This is a true story. The names have been changed.
Any leader knows that having poor performers on the team is never good. But in a remote or hybrid team, it becomes downright corrosive.
When you’re remote, you lose most of your non-verbal cues – the nods, the tone-shifts, the energy in the room. You lose your peripheral vision. It becomes harder to see who’s working hard, who’s struggling and who’s quietly opting out. As I learned the hard way, a small minority of disengaged people can spread damage far beyond their individual lack of performance. The problem isn’t what these people fail to achieve in their roles – it’s the massive cultural decay that their behavior triggers.
Because modern teams are wired together by Slack, Teams, or chat tools, the corrosion spreads faster than ever. In an office, a bad attitude might infect a pod. Remotely, it can travel the entire company in an afternoon. Anyone can direct message anyone. There are no walls, no insulation, nothing holding back the damage.
This is the lesson I learned the hard way – and I want to share two stories in the hopes it helps other managers and leaders.
Oscar: The Human Barnacle
Oscar wasn’t a bad person. He was just the wrong person, in the wrong role, at the wrong time.
He joined the team early in his career, full of enthusiasm. Yet as the energy from his interview and the novelty of the role wore off, he slipped back into his natural state. Instead of asking, like many early-career professionals do, “How do I do great work and succeed?”, he started asking himself “How little can I do before anyone notices?”
The answer, in a remote world, was “quite a lot.”
His manager led a mostly green team and was learning how to lead remotely for the first time, too. It was a tough brief even for a seasoned operator. And Oscar took advantage of that, not quietly, but brazenly.
He’d brag to his peers about sleeping in until 11. He’d message them mid-week to say he was heading to the mountains – not on leave, just not planning to work. He wasn’t sheepish or sneaky about it; he was proud of getting away with it.
When someone acts without integrity in a culture built on it, it’s like throwing sand in the gears. The performance loss isn’t just in their role – it’s the damage it does to the culture. I heard later that he’d show up to mid-afternoon team meetings with bloodshot eyes and dilated pupils, clearly stoned, surrounded by people who were working hard in challenging times to make the company successful and their effort and equity pay off.
The peers he bragged to were stuck in a miserable bind. They couldn’t unsee what they saw, but they also couldn’t report it without feeling like a narc or a rat. And even the most committed team member would start to wonder: then why am I working so hard?
Oscar became a human barnacle – not just dead weight, but something dragging the team backwards. His behavior was holding others back.
Leadership wasn’t completely blind to the problem – we could sense something was off with the wider team performance – but without evidence, it was hard to act without offending a sense of natural justice. If you fire people because you feel like they’re not working hard, then your best people irrationally think they’re next and start looking for a new role. We were left in the worst place for any manager to be: suspecting a problem we couldn’t really prove.
All the while, trust was breaking down. The moral contract – the belief that if you lie, cheat or steal there will be consequences – had been violated. And because that breach was invisible to leadership but painfully obvious to peers, it began to eat away at everything good in the culture.
That’s the corrosive spiral: when people see others skating by without consequence, they stop believing effort matters. Once that belief dies, a performance culture follows.
Sally: The Reset
Sally’s story is similar, but with a happier ending: proof that with visibility, the spiral can be reversed.
Sally was one of those dream hires. Smart, self-starting, a natural operator who understood the product, the customer and the team. The kind of person who makes the rest of the company look good just by doing her job. Initially, she crushed it.
But then something shifted. The pandemic was behind us, the office was open, and she still chose to work from her small home studio less than a mile away.
Unfortunately, the cultural corrosion from Oscar and others like him set in. Deadlines slipped. Work quality degraded. The same person who once raised everyone’s game was now bringing it down.
Her manager, a first-time leader, tried to course-correct. Her exec, newer to the company, tried to help turn things around. Their coaching had been met with defiance. Before letting her go, they wanted to see if I had any ideas, given I’d worked with her longer and because they knew firing her would turn her life upside down.
Sally didn’t use to be an Oscar – and while she wasn’t performing, she was still smart and capable. At that point, we didn’t need another pep talk. We needed truth.
So I went to the data – the boring stuff every company already has but rarely looks at. The digital black box stored in log files of email, calendar and collaboration tools. Not to play detective, but to bring something objective to what had become a subjective mess of feelings, trust, and denial.
The story the data told was simple. Sally was failing and putting her job at risk because she wasn’t making an effort. The issue wasn’t about talent or potential – it was how she’d let a lack of visibility and accountability change her own expectations of normal.
Her manager and executive shared that data with her. The conversation wasn’t punitive. It was honest. Her leaders said, “We know how good you can be. But only you can choose to make an effort. Your job is at risk because of your performance because you haven’t been doing it, but we hope you want to change. This is why you’re being put on a PIP – to give you a chance to make that choice.”
We gave her a 30-day plan, grounded in data, not vibes. And she turned it around.
The same visibility that had once exposed Oscar’s rot gave Sally the mirror she needed to reset. She started showing up again, both literally and figuratively. The effort returned, and with it, the performance and pride we’d once admired.
The Lesson
Remote and hybrid work have made leading teams both easier and harder. Easier because talent can be anywhere. Harder because visibility mostly disappears.
When you remove visibility, you don’t just risk losing productivity – you risk losing trust. And when trust erodes, the spiral begins:
- One person slacks off. Their peers notice.
- Good people stop believing effort matters – or there will be consequences for being lazy.
- Performance drops. Managers lose confidence. Clients get annoyed.
- It is a corrosive cycle that won’t stop itself.
The Oscar problem is obvious if you can spot it. The Sally problem is trickier – it hides behind good intentions and old reputations. But both stem from the same root cause: lack of visibility.
That’s what makes poor performance so dangerous in remote teams. It’s not the output gap – it’s the information gap.
The good news? You can stop the spiral. Most people want to do the right thing. They just need to know their effort still counts, that it’s visible, and that everyone else is pulling their weight too.
Why This Stuck With Me
These two stories – Oscar’s corrosion and Sally’s redemption – taught me the same thing: performance comes from culture and without visibility, you risk both.
Visibility into effort and performance isn’t about surveillance. It’s about fairness. It’s about giving teams confidence that their effort matters, that integrity is rewarded, and that leadership isn’t blind to what’s really happening.
That’s a lesson I wish I’d learned earlier – but one that stuck deeply enough to shape what I’m building now.
Because no leader should have to find out their culture is broken because of a lack of visibility.
geoffmcqueen.com 