A remote employee who is struggling may not show obvious signs of it.
They may still be attending meetings, answering messages and getting their work done. The first signs can be much less obvious: deadlines start slipping, familiar tasks take longer, mistakes become more frequent or a project keeps getting stuck at the same point.
For a manager, it is easy to treat those changes as a performance problem straight away. In a remote team, there may be other explanations.
Start With What Has Changed
One missed deadline does not tell an employer very much.
A pattern is more useful.
Has the quality of the work changed? Is a task taking much longer than it used to? Has the employee stopped asking questions? Has their workload changed? Are they waiting for information from someone else?
A 2026 study published in Frontiers in Organizational Psychology looked at how managers and professional employees in the South African banking sector viewed performance management in hybrid and remote work. The participants highlighted structured feedback, communication, trust and access to the resources needed to do the job as important parts of managing performance.
The study was based on 21 participants in one sector and country, so it does not represent every remote workplace. It does, however, point to a useful distinction: a change in output does not automatically explain why the change happened.
Look at the Work Before the Worker
Suppose an employee who normally finishes a report in two days suddenly needs five.
The problem could be performance. It could also be a change in the brief, a heavier workload, missing information or a process that has become more complicated.
That is why managers need to look at the work itself before deciding what the problem is.
A 2026 study published in the Journal of Business Research examined survey data from 288 US managers responsible for 8,351 employees. The researchers found that manager-employee trust and the extent to which employees could effectively work remotely were associated with managers’ decisions about remote work. They also found that informal forms of control had a stronger relationship with performance than formal controls in their model.
For employers, the practical point is fairly simple: knowing what employees are expected to deliver matters more than knowing whether they appear to be online.
Ask a Direct Question
When something changes, the first conversation does not have to be a warning.
A manager can ask:
What is taking the most time right now?
Is anything unclear?
Are you waiting for something from another person or team?
Is the current workload manageable?
Those questions can reveal very different problems.
An employee may need more information. They may need help with a skill, particularly if they are still building experience in the role. Their workload may have become unrealistic. Or there may be a genuine performance issue.
This is especially relevant for newer employees, who may still be building the skills and experience a role requires. As entry-level work changes, employers also need to think about how those skills are developed. Read more about how entry-level jobs are being redesigned.
Each situation calls for a different response.
Research published in Human Resource Management Journal in 2025 examined remote performance management across 11 telecommunications firms in Canada, Germany and the United States. The study drew on interviews and focus groups with 250 respondents and found that stronger worker voice was associated with less intensive electronic monitoring and disciplinary practices, alongside more developmental coaching.
That does not mean coaching will fix every performance problem. It does suggest that employers have options beyond simply increasing surveillance.
Make Good Performance Specific
Remote employees need to know what they are being judged on.
“Be more proactive” is difficult to act on.
“Send the client update by Thursday and flag anything that could delay the project” is much clearer.
The same applies to quality standards. If a manager expects reports to contain certain information, or customer requests to be answered within a particular period, those expectations should be stated clearly.
This makes performance conversations easier too. Instead of debating whether someone is “doing well,” the manager can look at the actual work and discuss what needs to change.
Do Not Confuse Visibility With Performance
Remote work can make managers nervous about what they cannot see.
An employee is not sitting across the office. There is no visual reminder that they are working.
That can make activity data tempting.
But being online for eight hours does not explain why a project is late. A high number of messages does not prove that someone is productive. And a quiet employee is not necessarily disengaged.
A 2025 study in Human Resource Management Journal found that stronger worker voice could help limit intensive electronic monitoring and support more developmental approaches to performance management.
For employers, the lesson is not to ignore performance problems. It is to measure the work that actually matters.
Know When It Is a Performance Problem
Sometimes the explanation really is performance.
If the workload is reasonable, expectations are clear, resources are available and the employee has had a chance to raise problems, the conversation may need to become more direct.
The employee should know what is not meeting the required standard, what needs to change and when the situation will be reviewed.
That is easier when managers have regular conversations throughout the year instead of waiting until a problem becomes serious.
Remote management does not require managers to watch employees more closely.
It requires them to understand the work well enough to notice when something has changed.
For employers, that means clear expectations, useful feedback and enough trust to have an honest conversation before a small problem turns into a much bigger one.
