Remote work isn’t exactly new anymore, but managing a remote team well still takes some getting used to.
Jollity has been remote since long before “working from home” became a standard part of the workplace conversation. Our founders saw the time and cost savings early on, but in my experience, one of the biggest benefits goes beyond overhead: remote work can make people more efficient while supporting the needs of their day-to-day life outside of work.
Everyone talks about the obvious perks… No commute. Easier kid drop off. Switching loads of laundry between Zoom meetings. Trading traffic time for extra family time.
And, with the right team and structures in place, you can get a whole lot done when it works well.
That last part is important: when it works well.
As a project manager at a fully remote web agency, I spend most of my days coordinating website projects, developers, designers, clients, support requests, deadlines, and all the little pieces in between. Managing a remote tech team isn’t necessarily harder than managing an in-person team, but it does require a different level of intentionality.
These are a few things I’ve learned along the way.
1. Communicate More Than You Think You Need To
This is probably the biggest lesson I’ve learned.
In an office, there are dozens of little ways to pick up information without anyone deliberately communicating it. You overhear a conversation. Someone stops by your desk. You see that a coworker has been buried in the same project all afternoon. You ask a quick question on your way to grab coffee.
Remote teams don’t have that.
If something isn’t documented or communicated, there’s a very real chance nobody else knows about it.That means status updates matter. Accurate time estimates matter. Task notes matter.
This can be one of the biggest learning curves for people who are new to remote work. You may be silently and diligently working through your task list, but if the rest of the team can’t see where things stand, it becomes much harder for other team members to plan ahead.
Which means that, yes, sometimes I’m the annoying project manager asking for another update. 🙂
But there’s a reason for it.
On a web team, one person’s work almost always affects someone else’s. A developer may be waiting on an approved design. A designer may need content before moving forward. I may need an estimate before I can give a client a timeline.
Good remote communication keeps those dependencies from disappearing into the void, and creates a more dynamic, proactive team.
2. Create Visibility Without Micromanaging
There’s an important difference between knowing what’s going on and watching someone work.
I don’t need to know what someone is doing every minute of the day. In fact, one of the biggest advantages of remote work is giving people enough autonomy to structure their day and environment so that it works best for them.
Examples of things I do need to know are:
- Who owns the task?
- What’s the next step?
- When do you expect to be done?
- Are you hitting any roadblocks?
- Has the timeline changed?
That’s where good systems and tools become essential in remote work.
Heads up: some links below are affiliate or referral links. If you sign up through them, Jollity may earn a commission or credit at no extra cost to you. We only recommend tools we actually use.
At Jollity, ClickUp helps us keep tasks, deadlines, ownership, and project status visible. Slack keeps day-to-day internal communication moving. Missive lets us collaborate around client communication without important context living in one person’s inbox. Fathom records and summarizes meetings so decisions and next steps aren’t reliant upon someone’s exact memory of that 4p end-of-day meeting.
The tools themselves aren’t the secret. The key component is using a shared system for storing information and how the team is expected to use it.
Successful remote management means giving people plenty of autonomy while creating enough visibility that the rest of the team can confidently plan their own work.
3. Not Everything Needs to Be a Meeting
One thing I really appreciate about the way we work at Jollity is that we aren’t overly meeting-heavy internally.
Have a quick question about a task? Send a Slack message.
Realize halfway through typing that it would be easier to talk it out? Jump into a five-minute huddle.
We don’t need to schedule a 30-minute Zoom meeting next Tuesday to answer something we could resolve today.
Of course, some conversations genuinely need meetings. Complex project discussions, strategy, client calls, technical screenshares, and anything that benefits from real-time collaboration are usually better handled face-to-face, even if “face-to-face” means little boxes on a screen.
But the question I come back to often is:
Does this actually require a meeting, and if so, what are we trying to accomplish?
If the answer is no, and we can meet those needs another way, we’ll typically skip the meeting in favor of a 2 minute screencast, task update, or Slack chat.
