> Try to focus on the employees who thrive in such environments rather than those few bad apples.
You can’t let the bad apples define the work experience for everyone, but you do need to identify them and remove them as fast as possible so they don’t poison the well.
One thing I didn’t realize at first was that remote work attracts bad apples at a much higher rate than in-person work. There’s an idea that remote jobs are an easy way to get away with doing less work, so you’ll be flooded with applicants who read books like “The Four Hour Workweek” and think your remote job is their ticket to traveling the world while they answer occasional emails from their phones. Or more commonly, a ticket to working a few hours (or less!) per day while they try to convince their boss that the task is just harder than it looks.
Good performance management is important in any job, but it’s even more critical in remote work. If you let remote slackers thrive at your company, the good employees will notice. They’ll quickly burn out after working normal amounts plus also picking up the tasks that aren’t being done by the remote slackers. Resentment grows quickly and the good employees will be leaving quickly if let the remote slackers coast without consequences.
I actually favor engineers-turned-managers for remote management positions over managers with non-engineer backgrounds for this reason. Former engineers are much better at spotting when someone is lying about the complexity of coding tasks.