Management failure, not work-from-home, kills productivity

Amazon, AT&T, and UPS have gone further than many other companies by mandating five days of in-person attendance at work. They were recently joined by the federal government and some state agencies.

These organizations claim that they suffered from reduced productivity under remote arrangements. Yet research forthcoming in the National Bureau of Economic Research points to a glaring oversight: Remote teams can succeed, but they need leaders trained to address these exact challenges.

Many managers, accustomed to seeing employees at their desks, felt they had lost control when teams scattered. Rather than taking courses on remote communication strategies, they embraced digital surveillance software that tracks mouse movement or times how long workers linger on a website. This approach failed to produce consistent gains in performance and, in many cases, resulted in employees feeling resentful or anxious.

The experiment conducted by Elizabeth Lyons of UC San Diego and Namrata Kala of MIT involved 434 remote workers on Upwork. These participants were under varying conditions of digital surveillance intended to track how they worked throughout the day. The hope was to see whether technology that logs keystrokes or captures screenshots has any measurable effect on productivity. The results, according to the researchers, are eye-opening.

It turns out that employees do not simply become more efficient because a manager watches their every move. Rather, they want clarity, communication, and trust.

Lyons and Kala’s randomized control trial split remote workers into different groups, including some who were told to keep their monitoring tool on to improve performance, others who could opt out of the tool, and a control group receiving no instructions about removing or continuing surveillance. Among low-performing workers, those forced to stay under digital scrutiny with no explanation saw a 17 percent drop in their efficiency compared to those given the choice to remove the tool. High performers, meanwhile, suffered a 17 percent decrease in productivity when the monitoring tool was removed without a clear explanation. Even though one might expect them to celebrate the cessation of constant oversight, they felt unsettled when they did not understand why management had changed the policy.

“Investing in managerial capital is probably a better use of resources than investing in monitoring technology,” Lyons concluded. 

Those findings speak volumes about the real reasons companies experience remote work struggles. Many leaders lacked the training to handle remote teams in a thoughtful way. They believed that software could fill the gap by supplying real-time data about what each employee was doing. That plan backfired because employees saw that management had little understanding of how to translate raw surveillance metrics into meaningful guidance or support. 

A recent Gallup study highlights a concerning truth: just 10 percent of managers have completed formal training on leading hybrid or remote teams. Another 18 percent have access to voluntary guidance, yet these resources often go untouched because managers face unrelenting deadlines and shifting priorities. Without organization-wide programs to equip them with hybrid best practices, most leaders are left improvising their way through a new era of work. The result is a serious shortfall of the necessary skills to keep distributed teams productive, cohesive, and engaged.

Underprepared managers frequently wrestle with sustaining productivity and ensuring clear communication among remote and on-site team members. They lack the insight to address employees’ unique challenges, which makes old in-office approaches feel simpler in comparison. Frustration grows, and the default response is to push for more face-to-face oversight in a traditional office, where familiar techniques for supervision seem easier to apply.

But it is not proximity that spurs high performance. Remote workers excel when they have well-defined goals, regular feedback, and a sense that the manager is paying attention to their progress in a constructive way, as the study by Lyons and Kala suggests. 

Remote work does not fail because of geography — it fails when managers do not receive the training to establish clear expectations, communicate effectively, and support their teams’ growth.

The new research from UC San Diego and MIT offers a compelling argument that digital surveillance only works if leaders justify its role and frame it within a transparent, respectful managerial approach. If managers fail to share the reasoning, performance dives as much as 17 percent. High performers feel no sense of reward when surveillance ceases without explanation. Low performers see forced surveillance as a sign of distrust. In both cases, productivity falters, and discontent spreads.

Amazon, AT&T, and UPS, along with government agencies, mandated five-day in-office policies because they believed it was the solution to lagging results. However, the data suggest that the real culprits are managers unequipped to foster remote productivity.

Without targeted training, managers struggle to guide dispersed teams to success. Bringing everyone back to the office might temporarily disguise the problem, but it does not resolve the leadership deficiency at its core. The best path forward is for organizations to invest in developing remote work management capabilities.

Transparent communication and robust support systems build trust and accountability. That is the key to ensuring employees perform at a high level, no matter where they happen to be located. By strengthening their management practices rather than clinging to surveillance or rigid, five-day in-office mandates, companies can unlock the full potential of remote teams and thrive in today’s rapidly evolving business landscape.

Gleb Tsipursky, Ph.D., serves as the CEO of the hybrid work consultancy Disaster Avoidance Experts and authored the best-seller “Returning to the Office and Leading Hybrid and Remote Teams.”