Remote work’s quiet deal is breaking

The Slack indicator remains green.
A cursor flashes in a blank Google Doc.
On Zoom, a young marketing manager in a hoodie agrees her way through yet another “quick sync”. Her camera is carefully positioned, while her eyes periodically drift towards Netflix on a second screen. Her manager speaks about “ownership” and “autonomy”; she responds with “bandwidth” and “deep work”. Everyone appears polished and professional. No one asks how many genuine working hours she has put in this week.

That is the unspoken arrangement underpinning remote work today.
And, according to one expert, that arrangement is beginning to fail.

Remote work’s invisible time gap

Visit an open-plan office at 3 p.m. and the familiar signs are everywhere: colleagues talking at the coffee machine, browsing Instagram, or making a task last until the end of the afternoon. Remote work did not create slacking; it simply put it behind closed doors and made it less visible.

What has changed is its scale. A workplace consultant I spoke with describes it as “time leakage” - those unaccounted-for parts of the day that nobody is keen to discuss. These are the hours when Slack shows someone as active, yet their mind is elsewhere. The expert’s assertion is stark: remote staff are discreetly doing less work, their managers are aware of it… and they say nothing.

Consider a 700-person technology company operating between London and Berlin. Its official arrangement is a flexible 35-hour workweek with “work from anywhere”. Behind the scenes, internal time-tracking figures reviewed by an external adviser found that the average knowledge worker recorded roughly 22–24 hours of focused activity each week. The remaining time went on meetings, administration, “context switching”, or simply being offline.

Nobody was dismissed, and no public concern was raised. Instead, HR promoted supposed “productivity gains in remote”. Senior leaders liked that narrative so much that they did not investigate further. The expert who examined the data told me that managers privately acknowledged they “suspected” staff were working fewer hours, but feared seeming anti-remote and driving people away.

The concern follows a straightforward logic. Since the pandemic, remote work has become a symbol - almost an entitlement. Challenge an employee’s hours and you are no longer merely their manager; you become a villain who “doesn’t trust your team”. In a jobs market where high performers can change employer with two LinkedIn messages, plenty of leaders silently favour harmony over certainty.

As a result, everybody takes part in an odd performance. Employees leave their status light on, send strategically timed messages and complete work to a “good enough” standard by the deadline. Managers praise delivered work while steering clear of how long it actually required. The true question - “Are we paying full-time salary for part‑time effort?” - hangs over every Zoom call without ever finding a place to land.

How the underwork gets hidden in plain sight

This behaviour is seldom driven by bad intent. It is a learned skill. Remote employees soon discover how to complete their genuine work in concentrated bursts, then make activity appear to continue across an entire day. They reply to one message within three minutes, add a comment to a shared document, or write “circling back on this” beneath a thread they had forgotten about. It conveys progress and suggests commitment.

The expert I interviewed refers to this as “signal management”. Rather than managing their time, workers manage indicators: their online status, fast responses and the occasional late-night email sent from bed on a phone. On the face of it, this looks like hustle. In reality, it can be a 4-hour day made to resemble an 8-hour one.

A typical routine is to complete two productive hours in the morning, deal with the most visible work, then fade into household jobs, errands or simply a lie-down caused by burnout. A person may return in mid-afternoon for another couple of hours of focused effort, before moving into a meeting-heavy end to the day that gives an impression of availability.

Most of us recognise the feeling of sending one final email at 4:57 p.m. and believing we have persuaded the entire company that we were “on” all day. In truth, hardly anyone sustains full output every day. What has changed is that office walls have disappeared, along with any collective definition of what constitutes “a full day”.

Experts argue that this ambiguity persists because organisations measure nearly everything other than the work itself. They monitor log-ins, time spent in meetings, message volumes and tickets closed. Those measures are productivity’s shadows, rather than productivity itself. Genuine value is often hard to define: an excellent idea, an elegant solution or a considered document that removes a barrier for a team. It is difficult to put a time limit on such work, and harder still to challenge it.

Managers who privately think, “I’m paying you for eight hours and getting four” almost never voice it. Many of them also worked remotely during the pandemic, loading the dishwasher between calls or taking 30-minute “walk breaks” that extended to an hour. Raising the issue now would mean examining their own routines too. Remaining vague feels easier. Pretending that it all evens out feels safer.

