Despite the regular threat of widespread return-to-office mandates, remote and hybrid work are still common in the US. A 2026 Robert Half survey of 500 US-based HR leaders found that 88% of companies offer some degree of hybrid work.
Yet even six years out from the pandemic, traditional performance management systems in some organizations remain stubbornly designed for in-person teams, relying on informal feedback, stressing the annual performance appraisal, and lacking a structured approach to one-on-ones. Below, we examine how HR leaders can enable better performance management for remote and hybrid organizations.
Why Managing Performance on Distributed Teams Is Different
In the early days of the pandemic, organizations had to pivot to remote work quickly. The general instinct was to try to recreate the visibility of the traditional office — but online. Status indicators in intraoffice messengers and always-on camera policies for video calls were implemented following the rationale that if managers could “see” employees, they’d know they were working.
But at Lattice, we’ve always believed it’s better to measure performance by outcomes than by visibility. And we’re not alone.
“The question I tend to ask leaders is simple,” said Caitlyn Beattie, founder and principal consultant at Origami HR. “If you couldn’t see your team at all, how would you know who’s doing well? Herein lies the problem. A lot of roles and success metrics aren’t defined tightly or clearly enough to answer that.”
Beattie’s comment underscores an important point: The inherent challenge of the remote setting is not that it makes performance harder to measure, but rather that it reveals just how loosely most teams have defined performance in the first place.
To improve performance management on remote teams, organizations often just need to get better at performance management in general.
Where to Start With Remote Performance Management
Rethinking your organization’s approach to performance management on distributed teams? Start here.
Get crystal clear on goals.
Shared goals serve a few purposes.
- They reduce the need for aligned working hours or synchronous check-ins, as everyone understands their metric for success on a given project. This is hugely important on high-performing remote teams where employees are distributed across time zones.
- Shared goals link employee contributions to the company’s priorities, which is key to helping employees feel connected to the organization at large.
- They provide a shared set of expectations for work and competencies, which supports fairer performance management — and better project management.
- Goals support team success by getting team members on the same page.
“Good performance management starts with understanding the work itself; getting clear on the project, what the end goal is, as well as setting clear expectations with the employee are all vital,” said Brooke Ponce, senior director of people and culture at Avolve, an electronic plan review software company.
HR can ensure alignment between managers and employees across different time zones by revisiting role expectations once a quarter, documenting what success looks like at each level, and aligning goal cycles to review cycles so expectations are restated and reinforced. Lattice OKRs & Goals surfaces this alignment across distributed teams, showing employees how their work ladders up without a manager having to walk them through it.
Adopt continuous feedback.
Regular, documented feedback — not just annual reviews — is essential when managers can’t give real-time verbal coaching.
“The fundamentals of good feedback don’t change in a remote environment,” Beattie said. “It still needs to be specific, timely, and grounded in real work.”
What does change is the cadence and documentation: Make feedback more frequent and be sure to record it. For managers with virtual teams, encourage them to give real-time feedback when something happens, then reinforce that feedback in one-on-ones. It’s also helpful to record the feedback in a running list of accomplishments and opportunities for improvement so managers can pull from these during performance appraisals.
Protect and prioritize one-on-ones.
In the office environment, team members have myriad opportunities to touch base with managers, be it an impromptu desk visit, water cooler chat, or read-the-room moment after a tense meeting. In remote work environments, these all collapse into a single one-on-one. As such, one-on-ones take on new importance as the only consistent, protected manager-direct report touchpoint, which makes them essential to get right.
Broadly speaking, what separates an effective one-on-one from an ineffective one is a clear sense of purpose and predetermined agenda items.
Melissa Duncan, founder and president of HR consulting firm HR Exec, recommends sticking to a working structure that follows this order: brief rapport check-in, last week’s highlights, this week’s priorities, blockers and asks for help, and a look at goal progress against documented objectives and key results (OKRs).
