Leading Remotely: Four Practices to Keep Your Team Connected
3 mins read
Remote and flexible work have moved from experiment to everyday reality in many organizations. Many of us don't attend the office every day or have team colleagues in different locations to work with. With distributed teams and fluid working times, the question "how do we stay connected and aligned wherever we are?" becomes more important than ever for product leaders. A lack of connectedness to the team and the company can have serious impact on performance and engagement.
Here are four practical ways I've found to foster connection, visibility and trust in distributed teams.
1. Create Moments to Come Together
Even in a remote-first world, occasional face-to-face time matters. It builds trust faster than any Slack thread ever could. That doesn't mean weekly office presence days. It means being intentional about when and why we bring people together.
Quarterly team gatherings focused on relationship-building and shared reflection.
Company-wide events that offer connection across departments, not just status updates.
Local co-working meetups where small groups can collaborate in person when it makes sense.
The goal isn’t to recreate the office. It’s to create shared experiences that support a strong distributed culture.
2. Make Connection a Habit
In remote environments, social interaction doesn’t happen by accident. There are no spontanous coffee machine talks, you need to rebuild this experience. Build rituals that create space for people to show up as more than just their job titles.
Virtual coffee chats and peer calls across teams
Casual Slack channels for everything from pets to playlists
Weekly rituals like "What made you smile this week?" in team retros
These moments don't replace deeper collaboration, but they do help create a sense of belonging that makes the hard work easier.
3. Communicate Asynchronously
When teams aren't in the same place or timezone, clear and inclusive async communication is essential.
Use public channels to share updates, decisions and discussions.
Keep things organized with threads, tags, and regular summaries.
Encourage documentation over just talking in meetings. Notion, Confluence, or even a shared Google Doc can be really useful here.
The aim isn’t to over-document. It’s to make sure everyone has access to what they need, when they need it and avoid endless meetings.
4. Help Work Get Seen
In flexible and remote setups, great work doesn’t always speak for itself and it's harder to get enough visibility for your achievements. Visibility becomes a shared responsibility of the leader and the team - not just for recognition, but for alignment and motivation.
Normalize sharing progress in Slack or team check-ins
Use tools like Jira, Trello or Linear to surface ongoing work.
Make wins visible, whether it’s a shipped feature or a great piece of customer feedback.
This isn't about showing off. It's about making sure no one feels invisible.
Why It Matters
People do their best work when they feel trusted, connected and seen. That doesn't change just because we're not in the same room.
As remote and flexible work continue to evolve, the real challenge for leaders is to design a remote work culture. Not to recreate the office online, but to build something better: a workplace that fits the way people actually live and work today.
It won't be perfect. But with the right practices, it can be human, clear and sustainable.