Remote Work Isn’t the Productivity Story You Think It Is
There has been a quiet assumption sitting underneath the shift to remote work - If people are working more flexibly, they must be working better.
It’s an easy conclusion to reach. When you remove the commute, give people more control over their time, and see an increase in visible activity, it feels like progress. Emails are answered quickly, meetings happen more efficiently and output appears steady... sometimes even higher. But that view only holds if we reduce performance to only that which we can see.
Working more does not automatically, and not always, mean working well - this is where the conversation needs to focus.
Most organisations measure remote work through activity. How often people are online, how quickly they respond, how much they produce. These are useful indicators, but they are only part of the picture. They tell us very little about how well someone is actually thinking, how clearly they are able to focus, or how effectively they are making decisions across the day.
And it's these things that underpin real performance. It's also these things that are much harder to track.
Research during the pandemic reinforces this analysis-performance gap. In one study of remote workers, perceived productivity was closely linked to prior performance and motivation, but heavily influenced by context - particularly the home environment and competing demands . In simple terms, people didn’t suddenly become more or less capable. Their environment changed, and that influenced how well they could perform.
When work moved into the home, it didn’t move into a controlled or neutral environment, it moved into real life. It moved into homes that already carried responsibility, distraction and competing demands. During the pandemic this became obvious, as work was layered on top of childcare, schooling and everything else that had nowhere else to go.
Even now, that overlap hasn’t disappeared.
For many people, the working day is shared with other roles, and that has a direct impact on attention. Studies have shown that the presence of children in the home moderates productivity in remote work, often reducing the ability to sustain focus across the day.
And that last point is the one that tends to get missed... Productivity isn’t just about time... it’s about attention, too.
What we are seeing in many remote environments is not a lack of effort, but a fragmentation of focus. The working day becomes a series of partial engagements. You start something, get pulled away, return to it, then switch again.
Research into remote work interruptions shows that these breaks in attention act as cognitive strain, making it harder to maintain concentration and increasing mental fatigue over time .
So while the day might be full, it is not always effective.
There is also a quieter shift happening underneath this. Remote work has extended the working day, often without people realising it. Without clear boundaries, work becomes more continuous. Studies have linked this to work intensification and difficulty disengaging, which then affects recovery and performance .
We’re also seeing this influence performance through altered sleep patterns. One study found that 64% of professionals met criteria for insomnia post pandemic, increasing from 44.5% before, with remote workers more likely to experience sleep disruption than those working in person .
That is not just highlighting a wellbeing issue - It directly affects how well people can think, how clearly they make decisions, and how they perform and sustain their performance under pressure.
This links closely to what I explore in Balancing Act, particularly in the Mental-Physical Health Paradigm. Performance is not just about output. It can't be. It has to take into account the condition(s) the individual is operating in. When recovery drops, performance doesn’t just carry on....it slowly erodes,.
Another assumption that doesn’t follow through well is that remote work affects everyone in the same way.... It simply doesn’t.
Some people find it easier to focus without office distractions. Others struggle without structure. Some environments support performance. Others compete with it.
Research highlights this variation clearly. Remote work can improve work-life balance for some, while simultaneously increasing stress, communication challenges, and mental strain for others .
The point is not that remote work is ineffective - It’s that it is not neutral.
It changes the conditions people are working within, and those conditions influence performance in ways that are not always visible in short-term metrics.
What this requires from organisations is a shift in thinking. Not just about where work happens, but about how work is experienced.
This is where the Calibration Model™ becomes relevant. Performance sits at the intersection of environment, mental capacity, and workload. When those are out of alignment, output may remain steady for a period, but it becomes harder to sustain.
Remote work hasn’t broken performance, it has simply exposed the cracks that were and are already there.
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References
- Duong, D. (2021) ‘Is remote work affecting health workers’ sleep?’, CMAJ, 193(21), pp. E780-E781. DOI: 10.1503/cmaj.1095941.
- Ropponen, A. (2025) ‘Remote work - the new normal needs more research’, Scandinavian Journal of Work, Environment & Health.
- Szulc, J. M., Riedel, A., D’Arcy, C. and others (2023) ‘Neurodiversity and remote work in times of crisis: lessons for HR’, Personnel Review.
- Toscano, F. and Zappalà, S. (2021) ‘Overall job performance, remote work engagement, living with children, and remote work productivity during the COVID-19 pandemic: a mediated moderation model’, European Journal of Psychology Open, 80(3), pp. 133–142. DOI: 10.1024/2673-8627/a000015.