“If Lattice is leveraged for goal setting and tracking, the Lattice 1:1 tool makes it easy for the manager to see the employee’s progress. That makes these meetings a great time to check in on wins, goals that are progressing, and goals that appear stalled,” Duncan said.
While Beattie didn’t recommend a specific order for one-on-ones, she was especially clear on one point. “I feel strongly that the employee should own the one-on-one,” Beattie said. “They set the agenda, they bring what’s top of mind, they use the time to get clarity and support. That’s what keeps it grounded in real work instead of turning into a routine update.”
On the manager’s side, ensuring effective one-on-ones means coming prepared, being fully present, and following through — which is exactly why documentation matters. Plus, tracking action items across virtual meetings and keeping a written record of decisions helps immensely at review time. To keep performance conversations from becoming a memory test, Lattice 1:1s supports structured agendas, shared notes, and action-item carryover across meetings.
Praise employees for a job well done.
At Lattice, we so deeply believe in praise that we built a whole product about it. Praise — recognition, making employees feel seen, celebrating wins, whatever you want to call it — matters a lot, and maybe even more so on remote or hybrid teams, where employees are at risk of feeling out of sight, out of mind.
Public recognition helps employees feel celebrated while also reinforcing other behaviors and competencies HR is eager to see across the organization. For example, praise the coworker who jumped in to unblock someone or the customer support manager who went beyond to ensure a happy client.
HR can help managers give better praise by teaching the basics, including when to offer it and how it’s best delivered. As a primer, provide praise in the moment for immediate wins, then reinforce it during one-on-ones. You can even add a praise prompt to one-on-one templates, so it becomes a weekly occurrence. Company-wide, dedicated Slack or Microsoft Teams channels are useful to share public praise and garner other excitement for wins.
Designing Equitable Evaluations
Proximity bias — the tendency to favor those who are physically closer to you — has become a core concern for HR teams (and remote employees) alongside the rise in return-to-office mandates.
Those concerns aren’t unfounded. In the KPMG 2024 CEO Outlook report, 87% of CEOs said they were likely to reward office attendance with favorable assignments, raises, or promotions. Similarly, a 2023 Resume Builder survey of 1,190 full-time employees found remote workers were 24% less likely to be promoted than their in-office colleagues.
An academic study published in PLOS One in 2024 provides additional context. Researchers found that hybrid workers were 7.7% less likely to be promoted and 7.1% less likely to receive a salary increase than office-based peers. But two interesting constraints mitigate this: On teams with leaders who regularly work from home themselves or where over 80% of the team works from home at least one day a week, this bias disappears.
The implication for HR teams is that strong performance management systems alone won’t fix proximity bias — remote and hybrid workplace arrangements also have to be normalized at the team level.
But HR leaders can still improve outcomes. To help combat bias on remote teams:
- Use structured performance review systems. A system like Lattice Performance helps establish clear criteria (AKA goals) before the review period begins, encourages consistent rating scales applied across remote team members and in-office folks alike, and lets managers document feedback continuously rather than reconstructing it from memory.
- Pull feedback from more than one source. Consider implementing 360-degree reviews — where feedback comes from the employee’s team members, colleagues, and manager — to gain a more holistic snapshot of performance.
Equipping Managers to Lead Distributed Teams
Often, a promotion to management comes without any training on how to, well, manage — let alone remotely.
Remote team management requires a different set of skills and competencies but is one of the variables HR can most directly influence. Here’s how.
Skip the micromanaging.
One of the most common ways managers approach remote teams is by defaulting to micromanagement à la unnecessary check-ins, the use of visibility tools, and a general pressure to be online. The problem is that micromanaging hinders teamwork, erodes trust among direct reports, and also signals to other functions that a team is not reliable.
Other managers step back perhaps too far. While they trust their team to function, they may fail to provide adequate coaching and feedback or to remove barriers for employees.
