I have run distributed teams for the better part of two decades, well before the pandemic made it everyone’s problem. The coordination side is solvable—it is tooling, discipline, and clear handoffs. The part that does not solve neatly is that you have lost your eyes.
In an office, you know when somebody is struggling before they tell you. You see them arrive, you see them not eat lunch, you notice they have gone quiet in a meeting they would normally run. None of that is available on a call.
Informal contact does real work.
The corridor conversation, the walk to get coffee, the five minutes before a meeting starts — those were not wasted time. They were where people said the small thing that indicated the larger one. Remove them, and you are left with scheduled calls, which are the least likely setting for anyone to admit they are not coping.
Video helps, but it does not replace it. You get faces without the unstructured minutes around them, and those unstructured minutes carried the signal.
It is not evenly distributed.
Anyone running a household alongside the job absorbs the worst of this. In most of the teams I have worked with, that has fallen disproportionately on working mothers—a working day made of interruptions, with no clear point where one role ends and the other starts. Treating that as a scheduling inconvenience rather than a structural load is a management failure, and a common one.
What a manager can actually do
Not diagnose anybody. Dr. Dawn Brown, whose work I drew on when I first wrote about this, makes the point that you often will not know a colleague is struggling — and that is the honest starting position.
What you can do is structural. Build in contact that has no agenda, and protect it when it feels unproductive. Make the calendar honest, so people aren’t pretending to be available at hours they aren’t. Notice changes in pattern rather than waiting for a declaration. And be specific in your own disclosure, because a team takes its permission from whoever runs it.
None of that is therapy and none of it should pretend to be. It is just the deliberate reconstruction of the things an office gave you for free.