Since March I have been living in Limassol. The sea is a few steps away, the sky is blue almost all year round, and I drink my morning coffee in the sun even in November. The catch is that many of the people I work with are in Romania and other countries. So for the last eight months I have been leading and advising teams I don’t see at the office every day.
When I tell friends in Bucharest, the first question is nearly always the same: “So how do you know what people are doing if you’re not there?” The question itself says a lot about how work is still seen in Romania. Remote work is normal at many tech companies abroad, but for most Romanian businesses it is still an oddity, a perk, or a polite form of slacking off. Here is what I have learned so far.
1. Trust replaces control, but not clarity
If you need to see people at their desks to feel calm, distance is not the problem. The problem is that you never defined what a job well done looks like. Remotely, you can no longer “sense” who is working, so you are forced to be very precise: what needs to be delivered, by when, to what standard, and who decides when it is finished.
Trust doesn’t mean leaving everything up in the air. It means setting clear goals and then not hovering over everyone’s screen. I have noticed that good people grow when they are given room, while those who are not a good fit surface much faster than in an open-plan office where you can look busy all day.
2. Writing becomes the team’s official language
In an office, half of the information travels through the hallway, the coffee machine, or a quick “let me just tell you something”. Remotely, if it isn’t written down, it doesn’t exist. That is why I insist that decisions, processes and priorities are written: a document with the quarter’s goals, a summary after every important call, a page on “how we do things here”.
It sounds like bureaucracy, but it is the opposite. A new person can read the documents and be productive within days, without depending on someone’s memory. And you stop repeating the same explanation ten times. Bonus: writing forces you to think clearly. If you can’t explain a task in five lines, you probably don’t know exactly what you want either.
3. A fixed rhythm of conversations
Distance doesn’t mean less communication. It means organized communication. The rhythm that seems to work looks roughly like this:
- A weekly 1:1 with every key person, 30 minutes: what is working, what is blocked, what they need from me.
- A short daily check-in, 10-15 minutes, only where the team really works on the same thing, such as the product or a launch. Not a meeting, just a sync.
- A longer monthly meeting about direction and numbers, not small tasks.
- Asynchronous messages for everything else, answered the same day, not the same minute.
The golden rule: meetings happen even when “there’s nothing special”. That is exactly where small problems show up before they become big ones.
4. Tools matter, but they don’t work miracles
Today we have tools we could only dream of ten years ago. Slack for everyday conversations, Skype or Zoom for video calls, Google Drive and Google Docs for documents everyone edits at the same time, Trello or Asana for tasks, Jira for development teams. All of them are cheap, or even free, for small teams.
But a tool won’t fix a bad process. I have seen teams with three task management apps and no idea what the week’s priorities were. Pick a few tools, agree on what gets discussed where (for example, decisions go into documents, not lost in a chat thread) and stick to it. And turn your camera on during calls. A person’s face tells you things their voice doesn’t.
5. The time zone and plane ticket advantage
Here I am lucky. Cyprus and Romania share the same time zone, so my working day overlaps perfectly with the team in Bucharest. No midnight calls, as when you work with someone in Asia or the Americas. The flight takes around two hours, so I can make it to an important meeting on the same day.
And I do. I come to Romania often, for my friends but also for my teams. I strongly believe a remote team needs regular face-to-face time: a day when you talk strategy, eat together and remember that you are people, not avatars on Slack. A good dinner is worth a lot of emails.
A while ago I wrote about building a SaaS from Romania for customers all over the world. Now I see the same story from the other side: leading, from abroad, a team that works in Romania.
6. Hire autonomous people and measure outcomes, not hours
Not everyone is cut out for remote work. Some people need the structure of an office, colleagues next to them and a boss who asks at lunch how things are going. That is perfectly fine, but a distributed team needs something else: people who organize their own day, ask when they don’t know, and speak up early when something isn’t working.
In interviews, I look less at the CV and more at how the person writes and how they take ownership. And after hiring, I forget about the time sheet. I don’t care whether someone worked from 9 to 6, or from 7 to 11 and then again in the evening. I care whether they delivered what we agreed on. Hours worked are a lazy metric. Results are the only metric that counts.
7. Culture and recognition at a distance
The biggest risk of remote work isn’t laziness, it is isolation. People can end up feeling like external contractors rather than part of a team. So culture has to be built deliberately: a channel for celebrating wins, thanks given in public rather than only in private, a call where you also talk about something other than tasks.
Recognition matters more remotely, because the pat on the back in the hallway is gone. A short message like “what you did yesterday really made a difference” takes ten seconds and keeps someone motivated for a week. And watch out for the other extreme: without a commute to close the day, people risk working non-stop. I know from experience how easily that happens, and I wrote about it in my piece on entrepreneurs and burnout.
8. When remote doesn’t work
I don’t want to sell remote work as a cure for everything. There are situations where it is hard or even impossible:
- when the company is very young, still looking for its direction, and decisions change daily;
- when the team is very junior and needs daily, side-by-side learning;
- when there is a serious crisis and you need everyone in the same room;
- when the work involves production, logistics or physical contact with customers;
- when the manager can’t delegate and makes up for it with control.
In those cases, you either fly in more often, put someone you trust in charge locally, or accept that the role needs to be done from the office. And that is perfectly fine.
Final thoughts
After almost eight months, my conclusion is simple: distance doesn’t ruin a good team, it just reveals what was already there. With clear goals, the right people and disciplined communication, you can lead from anywhere. Without them, the office won’t save you either. In fact, it was one of my lessons from last year for entrepreneurs: clarity beats control.
How do you work? Do you have remote colleagues or managers, or does your company still want everyone at the office from 9 to 6? I would love to hear what has worked for you and what hasn’t.