Remote Teams: What Actually Works After Five Years of Data

A few months before the world changed, as CTO I walked into the founder’s office with what I thought was a clever idea. “For the purposes of testing our Disaster Recovery plan,” I said, “I want to send everyone home.”

He went pale. “And then what?”

“Then I want them to carry on working as normal. They’ve got laptops and mobile phones. We’ll shake out any technical problems, and it’ll save us a fortune compared with duplicating equipment and office space.”

He was so nervous about it that we didn’t do it. Within two months, every single person in that multinational company was working from home anyway. And productivity? It didn’t change one bit.

That accidental experiment, replicated across millions of organisations worldwide, gave us five years of hard data. Yet many companies are still treating remote work as a temporary aberration rather than a legitimate way to build high-performing teams.

Communication is almost the only thing that matters

Over thirty years, the single factor I’ve seen correlate most strongly with project success is communication. Not the tech stack, not the methodology, not even the talent level. It’s whether people are actually talking (clearly) to each other: engineers to engineers, tech to product, tech to management, tech to users.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: communication is easier face-to-face. There’s no point pretending otherwise. The ambient awareness of sitting next to someone, the quick tap on the shoulder, the whiteboard sketch; these things have value.

But “easier” doesn’t mean “necessary.” With a decent video calling setup and a culture that actually uses it, you can achieve the same outcomes. The key word is “decent.” A grainy webcam and a dodgy microphone aren’t good enough. Invest in proper equipment. It pays for itself in the first month.

Time zones are a feature, not a bug

The knee-jerk reaction to distributed teams is to worry about time zones. How can we collaborate if half the team is asleep?

Turn it around. One group works while another sleeps. Problems get solved overnight. Code gets reviewed across the globe. You don’t need continuous communication; you need windows of overlap for the collaborative work and stretches of uninterrupted time for the deep work that actually moves projects forward.

The “always available” culture of the open-plan office was never healthy. Remote work, done properly, forces you to be deliberate about when you need synchronous time and when you don’t.

The tools are a solved problem

Sharing information, data, code, and visuals with a distributed team is not a technical challenge. The collaboration tools available today are extraordinary. Screen sharing, virtual whiteboards, shared documents, asynchronous video messages. The infrastructure exists, it works and it’s much cheaper than an office.

If your remote team is struggling to share context, the problem isn’t the tooling. It’s how you’re using it.

Hire the best, wherever they are

Remote-first hiring means you’re no longer restricted to whoever happens to live within commuting distance of your office. You can hire the best person for the role, full stop.

This is a genuine competitive advantage. If your competitor insists on everyone being in a London office, and you’re willing to hire from Edinburgh, Porto, or Krakow, you have access to a talent pool they’ve artificially excluded. And when you’re not filtering candidates by geography, you can focus on what actually matters: their ability to solve problems, not whether they’ve used your specific tech stack.

However, a word of caution on cross-border employment: it’s trickier than it looks. The services that promise to make it painless are, in my experience, somewhat overstated. Read the small print and you’ll often find the compliance burden lands squarely on you. Understand the labour laws in the countries where you’re hiring. Don’t assume a third party has it covered.

The commute is a waste

Consider the arithmetic. A typical commute into a city centre office costs an employee one to three hours a day. That’s time spent on trains, in traffic, or walking through the rain. It’s not productive for the business, and it’s not enjoyable for the person.

Remove the commute and you can gain an extra hour of focused work while giving your employee an extra hour of leisure time. Classic win-win. That’s not a small thing. It’s a material improvement in wellbeing, retention and productivity.

Loneliness requires deliberate action

The genuine risk of remote work is isolation. Some people thrive working from home. Others wither. The solution, as with so much in management, is to be deliberate.

Find out if people are lonely. How? Ask them. It sounds obvious, but most managers never do. Regular one-to-ones should include a genuine check-in on how someone is feeling, not just what they’re delivering.

And there are plenty of ways to socialise meaningfully online. Virtual coffee chats, remote team games, interest-based Slack channels. None of these replace a Friday evening at the pub, but they do build connection. The mistake is assuming it will happen organically. It won’t. You have to create the space for it.

And try to get people together when you can.

The pragmatic conclusion

Remote work isn’t a perk or a pandemic hangover. For many roles, it’s simply a better way to operate. But it requires intention. You need to invest in communication tools and culture. You need to think carefully about hiring across borders. And you need to actively combat the isolation that can creep in when people work alone.

The companies that figured this out five years ago are now reaping the benefits: access to global talent, lower overheads, and employees who aren’t exhausted from a daily commute. The companies still dragging people back to half-empty offices are solving yesterday’s problem.

The data is in. It’s time to stop treating remote work as an experiment.