Did remote work just make you a newly minted Work From Home (WFH) manager? Welcome to the club of remote leaders, there are a ton of us now!
When you manage WFH employees, you need a completely different approach than traditional in-person management. Though at Strety we’ve been working remotely since our founding as a 100% distributed team, I asked Todd Kaufman who is the CEO of a 50 person remote software agency (TestDouble) to share his advice on managing work from home employees.
This is what he said:
“You will need to focus and prepare more as a remote manager than an in-person one. You won’t be able to rely on body language and the stronger relationship that comes from working side by side with your direct reports, so you’ll need to up your game.”
He’s right and we want to help you up your game. Here are 8 best practices for managing remote employees you can implement right now, using EOS principles and tools to create structure and accountability:
1. Start from a place of Trust & Transparency (EOS Core Values in Action)
Everyone goes through an adjustment period with remote work, even you. Deep down you may be experiencing the thought of “when the cat’s away, the mice will play” and have the urge to micromanage your team all day. One of the biggest challenges of managing remote employees is overcoming this impulse. Stop yourself and start your journey as a remote team manager from a place of trust and transparency.
Your team is full of good people (that’s why you hired them) and they will get their work done just as they do in the office sitting near you. Micromanagement and distrust is a surefire way to add more stress and less focus to everyone. Even if you can’t see them, you can keep the team humming, focused, and accountable.
Use your company’s Core Values to guide every remote management decision. At Strety, our HPG values (Humble, Passionate, Good) shape how we hire, manage, and support our distributed team. When you lead with your Core Values, trust becomes the foundation of your remote culture.
2. Implement Check-ins with EOS Structure
Once trust is established, you can now put the processes in place to keep your fears at bay of whether someone is working or not AND provide a lightweight way for employees to feel connected to you and the team.
Weekly L10 Meetings are critical – use the Level 10 Meeting format to get your team on the same page. At Strety, our Microsoft Teams integration makes L10s seamless for our remote team meetings. Keep scorecard review front and center – this data-driven approach removes guesswork about team performance and is essential for how to effectively manage remote employees.
These simple check-ins will give your direct reports a sense of normalcy; a feeling of a start and end to the week and a cadence to check in with you so you know how and what they’re doing.
3. Master the Remote 1:1: Your Most Important Management Tool
1:1s are important always but for remote teams, they’re absolutely critical to do weekly! We suggest doing them over a video call (we use Microsoft Teams). This is your informal catch up to see how remote work is going, what can your reports be doing better, what you can be doing for them, etc.
Understanding how managers can support remote employees starts with consistent, structured one-on-one meetings.
Remote employees face isolation that in-person teams don’t experience. Your 1:1 meetings become their primary connection point with leadership and the broader company vision.
Stick with consistent and simple agenda items that you share ahead of time, using EOS structure:
- Rock progress and accountability
- Scorecard performance discussion
- Issues that need escalation
- Personal/professional development
At Strety, our 1:1 tool ensures no manager skips or forgets these meetings – they’re automatically scheduled and structured for consistency. You can also add custom 1:1 meeting questions to make your time uniquely valuable to your team. This is a learning experience for everyone so encourage collaboration and transparency about everything going in the lives of your direct report.
4. Use Engagement Surveys to Monitor Team Pulse
Managing remote employees requires proactive engagement monitoring.
You can’t rely on “walking the halls” to sense team morale or catch problems before they escalate. How to manage WFH employees effectively starts with understanding their engagement and satisfaction levels.
The EOS Culture Checkup™ becomes even more valuable for remote teams. Run monthly pulse surveys to track culture health and connect survey results back to your Core Values alignment. You’ll identify issues like people feeling disconnected, unclear on priorities, or struggling with work-life balance.
