promise a same-day answer to questions from remote teammates, and thank the person who raises a doubt early. That is how you keep a proactive teammate proactive.
To do
Explain clearly that questions are welcome, and reassure the candidate that they won’t look stupid if they ask several.
3. Self-discipline
Managers worry most about remote teammates slacking off with no manager present. That is not a remote-only problem, since sitting in an office doesn’t make someone productive, but it is amplified when someone who is not self-disciplined works from home. Enjoying the work is the key to maintaining self-discipline: it is difficult to force someone to be productive on something they don’t like, which is why passion comes first in our hiring process. The task we give candidates also shows whether someone can deliver without close monitoring.
Trust is a two-way street. We don’t apply any anti-slack-off measures in our workflow at Kipwise. We set the goals we want to achieve together every two weeks, and we don’t care when teammates work. Some are early birds who start the day at 7 am, others are night owls who work until 11 pm, and there have been cases of teammates swapping a weekday with a Sunday to handle family or bank-related issues. If teammates are self-disciplined, these issues don’t affect productivity.
To do
Build trust and agree on goals instead of measuring working hours. Don’t assume a teammate is slacking off before you know what obstacles they face.
Re-assess the team and re-align expectations
Assess the whole team, including yourself: does the setup above exist for everyone, and does each person show these three traits? When you talk to someone who falls short, describe what you saw, not the trait. “You lack self-discipline” gives them nothing to change. “The draft was due Tuesday and arrived Friday with no message in between” does, and you can agree on the fix: a note on the due date if the work is going to slip. Remote work amplifies problems that were already there, so fixing them makes the team better wherever it works.
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