Last Tuesday one of my engineers pinged me at 11pm his time to ask about a deployment flag. I was asleep. He figured it out from our runbook, shipped it, and left a note in the PR. I found out about the whole thing over morning coffee.
That’s a distributed team working. No drama. No blocked work. No meeting about it afterward.
I’ve been running Decloud as a remote-first company since before the pandemic made it fashionable. So when March hit and every company on Earth suddenly became “distributed,” I had a front-row seat to a lot of people reinventing wheels. Badly.
Six months in, the panic phase is over. But most teams are still stuck in this weird middle ground where they’re doing office work over Zoom and calling it remote. It’s not. And that gap is where the pain lives.
Writing is the job now
This is the single biggest adjustment and most teams still haven’t made it. In an office, you can be sloppy with communication because you’ll bump into someone at lunch and clear it up. Distributed? That ambiguity sits there rotting until someone makes the wrong assumption.
At Decloud, we write everything down. Not because we love documentation – honestly, nobody does. Because the alternative is having the same conversation three times across two time zones and a Slack thread that’s 200 messages deep.
When someone proposes a change, they write it up. Context, options, recommendation. It takes maybe 20 minutes. It saves hours of meetings that would’ve happened otherwise. The people who push back on this the hardest are usually the ones who are used to winning arguments by talking louder in a room. That doesn’t work in a Google Doc.
Meetings should hurt to schedule
Hot take: if your remote team is in more meetings than your office team was, you’ve failed. The whole point of going distributed is that async is the default. Meetings are the exception.
We have a few standing syncs at Decloud. Short ones. Everything else requires an agenda shared beforehand and a written outcome after. If you can’t write an agenda, you don’t need a meeting. You need to think more about what you actually want.
The time zone thing makes this easier, honestly. When you only have a four-hour overlap with half your team, you get very precious about those hours. Pairing sessions, hard design problems, the stuff where real-time back-and-forth actually matters. Everything else goes async.
Onboarding is where you find out if your system works
New hires are the stress test. If your distributed setup actually works, a new person should be able to get productive without scheduling fifteen “intro calls.” If they can’t, your documentation is bad. Full stop.
We give every new hire a buddy, a setup guide, and a small ticket that ships in the first week. The shipping part matters. Nothing builds confidence like seeing your code in production on day four. Compare that to spending your first week in orientation decks learning about the company values. Please.
The green dot problem
I talk to other engineering leads and the thing that makes me genuinely angry is the surveillance stuff. Screen monitoring. Activity tracking. Checking who’s online at what time.
Stop it. You’re measuring presence, not output. I don’t care if someone takes a two-hour break at 2pm to go for a run. I care if the work ships. If you can’t evaluate your engineers without watching their screen, that’s a management problem, not an employee problem.
At Decloud we’re explicit about this: here’s what we expect this sprint, here’s how we check in, here’s what “done” looks like. That clarity is the actual work of management. It’s harder than installing monitoring software, which is exactly why most people don’t do it.
What still sucks
I’m not going to pretend it’s all figured out. Some things about distributed work are genuinely worse.
Catching burnout is harder. In an office you can see someone looking tired or disengaged. Over Slack, people just go quiet, and by the time you notice, they’re already job hunting. I still don’t have a great answer for this beyond frequent 1:1s and actually paying attention.
Spontaneous collaboration is basically gone. Those hallway conversations where two people accidentally solve a problem? They don’t happen on Zoom. We’ve tried virtual coffee chats and random pairing. It’s fine. It’s not the same.
And onboarding senior people into leadership roles remotely is rough. Building the trust and political capital that lets you make big calls – that takes longer when you can’t read a room.
The actual secret
None of this is complicated. Write things down. Meet less. Trust your people. Ship the onboarding. That’s it. That’s the whole framework.
The reason most teams struggle with remote work isn’t because they lack the right tools or the right process doc. It’s because distributed work is less forgiving of the dysfunction you were already getting away with in the office. Bad communication, unclear ownership, meetings that should’ve been emails – all of that was survivable when everyone sat in the same building. Remove the building, and it falls apart.
Fix the fundamentals and the rest follows. Or don’t, and keep blaming Zoom fatigue. Up to you.