Additional engagement indicators to watch for:
- Participation in optional team activities
- Response time and quality in communications
- Proactive issue raising vs. staying silent
At Strety, our engagement surveys integrate directly with our EOS culture work, making it easy to track trends and act on feedback. The key is don’t just collect data – respond to it with concrete actions and communicate back to your team what you’re doing differently.
5. Elevate Performance Management for Remote Success
How to manage remote employees effectively requires more intentional performance management. Traditional “presence = productivity” doesn’t work when you can’t see people at their desks.
Shift to outcome-based performance using EOS tools:
- Rock completion rates as performance indicators
- Scorecard consistency and ownership
- Quality of participation in meetings and processes
The People Analyzer becomes more important remotely. Regular assessment of Right Person, Right Seat is harder when you’re not observing daily interactions. Core Values alignment can be trickier to spot, and GWC (Get it, Want it, Capacity) evaluation requires more structured check-ins.
Our performance review tools at Strety create consistency across remote managers and ensure important performance conversations don’t fall through the cracks. Documentation matters more in remote settings – create clear paper trails for all performance conversations.
6. Maintain Focus on What Matters Most (Rocks & Priorities)
Your job as a remote manager (heck, as any manager) is to ensure your team stays focused. Do your part by limiting instant messages to your direct reports (unless you’re blowing off some steam in your team group chat… guilty) and remove pointless meetings. Remote work can create scattered priorities without the natural guardrails of office structure.
Your job: Keep your team laser-focused on their Rocks. Use the EOS Issues List to capture and resolve blockers quickly, and make sure everyone knows their quarterly priorities inside and out.
At Strety, we use our homepage dashboard to keep priorities visible for everyone. When team members log in each day, they immediately see their Rocks, To Dos, and key metrics – no hunting around for what matters most.
7. Create Structured Communication Rhythms
Over-communicate initially, then find the right cadence for your team. Establish clear expectations for response times and use async communication effectively (not everything needs a meeting).
We do a LOT of async communication in Strety – on our Rocks, Issues, To Dos… basically anything in Strety. Through threaded async comment discussion, we respect each other’s time and workflows, and still get a lot of important communication done between meetings.
Your Issues List becomes your central communication hub for problems that need solving. Weekly Headlines keep everyone informed across the organization without overwhelming anyone’s calendar.
Leverage Messages for ongoing updates and announcements. We built Strety’s Messages tool for team-wide communication that doesn’t need immediate response. Perfect for sharing company updates, process changes, or strategic announcements. It creates a documented trail of important communications and allows team members to comment and ask clarifying questions in context. This reduces email overload while keeping everyone informed.
8. Watch for Burnout
This is a stressful reality for many remote workers. Working from home can bring enormous challenges, especially for those with kids or other home responsibilities. You need to manage everyone’s emotional state, be extraordinarily supportive, and help avoid burnout. Not only for their mental state, but for that of your teams.
Remote work can blur work/life boundaries in dangerous ways. Watch for signs: missed deadlines, disengagement, communication changes. Use your People Analyzer to assess team health regularly and create psychological safety for team members to raise issues before they become bigger problems.
At Strety, we actively encourage time off and model healthy boundaries to prevent the always-on mentality that can destroy remote teams. Understanding how managers can support remote employees means recognizing when they need to disconnect completely.
And lastly…
Company culture starts with you – never more true than in adjusting for remote work. Make sure you’re adjusting well, communicating frequently, and protecting against your own distractions. Effective remote management starts with you as the leader – EOS provides the framework, and the right software to manage remote employees helps. But you have to set an example and hold yourself accountable, as well as your team.
There are lots of resources out there for remote work, but we’ve found that the combination of EOS structure with the right tools creates the most successful remote teams. Remote teams can even be more productive and engaged than in-person teams with the right structure and intentional management.
If you want to see how operating your remote business in Strety can bring a new level of accountability and connection to your team, start your free trial here. If you want to learn more about how Strety can bring your business operating system to life for remote teams, book time with our team so we can answer your questions and give you a VIP tour of Strety!