What companies can do without starting a remote war

The expert’s initial step with clients is strikingly uncomplicated: remove hours from the discussion and rebuild expectations around outcomes. This is not meant as a buzzword, but as a spreadsheet. For each role, companies should set three to five specific weekly results that visibly demonstrate value. Rather than “be available” or “join standup”, expectations should be “ship X feature”, “resolve Y issues” and “produce Z quality content”.

When those outcomes are explicit, discussions about time become less emotionally charged. One employee may work 30 hours in one week and 45 in the next. If results are visible and mutually agreed, covert underwork is easier to identify - and easier to address without labelling anybody lazy. Instead of scrutinising someone’s day, managers can refer to the scorecard already agreed by both sides.

Most businesses go wrong when they move immediately towards surveillance. They introduce keystroke monitoring, webcam checks and “idle alerts” that notify managers whenever a laptop falls silent. Trust can collapse within minutes. Staff then begin manipulating the systems rather than completing meaningful work: moving the mouse, leaving irrelevant documents open or keeping Zoom running with the camera off while making lunch.

A more measured - and more adult - approach is to hold regular, candid conversations about workload and results. “You say you’re overwhelmed, but your output is low. What’s blocking you?” Or: “You’re hitting your goals in 3–4 hours a day. Is your role too small for you now?” Such questions are uncomfortable, but they are also the only way to prevent resentment from building on either side.

One consultant who advises large U.S. companies told me something that stayed with me.

“Most remote teams aren’t lazy. They’re misaligned. The quiet underworking is a symptom: either the job is badly designed, or the company is scared of saying what good really looks like.”

She suggests a straightforward toolkit for organisations that want to confront the problem without becoming Big Brother:

• Set crystal-clear outcomes for every role, accessible to both employee and manager.
• Hold brief weekly check-ins centred on results rather than hours or “busyness”.
• Agree shared standards for responsiveness, including when fast replies matter and when they do not.
• Use simple, transparent information, such as output dashboards rather than concealed time trackers.
• Allow room to renegotiate roles when someone regularly completes “full-time” work quickly.

The uncomfortable question everyone feels, nobody asks

The reality beneath this issue is complicated. Some remote employees are unquestionably coasting, receiving a full salary for what amounts to side-gig levels of effort. Others are silently doing the work of two people from a kitchen table, exhausting themselves while their Slack light stays as green as everybody else’s. The current system obscures both extremes.

Remote work is not the problem. Silence is. When experts claim that “remote workers secretly work less”, they are really pointing to a conversation that never takes place: what does fair effort look like in this job, for this salary, at this company? Avoiding that question may preserve calm temporarily. It also creates cynicism and friction, and eventually leads to headlines about compulsory office returns that feel more like punishment than policy.

Speak privately with employees and many will concede that, at least during quieter weeks, they could likely complete their job in fewer hours than they are paid for. Speak with managers and another admission emerges: they no longer know how to assess real work, only activity. Beneath the metrics and dashboards lies a simple human uncertainty: are we being honest with one another?

The organisations that resolve this will not necessarily have the most restrictive monitoring or the most polished “hybrid” messaging. They will be prepared to say what is usually left unsaid, renegotiate the arrangement openly and accept an unsettling possibility: when adults are treated like adults, some may surprise you by working more effectively… while others may finally reveal that they were never really working at all.

Key point	Detail	Value for the reader
Shift from hours to outcomes	Set 3–5 specific weekly results for each role	Provides a practical way to assess genuine productivity
Avoid surveillance traps	Prioritise trust, transparency and straightforward metrics	Helps prevent a toxic remote “us vs them” culture
Talk about the quiet deal	Discuss effort, workload and expectations openly	Limits resentment and defines what full-time really means

FAQ:

• Are remote workers really doing fewer hours? Many experts identify a difference between contracted time and focused work, frequently around 20–30% less, although this varies greatly by role and company culture.
• Is this just laziness? Usually, no. More often, vague roles, weak measurement and burnout encourage people to do the minimum that still appears acceptable on screen.
• Should companies bring everyone back to the office? Quickly requiring everyone to return often penalises high performers as well; improving expectations and outcomes works better than changing where people work.
• How can a manager raise this without losing trust? Focus on outcomes rather than hours, framing the conversation as “Let’s agree what good looks like” instead of “Prove you’re not slacking.”
• What if I can do my job in fewer hours than I’m paid? The additional time can be used to increase your impact, take on higher-value projects or begin an open conversation about expanding your role.