Hiring more people is not always the answer when a remote team starts falling behind. Sometimes the problem is already inside the company: nobody knows who approved a change, a manager has become the only person who can move a project forward, or employees spend half their day trying to get answers from colleagues.
These things are easy to overlook when a business is small. People know each other, informal arrangements work and someone usually steps in when a task gets stuck. That becomes harder as the team grows. New employees do not know the unwritten rules, and the old ways of working start creating delays.
There are a few things employers should look at before reaching for another job advert.
1. Important decisions need a home outside the chat
A manager agrees to move a deadline in Slack. Someone else discusses a change with a client over email. A third employee updates the project plan, but not everyone sees it. A few days later, the team is working from three different versions of the same decision.
This is not unusual in remote companies. Research published in Nature Human Behavior in 2022, based on data from 61,182 Microsoft employees, found that the shift to remote work was associated with more siloed collaboration networks and less communication between different parts of the organization.
Employers cannot expect everyone to follow every conversation. They need to decide where final decisions are recorded. Chat is useful for quick questions and everyday exchanges. Project changes, agreed deadlines, budgets and new procedures should be saved somewhere the relevant people can find them.
It does not require a new software subscription. A shared document or the project management tool the company already uses will do. The important thing is that employees know where to look.
2. Don’t let responsibility disappear between colleagues
A task involving three or four people can easily become a task nobody owns. The designer is waiting for copy, the writer is waiting for approval and the manager assumes the project is moving forward.
When this happens, asking everyone for an update rarely solves the problem. The team needs to know who is responsible for getting the work to the next stage.
That person does not have to complete every part of the assignment. Their job is to keep track of what is outstanding, follow up when something is delayed and make sure the right person makes the next decision.
Research on remote and hybrid team charters, published in Organizational Dynamics in 2025, looks at how teams can agree on responsibilities and ways of working. For employers, the practical point is straightforward: discuss these arrangements before a project starts, not after something goes wrong.
A short project brief should make clear who is doing the work, who approves it and what the finished result should look like. If those details are missing, employees will fill in the gaps themselves. They will not necessarily make the same assumptions.
3. Find out who is carrying too much work
A team can meet its deadlines and still have a workload problem. One employee may be handling several urgent projects, while another has little work because nobody has assigned the next task. Managers who only check completed assignments may never notice the difference.
Look at the work people are actually doing. Ask employees which projects are taking up most of their time, where they are waiting for decisions and which deadlines keep getting pushed back. Compare their answers with the workload recorded in the project system.
A 2025 study published in Sustainability examined links between remote workers’ use of communication technology, role clarity, coworker support and work overload. It is a useful area for employers to consider, particularly when communication tools are creating more interruptions than they remove.
There is little point in adding another daily call if employees already spend too much time in meetings. A manager may get a clearer picture from a short one-to-one conversation and a proper review of current assignments.
4. Don’t wait until a performance review to raise a problem
If an employee misses two deadlines or keeps submitting work that needs major corrections, the manager should not save the conversation for the end of the quarter.
Leaving problems unaddressed puts both sides in a difficult position. The employee may not realize that something is wrong, while the manager becomes increasingly frustrated.
Be specific. Explain which deadline was missed, what was expected and what needs to change. Then give the employee a chance to explain what happened. Perhaps the instructions were incomplete, another team delayed the work or the original deadline was unrealistic.
Task ambiguity is also worth taking seriously. Research published by Christian Korunka in 2024 examined how uncertainty around daily tasks relates to remote workers’ sense of connection with others. Unclear responsibilities can affect the working experience, not just the final result.
Before deciding that someone is underperforming, check whether they had enough information and whether the assignment was properly defined.
5. Make it possible to speak up without an audience
A group video call is not the right place for every conversation. An employee who has a problem with a colleague, feels overwhelmed or disagrees with a manager may not want to bring it up in front of the whole team.
Small companies sometimes rely on an informal approach: employees are told to speak to their manager if anything comes up. That may work when everyone has a good relationship with the manager. It is less useful when the manager is part of the problem.
Employers should name another contact for private concerns. In a larger company, this may be someone in HR. In a smaller business, it could be another senior member of the team.
Employees also need to know what happens after they make contact. Who will receive the complaint? Will the conversation remain confidential? When can they expect a reply? A contact address buried in an employee handbook is not enough if nobody knows how to use it.
6. Work out what’s slowing the team down before recruiting
When projects take longer than expected, managers often assume they need more staff. That may be true, but it is worth checking how work moves through the company first.
Perhaps every decision has to go through one manager. Maybe new employees cannot start properly because instructions are scattered across old emails. Or the same information is being entered into several systems by different people.
These are process problems. Another hire will not necessarily solve them. In some cases, it will give the company another person who has to deal with the same delays.
If a vacancy has been open for weeks without attracting the right candidates, the issue may lie in the hiring strategy itself. Employers should review the job requirements, the candidate profile and the recruitment process before continuing the search. Our article on what to do when a job has been open for 60 days explains when it may be time to rethink the approach.
Before approving a new position, look at the last few projects that missed their deadlines. Where did they get stuck? Which decisions took too long? Were people waiting for information, approval or help from another department?
The answers may point to a need for another employee. They may also show that one responsibility needs to move, a procedure needs to be documented or a manager needs to stop being the only person authorized to approve routine work.
Growth Exposes the Problems a Small Team Can Hide
A remote team can get by with informal arrangements for a while. But once more people join, those arrangements become harder to follow. Employees need to know where decisions are recorded, who is responsible for their work and whom to contact when something goes wrong.
Employers do not need to turn every part of the working day into a formal procedure. They do need to notice when the same confusion keeps slowing people down. Sorting it out before the next round of hiring is usually easier than asking a larger team to work around it.
Once your team is ready to grow:
