Your team is scattered across three time zones. One person is dialed in from a home office in Dallas, another from a coffee shop in Denver, and the third is — honestly — you’re not totally sure. The project is moving, reports are coming in, and on paper everything looks fine. But you still have that nagging feeling in the back of your mind: Do they know what actually matters right now? And do they know that I know what they’re doing?
If you’ve been leading a remote or hybrid team for a while now, you’ve probably made peace with the setup. The panic of the early days is gone. You’ve got the video calls figured out, the collaboration tools are humming along, and nobody’s asking “can you hear me?” for ten minutes at the start of every meeting anymore. Progress.
But here’s what I’ve noticed talking with leaders across nearly every industry over the past few years — the Technology problem got solved. The Clarity problem? That one’s still wide open.
When remote work went from niche to norm almost overnight, most organizations threw tools at the situation. More Zoom. More Slack. More project management dashboards. More tracking software. I’ve seen companies install monitoring software that screenshots employee computers every ten minutes. (You can imagine how that went over.)
Here’s the thing: none of that addresses the actual issue. The issue isn’t that you can’t see your people. It’s that you and your people may not be clearly aligned on what matters most right now — and what getting there actually looks like.
Think of it like GPS. You can track a car’s location in real-time all day long, but if the driver doesn’t know where they’re supposed to go, all that data just tells you where they wandered. What you really need is a shared destination and a route.
That’s the clarity problem. And it’s the one that most remote and hybrid teams are still struggling with.
I’ve been teaching a framework called Big 5 for years — long before hybrid work became a corporate buzzword. I learned it from a colleague who worked for me during a particularly turbulent stretch in our industry. Days were flying by, priorities were shifting, and nobody had great visibility into what was actually getting done.
One morning, he dropped a printed sheet on my desk. I looked at it and said, “What’s this?”
He explained it to me. It took about three minutes.
We had a brief conversation. He left with total clarity on what I needed from him. And from that point on, everything changed — not because we suddenly had more meetings or better software, but because we had a shared language for priorities and progress.
I’ve used Big 5 ever since. And honestly, it works even better in today’s distributed world.
The framework is almost laughably simple. That’s the point. Complex systems get abandoned. Simple habits get kept.
Every employee — including managers — writes out two short lists on a regular basis:
Five upcoming priorities. These are your “must-wins” for the month ahead. Not a laundry list of tasks. Not a wish list. The five things that, if you knocked them out, would make the month genuinely successful. Think of them as your big rocks — the things that need to go into the jar first before everything else.
Five recent accomplishments. What did you actually get done last month? Again, not a diary. Just the five things you’re most proud of, the work that moved the needle in a meaningful way.
That’s it. Both lists are bullet points, not paragraphs. You’re not writing a novel. You’re creating a snapshot.
Then you send it to your manager.
The manager reviews it and responds. Not with a long evaluation — just a quick reaction. “Love goals one through four. Let’s talk about number five.” Or “I had no idea you handled that situation last month — well done.” Or “I can see you’ve been stretched thin. Let me see what I can do.”
It becomes a flash moment of real Coaching. Brief, focused, and genuinely useful.
I know what you’re thinking. We already have dashboards, status reports, and weekly standups. Why do I need another thing?
Fair question. Here’s the difference.
Most reporting tools are designed to capture activity. Big 5 captures intent and achievement. That’s a completely different thing.
Activity tells you someone attended six meetings and closed 14 tickets. Big 5 tells you whether those tickets were the right ones, whether they’re building toward the right goals, and whether the manager and employee are actually thinking about the future in the same way.
It’s the difference between tracking a hiker’s steps and knowing whether they’re climbing the right mountain.
And here’s what makes it uniquely powerful in today’s world: it creates a paper trail of alignment. After 12 months of monthly Big 5 exchanges, you have 24 data points — goals set, accomplishments recorded — that document the rhythm of someone’s work far better than any annual review ever could. I’ve seen Big 5 replace traditional performance review tools entirely. When the end-of-year conversation comes around, you’re not groping for memories. You have a year’s worth of clarity sitting right there.
Monthly is usually the right starting point. It gives people enough time to actually make meaningful progress on their goals before reporting back.
But sometimes weekly makes more sense. If your team is in a high-velocity sprint, launching something new, or navigating real uncertainty — going weekly keeps everyone sharper and more connected. I once ran a large, fast-moving project where I was delivering a client update every Monday. My team did weekly Big 5s. When they wrapped up on Friday, they sent me their lists. By Monday morning I had a full picture to share with the client.
It worked beautifully. Big goals were hit. Deadlines were met. And nobody felt micromanaged because the system made the expectations clear from the beginning.
Maybe you’re not managing anyone yet — but you do have a boss.
Write your Big 5 anyway. Send it to your manager. When they say “What’s this?” — and they will — explain it. Tell them you want to create more clarity about your work and you believe this can help.
That’s exactly how I was introduced to it. My colleague didn’t wait for me to ask for a better system. He just showed up with one. And it changed everything for both of us.
If your manager isn’t receptive, that’s useful information too. It tells you something about the culture you’re working in — and gives you something worth reflecting on.
Remote work isn’t going away. Hybrid work isn’t going away. And the challenge of building genuine accountability across a distributed team isn’t going away either — no matter how many monitoring tools get installed or how many all-hands calls get scheduled.
What does work is clarity. Clear goals. Clear accomplishments. Clear feedback. That loop, done consistently, builds the kind of trust that no surveillance software can manufacture.
Big 5 is a habit, not a heavy system. It takes maybe 20 minutes a month per person. And the return on that investment — in alignment, in coaching moments, in documented performance — is enormous.
So here’s the question worth sitting with: Do the people on your team know exactly what matters most right now? And do they believe you know the value of what they’re doing?
If the answer to either question is “I’m not totally sure” — that’s where Big 5 starts.
If you want to talk through how to implement something like this for your team, I’d love to have that conversation. Book a free 20-minute discovery call here — no pitch, just a real conversation about what’s actually going on with your team and what might help.
I’d love to hear your take. Have you tried Big 5, or something like it? Drop a comment and tell me what’s working — and what isn’t — for your remote or hybrid team.
The post The Remote Work Question That Won’t Go Away — And the Simple Answer That Still Works first appeared on Servant Leadership Coaching | Practical Leadership Development | Doug Thorpe.