That matters especially on a technical team. Designers and developers often need long stretches of uninterrupted concentration, and constantly pulling them into calls can make it harder to get meaningful work done.
Efficiency isn’t about cramming more into every minute. Sometimes it means protecting people’s time so they can actually focus.
4. Great Talent Isn’t Limited by Geography
One of my favorite things about being a remote company is that geography doesn’t dictate who gets to be on the team.
At Jollity, we sometimes refer to our team members as “unicorns”: people who are experts in their primary field but also bring an unusually broad mix of skills, perspectives, and experience to everything they do.
It’s certainly possible to find amazing people in your own city. But when your hiring pool becomes the world instead of a commuting radius, your odds of finding someone really special get a whole lot better.
We’ve been able to build a team made up of people from a variety of places, backgrounds, and disciplines who each bring something unique to the table.
If you’re curious who some of those “unicorns” are, you can meet the Jollity team.
What is a ‘Jollity Unicorn’ ?
Our term for people who are experts in their primary field, but who also bring an unusually broad mix of skills, perspectives, and experience to everything they do.
5. Flexibility Matters More Than You Think
Efficiency is the biggest professional benefit I’ve gained from remote work, but flexibility has the most impact for my personal life.
True, there are fewer transitions without a commute, traffic, and the like. But coupled with our unlimited PTO policy, I also have the flexibility to create half days to spend time with visiting family, schedule doctors appointments when it works best for me, or take the dog for a midday walk. At Jollity, all that’s asked is that the work gets done and expectations are communicated.
And there’s evidence that people value that flexibility. A 2024 Stanford-led study of more than 1,600 employees found that employees working a hybrid schedule performed just as well as fully office-based employees while resignations dropped by about one-third.
That data reinforces something I’ve seen firsthand: flexibility and productivity don’t have to be in opposition.
Giving people more control over how work fits into their lives can be good for both the employee and for the company.
6. Remote Work Has Its Own Weird Little Problems
I’d be lying if I said remote work was all sunshine and sweatpants.
From a management standpoint, even with all of our infrastructure, communication is always the biggest challenge. It can take months for someone new to remote work to really understand how much information the rest of the team needs from them. You have to build habits around updating tasks, tracking time, documenting decisions, giving realistic timelines, and speaking up when something changes.
Then there are the personal quirks.
I’m guilty of reaching the end of a focused workday, shutting my computer, and realizing I’ve barely moved my body in eight hours. At that point, I usually feel a fairly urgent need to go touch some grass. Taking my dog for a walk, getting outside, or generally reminding myself that a world exists beyond my laptop has become an important part of working remotely too.
Contrary to popular belief, remote work isn’t automatically more productive or more enjoyable just because everyone gets to stay home.
Like anything else, it also requires some self awareness, personal responsibility and boundaries to be effective.
7. Connection Doesn’t Require Proximity
I worked at Jollity for nearly three years before meeting any of my teammates in-person.Though we talked daily, shared inside jokes, and said ‘hi’ to their kids on Zoom, there were still a few brief moments of social anxiety, as if meeting someone new. It took a minute for my brain to process the fact that the people I’d been talking to online for years were, in fact, the same real people standing in front of me. But once the first joke was cracked, the dynamic felt completely normal, like I’d known them in-person the whole time.
That says a lot about not only our team, but also what remote work can look like when it’s done well. Working from different cities, states, countries, and time zones doesn’t mean you can’t build real relationships with the people you work with. The connection just happens on a different timeline.
At the end of the day, remote work isn’t effortless just because it’s flexible. Remote work is still work. It takes intention, good habits, and a little more communication than you probably think you need. But when those pieces align, you can build a team that feels surprisingly close, even when you’re a thousand miles apart.
Need a web team that knows how to keep projects moving?
Our remote team is built to collaborate efficiently and keep the details from falling through the cracks.
Source: Bloom, Nicholas, Ruobing Han, and James Liang. “Hybrid Working from Home Improves Retention Without Damaging Performance.” Nature, 2024. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07500-2
