This refers to the skill of noticing what is happening in a room of remote workers at a Grow Remote meetup. It’s all about facilitation and the process of gently shaping an experience so that everyone feels included. This month, local leaders from right across Ireland joined the call. We had chapters represented from Galway, Skerries, Gorey, Kilkenny, Macroom, Castlerea, Cork City, Lusk, Greystones, Kinsale, Kilmuckridge, Wexford, Tralee, and Kinsale. So much tenure in the room and so much wisdom to draw from.

The session also marked a farewell to Dónal Kearney, our outgoing Head of Programmes, after nearly five years with Grow Remote. Dónal started in 2021 as Community Facilitator and held the role of Community Manager from 2022 – 2025. In that time, the community has emerged from the Covid-19 pandemic; from zero offline events to an average of 300 social meetups per year, all led by and for remote employees nationwide. Although he is leaving the Grow Remote team, Dónal will stay on as a local leader in his hometown of Skerries.

Four Scenarios

The core of the session saw our local leaders breaking into smaller groups to work through four common situations that arise when hosting a local event:

• Scenario 1 – The Shy Newcomer: Someone is standing alone checking their phone while everyone else is chatting in groups.
• Scenario 2 – The Dominator: One person is talking loudly and taking over every conversation circle.
• Scenario 3 – The Energy Drop: Halfway through the event, energy feels flat and conversations are slowing.
• Scenario 4 – The Closed Circle: Three established community members are deep in conversation and unintentionally blocking newcomers from joining.

What would you do in these scenarios? Well, the local leaders shared 10 insights in this month’s Collaboration Session.

1. Open with “What brought you here tonight?” — Dónal (Skerries)

Scenario 1: Dónal’s favourite opener gives newcomers space to share their story without feeling interrogated. It allows the host to understand more about the need that is being met and allows the conversation to flow organically. It is useful for a local leader because it can help to facilitate introductions and thematic conversations. Mary in Castlerea said she would be stealing it!

2. Use universal topics to break the ice — Kitti (Gorey)

Scenario 3: When the energy dips, Kitti reaches for what everyone can relate to: the weather, the commute, where people have moved from. In a community like Gorey, where many attendees have recently relocated from Dublin, common-ground topics quickly become real conversations.

3. Keep prompts in your back pocket — and pull out the camera — Liam (Kilkenny)

Scenario 3: Liam recommended having a handful of light questions ready (“any plans for the holidays?”) before you walk in the door. And if the room flattens, he suggested using the moment to annoucne a group photo or short video. Sometimes it can be awkward to interrupt conversations to ask for a photograph. Doing so can lift the room’s energy, gets people laughing, and gives an excuse for people to move around. It also gives the Grow Remote team something to share on socials. As host, your key role is to facilitate a positive experience for all so another good idea is to invite people to start chatting to someone new after the photo – it’s a good cadence to freshen up the group.

4. Pay attention to where people are sitting — Rachel (Greystones)

All Scenarios: Rachel pointed out how curved pub seating can accidentally trap people on the edges of the conversation. As host, you can get hemmed in too. The fix is simple: stand up, take a group photo, and don’t sit back down in the same spot. She also reminded us of the long game – an attendee from her chapter’s relaunch event came back more than a year later for a co-working meetup. Community-building is a slowburn!

5. The format of the event shapes who shows up — Mary (Castlerea)

All scenarios: A cookery workshop attracts a different attendee than a pub social. Some people show up for the activity, not the group – and that is okay. The lesson is resilience: a one-off attendee is not a reflection on the community. From experience, the group spoke about the fact that the word-of-mouth notoriety can often be strong due to consistency and high quality of experience. But it doesn’t always mean people can come back every time!

6. Pair a newcomer with a regular — Anna (Galway)

Scenarios 1 and 4: We all know how risky it can feel to attend a new group, especially when you might be naturally shy or introverted. Anna suggested a simple buddy system: at the start of the event, partner each new face with a regular who can act as their “insider”. It is a small intervention that prevents anyone from drifting to the edge but gives a safety net for that newcomer.