Effective remote managers strike a balance between the two, but this doesn’t happen by accident. Beattie described it this way: “The biggest shift for most managers is how explicit they need to be. In an office, a lot of things get picked up informally. Remotely, you have to say them. Expectations, priorities, what good looks like, what needs to change. And not just once, but consistently.”
Offer regular training.
Regular, structural enablement via training can help combat this. Duncan recommends a layered training cadence of monthly all-managers sessions where people leaders learn together and develop shared frameworks, plus a dedicated one-on-one onboarding session for newly hired managers covering policies, internal workflows, and remote-specific habits.
“No managers have the same start date or hit the ground with the exact same training,” Duncan said. “They tend to bring whatever leadership skills and processes they implemented at former teams.” By ensuring a consistent training rhythm, HR can help narrow the discrepancy among managers.
Some frameworks worth teaching include OKRs, asynchronous coaching habits, how to deliver feedback via video conferencing without losing nuance, and how to build trust without proximity. The right tools, like Lattice AI, can also support managers with coaching prompts, talking points, and performance summaries, which are useful for showing up to remote conversations better prepared, particularly for newer managers still building the muscle.
Using Engagement Surveys as an Early Warning System
Employee engagement is that intangible sense of connectedness, enthusiasm, and fulfillment employees feel for their job and workplace. Linked to higher profitability, better employee wellbeing, and lower turnover, among many other benefits, employee engagement is good for just about everything.
But on hybrid and remote teams, it can be harder to take the pulse of it. Without the informal signals that come from being in an office (like body language, hallway conversations, or energy in a room), HR teams can easily miss early warning signs.
Engagement surveys, which act as an anonymous channel for employees to share how they’re really feeling, can catch what performance data may miss, such as unclear expectations, a lack of manager support or resources, or concerns about career growth.
These are the kinds of sentiment that may not show up so clearly in other mediums, like one-on-ones, but they can lead to disengagement and eventually attrition.
Here are a few best practices for using engagement surveys on remote teams.
- Cadence matters more than length. You’ll uncover more actionable learnings with a combination of full-cycle surveys and more frequent pulse surveys than a bi-annual or annual engagement survey.
- Parse data wisely. Segment results by team, location, and remote versus hybrid versus in-office for more insights about the experience across your workforce. A remote cohort scoring consistently lower than in-office peers is a flag, not a coincidence.
- Share results. Next, HR teams should close the loop by sharing results and action plans with employees, especially remote ones who may already feel disconnected from company decision-making.
Lattice Engagement, Pulse, and eNPS are designed for this kind of recurring, segmentable feedback, but the discipline of acting on what you find matters more than the survey tool you use.
Measuring Outcomes, Not Activity
What gets measured gets managed, but remote performance metrics need to reflect impact, not just activity. Rather than focusing on status indicators and response time on Slack messages, help managers focus on metrics that actually speak to performance, for example:
- Deliverables produced against documented goals
- Quality of decisions made, especially under ambiguity
- Problems flagged early rather than escalated late
- Goal progress against OKRs that the employee owns
- Impact on teammates; e.g., who they unblock and how they mentor
Outcome-based measurement requires managers to define outcomes upfront, which is why you should start by getting crystal clear on goals. “Ultimately, performance management becomes about clarity, trust, and outcomes,” said Ponce.
HR can also use analytics to help spot uneven manager behavior. For example, look at review completion rates, calibration outliers, and other gaps between in-office and remote individuals. If a manager is rating remote direct reports lower across the board, there’s probably a proximity bias issue that needs to be addressed and surfaced in review calibrations. With Lattice Analytics, HR teams can identify these trends across distributed teams and take proactive action.
How Lattice Supports Remote Performance Management
Effective performance management for remote and hybrid teams doesn’t have to be complicated. Ensuring goal clarity, sharing regular feedback, prioritizing well-run one-on-ones, and celebrating wins are foundational to the process. From there, leverage engagement surveys and analytics to spot trends like disengagement or proximity bias.
To discover how we support remote and hybrid organizations with tools that span the performance cycle, schedule a Lattice demo.
