The great remote work debate might be looking in the wrong direction
With the arrival of the pandemic in 2020, the rules of the game regarding our environment changed completely. Hybrid and remote work became consolidated in countless companies, and the conversation has revolved around the same questions: Do people perform the same from home? Is commitment lost when face-to-face interaction disappears? Is it harder to maintain corporate culture at a distance?
However, while many organizations are still trying to measure whether
remote work affects performance, there is another variable that may be conditioning results even before analyzing the data: the manager's expectations.
This is because the way a leader perceives their team inevitably changes the way they manage them. And that has direct consequences on autonomy,
feedback, trust, and, ultimately, performance. Because the problem is that in remote work, this effect does not disappear; it is amplified.
What the Pygmalion Effect is and why it still influences companies
In 1968, researchers Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson published one of the best-known studies in behavioral psychology. The experiment, later known as the Pygmalion Effect, showed that the expectations of an authority figure could directly influence the performance of others.
In the study, several teachers received false information about certain students who supposedly had higher academic potential than the rest. Although the students had been selected at random, the teachers began to treat them differently without realizing it. They gave them more attention, more encouragement, and more trust. Over time, it was proven that those students actually improved their performance.
This result was very revealing since expectations do not only interpret reality, they often end up constructing it. Decades later, this phenomenon continues to appear constantly in
leadership, people management, and organizational culture, especially in hybrid environments.
The problem with remote work is usually not technological: it is usually psychological
When we talk about face-to-face work, many managers build trust almost by inertia. Seeing the team working, crossing paths in the office, or having spontaneous conversations generates a continuous sense of control. However, remote work eliminates many of those visual cues and forces physical supervision to be replaced by something much more complex to manage: explicit trust. This is exactly where the first problems begin to arise.
When a manager thinks that people working remotely are less involved or less focused, that idea rarely stays solely on a mental level. Little by little, it begins to filter into small daily decisions that modify the team's experience almost without anyone noticing.
For example, fewer strategic projects are delegated, follow-up meetings increase, and feedback becomes more corrective than developmental. Autonomy decreases and control begins to take over everything. The problem that arises here is that these dynamics end up generating exactly what the manager wanted to avoid from the beginning.
What signs may indicate that the problem lies in leadership and not in remote work
Many organizations continue to state that "performance has dropped since working remotely" without analyzing what other variables changed at the same time.
For example:
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Was clarity of goals reduced?
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Did the frequency or quality of feedback change?
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Are fewer strategic projects delegated?
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Do some managers evaluate remote profiles worse?
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Has the team's perceived autonomy decreased?
This is precisely where
People Analytics begins to be useful. Not only to measure performance, but rather to understand what factors are actually conditioning it. Crossing data related to work modality, autonomy, frequency of feedback, or leadership style allows detecting something important: that the problem is not geographical, it is structural. And the latter, if necessary, can be redesigned.
What managers who build trust remotely do better
Senior executives or leaders who achieve good results in hybrid environments usually share a fairly recognizable pattern. They do not try to replicate the face-to-face experience through digital surveillance, nor do they turn supervision into the center of the relationship with the team. Instead, they work on much more solid pillars:
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Clarity in expectations and objectives.
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Frequent feedback oriented towards development.
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Evaluation based on impact and not on visibility.
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Real spaces for autonomy.
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Constant communication without falling into permanent control.
In other words, they understand that leading remotely is not about monitoring better. It is about designing trust better. At this point, it is inevitable to raise the question: what kind of manager do you want to be?