7. Inclusion is the keyword — Anna (Kilmuckridge)

Scenario 2: The work of a host is to make sure everyone in the room has a way into the conversation, not just the loudest voice. The host’s role is to make sure everyone feels included. This can mean gently bringing people into the room, carefully interrupting someone who is dominating the conversation, and even taking a talkative attendee aside to allow for other conversations to spring up in their absence. This early intervention can be enough to rebalance the conversational energy for the rest of the evening.

8. Watch the body language — Nuria (Cork City)

Scenario 2: Nuria pointed out the early signals that a dominator is becoming a problem: faces that don’t look happy, people looking away, attendees quietly drifting into smaller groups. It’s the hosts role to read those signals before the energy leaks out of the room and intervene in an upbeat, positive way. The worst thing the host can do is avoid the problem. That said, sometimes good facilitation means letting a scenario play out. It’s all about interpreting the energy and relies on your own position as “host” – it’s your party and people will expect you to take the lead so don’t be shy about intervening.

9. Redirect by sparking new conversations — Ivanna (Newbridge)

Scenario 2: Ivanna shared her own playbook for handling a dominator: gently ask questions of other people in the circle, starting fresh conversations that include everyone. It might take more than one attempt over the course of the night, and that is normal. Victoria also mentioned that we should presume goodwill – often someone is talkative because they are comfortable and excited to be there. However, if the conversation takes a negative turn or becomes too much of a debate or too controversial for your taste, the local leader is entitled to move the conversation in an authorative tone on: “At Grow Remote, we don’t talk to each other like that. Let’s move the conversation on. Thank you, folks.” This can take practice, so don’t worry if it doesn’t feel natural to take that tone. Also – it’s worth saying this practically never happens in the Grow Remote community over 300 events per year!

10. Build a welcome-by-introduction culture – Laetitia & Shauna (Gorey)

In Gorey, every new face is introduced to the room. No icebreaker, no script – just a friendly announcement: “this is Shauna, she’s new, Shauna do you want to introduce yourself?” When that becomes the cultural norm, the closed-circle problem rarely takes root because people get the chance to introduce themselves as peers. It reduces the in-group / out-group dynamic by prioritising inclusion from the outset.

We’re currently welcoming Local Leaders!

Trust, as Dónal said on the call, is the key currency at the local level. It is built one conversation at a time. If you want to make this kind of impact in your own community, we welcome new local leaders every month. Register for our next info session here.

The post Reading the Room: 10 Insights from Grow Remote Local Leaders appeared first on Grow Remote.

Most of this research is global, but if you’re running a remote or hybrid team in an Irish SME, it maps very closely to what we see here on the ground. We know because we hear it directly. Through conversations with hundreds of Irish employers and insights from leaders going through our training programmes. Real world challenges that employees, managers and businesses are dealing with right now.

1) “Quiet cracking” and the engagement recession

The report introduces a concept called “quiet cracking.” It’s not the same as quiet quitting, where someone deliberately checks out. Quiet cracking is subtler. The person keeps showing up. They’re still in the meetings, still responding to messages. But underneath, they’re slowly fracturing under the weight of pressure, unclear expectations, and the feeling that no one is really paying attention.

20% of workers experience it frequently or constantly. 78% of managers say they’ve noticed a productivity drain linked to individual disengagement in the last 12 months.

Left unaddressed, it spreads. The report calls this the “engagement recession.” Teams lose momentum. Collaboration drops off. Even the good performers start to wobble.

Now picture that playing out in a distributed team. In an office, you can see the signs. Someone who’s gone quiet, who used to contribute in meetings and now just sits on mute. In a remote or hybrid setting? That person can disappear into the noise for weeks before anyone notices. The gap between what’s actually happening and what the manager thinks is happening gets very wide, very quickly.

Grow Remote Opinion: This isn’t a problem that office mandates are going to fix. You can’t proximity your way out of disengagement. The managers who catch this early are the ones who’ve built real habits around connection, who ask the right questions, and who’ve created enough trust that people will actually tell them when something’s wrong. That’s a skill. It’s not something most people were ever formally taught.

2) The EQ gap is real, and it’s bigger in distributed teams

The report’s section on emotional intelligence (EQ) is one of the more below the line challenges that businesses are facing.

