Several months into remote work, many leaders miss something they never noticed they had: a feel for how projects were going. They used to see who was in early, who looked worried, and who was huddled around a whiteboard. Without that, some compensate by adding status meetings, demanding daily reports, or installing software that tracks activity. It’s an understandable reaction. It’s also the wrong one.

Why surveillance fails

Counting hours online or keystrokes measures presence, not progress. Good people notice quickly, and they respond by looking busy. Meanwhile the real signals, such as a blocked dependency or a risk growing quietly, stay hidden. More status meetings have a similar effect: they consume the time people need to do the work, and they rarely surface bad news any faster.

What to do instead

Governance has always been about decisions and evidence, not observation. Remote work makes that easier to see. Consider these practices:

1. Check in on outcomes. Ask what was delivered and what will be delivered next, not how many hours people worked.
2. Publish dashboards that everyone can read, including the team. Keep them few and simple: scope, schedule, risks, and open decisions. If the team doesn’t trust the numbers, fix the data before adding more charts.
3. Hold lighter but regular steering meetings. A 30-minute session every two weeks, with a clear agenda and the right decision makers, beats a monthly marathon.
4. Keep a decision log. Record what was decided, by whom, and why. It saves arguments later and helps new team members catch up.
5. Trust, but verify. Give people room to work, and confirm progress through demonstrations, reviews, and delivered work.

Picture a regional distributor running a systems replacement with a team spread across five cities. The sponsor asks for daily written reports and gets them, along with a growing stack of documents nobody reads. After switching to a shared board, a biweekly demonstration, and a one-page risk summary, the sponsor sees problems earlier and the team gets hours back each week.

The PMO’s role

A project management office (PMO) is well placed to make this work. It can set the lightweight standards for dashboards, decision logs, and steering cadence, so each project doesn’t invent its own. It can also act as a translator, helping executives read the signals and helping teams understand what leaders need to know. The PMO that insists on more reporting for its own sake will lose credibility quickly. The one that makes information easy to find will gain it.

This week, pick one project and ask what decision your current reports help you make. If the answer is none, replace them with something that does. If you’d like help designing remote governance for your PMO, get in touch.