Managing remote support staff comes down to one change: you stop managing presence and start managing output. In an office you can see who’s at their desk, and it feels like information. At home you can’t, and if you keep trying to replace that visibility with surveillance, you’ll lose your best people first.
Two months into working from home, support managers keep asking the same questions. How do I know people are working? How do I keep the team connected? What do I do about the person who’s struggling and hasn’t said so? Those are the right questions. I’ve written about the hardest version of them, after reducing a support team by 60%, in keeping a team motivated when everyone is scared. Here’s how I’d answer them for a support team, where the work is measurable and the cost of getting it wrong shows up in the queue.
How do you know remote support agents are doing their jobs?
The same way you know in the office, only more honestly. A support team already produces numbers: contacts handled, response time, resolution time, first-contact resolution, customer satisfaction. Those tell you far more than a green light on a chat status. If an agent is closing tickets properly and customers are satisfied, you know they’re working. If they aren’t, you know that too, and the problem won’t be location.
I’d be careful with one thing. Don’t start tracking new activity measures because you’re nervous. Keystrokes, screenshots and minutes logged in measure effort, and I’ve argued for years that a metric chosen for convenience measures effort while one chosen from the customer’s side measures outcome. Both can be tracked. Only one tells you whether the customer got what they needed. If you start watching the wrong one, you’ll teach your team to perform for it.
Pay attention to the quality of the work, not only its volume. Listen to a sample of calls and read a sample of tickets each week, with the agent, and talk about what you find. It’s the best coaching tool a manager has, and it works at any distance. It also tells you what the dashboard can’t: whether a number is good because the agent is good or because they’re rushing people off the phone.
What cadence keeps a remote team connected?
A predictable one. Three rhythms cover most of it: a short daily check-in for the team, a weekly one-to-one for each person, and a monthly conversation about their development. The daily call is about the work: queue, problems, help needed. The weekly one-to-one is about the person: how they’re doing, what’s in their way. Keep the two separate. A one-to-one that turns into a status update stops being a place where anything honest is said.
Don’t let the one-to-ones slip. When everything is on video, they’re the first thing to get cancelled, because there’s always a reason and nobody’s physically there to notice. Put them in the calendar as fixed points and move them rarely. A manager who cancels three in a row has told the agent exactly where they rank.
Set communication norms and write them down. Which channel for urgent questions? How quickly does an agent have to answer a direct message while on a call? When is it fine to ask a colleague, and when should the question go to the team channel so everyone can see the answer? Unwritten norms get filled in by whoever is loudest, and the quietest people are the ones who pay for it.
What do remote workers struggle with most?
Communication, collaboration and loneliness, in that order, according to Buffer’s 2020 State of Remote Work report. The survey covered more than 3,500 remote workers and was collected in late 2019, so these are people who chose remote work, not people sent home last month. About 20% of them named loneliness as their biggest struggle. Your team didn’t choose this, so I’d assume the number is not lower for them.
That finding changes what a support manager should spend time on. The job used to include noticing, in passing, that someone looked tired or had stopped chatting. You can’t pass anyone in the corridor now. So you have to do deliberately what used to happen by accident: ask, listen, and pay attention to the small changes. A person who used to speak up and now doesn’t. Someone whose quality scores slip for no obvious reason.
Support work adds a particular pressure. Agents spend their day absorbing other people’s frustration, and in an office there’s a colleague nearby to share a look with after a bad call. At home that release valve is gone, and the stress goes home with them because home is where they are. I wrote about the crucial role of job satisfaction last year, and it’s more relevant than I expected it to be. Satisfaction at work depends heavily on feeling supported, and support has to be visible now.
Give people a way to debrief. I made the same point about protecting the team in my 2009 piece on help desk pandemic planning: when people are out or stretched, the plan has to cover them as well as the queue. A team channel for the difficult call, a ten-minute peer huddle, a lead available for a quick voice call after an abusive customer. These cost little. They also stop a bad day from turning into a resignation letter.
How do you coach and develop people you can’t sit next to?
Deliberately, and with more preparation than you’d do in person. In an office, coaching is partly overheard: a lead hears a call, comments afterwards, moves on. Remote coaching has to be scheduled and specific. Pick one call, listen to it, and bring one thing that went well and one thing to try. Two is plenty. Seven suggestions is a performance review.
Pair people up. A new agent who’d have learnt by sitting next to someone experienced now needs a named buddy, a scheduled slot and permission to ask basic questions without feeling they’re interrupting. It’s the cheapest quality investment you can make, and it protects Tier 2 from a flood of questions Tier 1 could answer for each other.
Keep development conversations going, too. People who are sent home can feel they’ve been parked, and the ones with ambition will notice that nobody has mentioned their next step in two months. Talk about the move into Tier 2 or problem management, a skill they could add, or a project they could lead. It costs a conversation and signals that you still see them as a person and not as a seat.
What should you stop doing?
Stop assuming that visible equals productive. The agent who answers every message in thirty seconds isn’t necessarily the one closing the most tickets. Stop scheduling meetings that could have been a message, because every meeting is time off the queue. And stop expecting people to be reachable at all hours. When the office is the kitchen, the working day has no natural end, and your team needs you to say when it ends.
Be clear about hours, response expectations and when it’s fine to be offline. Support teams that run shifts already know this, and the ones that don’t should learn it quickly. A manager who sends messages at 10pm teaches the team to answer at 10pm.
It also helps to remember how recent this is. For the customer side of the same question, see whether a call centre can help in a pandemic. For your own team, the standard is simple: would you be comfortable explaining your management approach to the person on the receiving end of it? If not, change it.
How do you handle a struggling remote employee?
Early, privately and with a specific observation. Don’t wait for the quarterly review. If quality scores have slipped for three weeks, say so in the next one-to-one: here’s what I’m seeing, what’s going on? The answer is often not about performance at all. A childcare gap, a partner who’s lost work, a bad internet connection, a home that has no quiet room. You can only help with what you know about.
Agree something concrete and revisit it within a week. Maybe shifts move, maybe a task goes to someone else for a while, maybe the agent gets a better headset. Then check it worked. A kind conversation without a follow-up is easy to mistake for a solution, and the person on the other end remembers which one they got.
Keep your own standards visible too. Fairness at a distance depends on people believing the same rules apply to everyone. If one agent gets flexibility and another doesn’t, explain why, or the team will invent their own explanation and it won’t be generous.
Trust is the cheap, fast way to run a team at a distance, and it only costs you the nerve to extend it first.
Hutch Morzaria is a Director-level CX and Support Leadership professional with 19 years of experience building global support organizations across SaaS, Fintech, and enterprise technology. He has hired dozens of support and CX leaders across his career and holds ITIL Expert certification across V3 and V4.