For a co-located manager, some of the EQ work happens naturally. You pick up on body language. You notice who’s distracted, who’s energised, who needs a conversation after the meeting. Remote and hybrid leaders don’t have those defaults. They have to be intentional about all of it. Every check-in, every one-to-one, every moment where someone needs to feel seen has to be designed into how they work, not picked up by accident.

71% of employers say EQ matters more than IQ. 90% of top performers display high emotional intelligence. And yet only 13% of organisations provide any form of EQ training.

When EQ training is rare across the board, and the environment strips away the natural cues that help even an untrained manager pick things up, you’re asking people to lead with one hand tied behind their backs.

Grow Remote Opinion: We’ve now trained over 1,000 Irish managers and EQ comes up constantly, not as a concept but as a practical gap. Leaders tell us they didn’t realise how much they were relying on physical presence to read their teams until it was gone. The good news is it’s trainable. The leaders who come through our programme leave with habits and frameworks that replace what proximity used to do for free.

3) 85% of professionals are considering a career move in 2026

The report’s section on career cushioning rounds out the picture. Career cushioning is when employees quietly start building a safety net. They’re updating their CVs, having conversations with recruiters, doing a course on their own time. Not because they’ve decided to leave, but because they’re not sure they can rely on where they are.

The research shows 68% of workers are already doing some version of this. And 85% are considering a move this year.

The report is clear about what drives it: poor communication, no career clarity, and leadership that doesn’t inspire confidence. Those three things hit differently when you’re working remotely. When you’re not physically present, it’s easier to feel like you don’t matter, like you’re not on anyone’s radar, like the organisation’s direction doesn’t include you. A good remote leader closes that gap intentionally. A lot of managers just don’t know how yet.

Grow Remote Opinion: 85% is a harsh number but it doesn’t surprise us. What we hear from leaders on the ground is that people aren’t always leaving because the work is bad. They’re leaving because they experience low job satisfaction or engagement. You can’t solve this by being a good manager in a meeting once a week. It has to be built into how you lead every day. That’s the leadership culture we help define and shape.

The common thread

These aren’t three separate problems. They’re the same problem showing up in different ways. Organisations have adopted remote and hybrid working without equipping their managers to actually lead in that environment. The policy changed. The capability didn’t keep up.

That’s what our “Lead From Anywhere” was built to address.

An 8-week, fully funded online leadership programme for current and aspiring managers of remote and hybrid teams. Practical learning, peer to peer conversations and frameworks that participants can apply directly to their own teams, from day one.

We’ve trained over 1,000 managers across Irish SMEs and global companies. Over 90% went on to implement new leadership initiatives with their teams. Over 80% said they felt noticeably more confident in handling the real challenges of remote work.

The next cohort starts 28th May 2026 and registration closes on 21st May. Places are limited, and it costs nothing. €1,350 value, €0 cost to your organisation or your managers.

If you recognise or want to prepare for any of the challenges above , this is a practical place to start.

If you’d like more information, you can view a course brochure here or book a call with Ciara our Learner Success Manager here for a 1:1 chat.

If you just want to secure a space click below and register your interest before 21st May
https://growremote.ie/lead-from-anywhere/

______________________________________________________________________________________________________

About Grow Remote

Our mission is to solve the challenges of remote work in order to unlock social, economic and environmental change for individuals, employers and local communities.

Featured Photo by LinkedIn Sales Solutions on Unsplash

The post Talent Challenges Irish SMEs Face in 2026, and What They Mean for Remote and Hybrid Leaders appeared first on Grow Remote.

Today, Ireland marks National Workplace Wellbeing Day 2026. This year’s theme, led by IBEC, is Belonging: the idea that true wellbeing happens when everyone feels seen and valued, in a diverse and intergenerational world of work.

At Grow Remote, we work and engage with remote employers and employees everyday. From our work on the ground that wellbeing and belonging matters to both. When we remove location from the equation, the question of how people managing their wellbeing, connect, feel included, and feel part of something bigger doesn’t always happen organically or by default.

Wellbeing in a distributed team doesn’t happen by accident. It’s designed. If you are an individual taking responsibility for your personal wellbeing or a leader working hard to help your remote or hybrid team thrive this is for you.

The Remote Wellbeing Picture in 2026: Still a Design Challenge

Remote and hybrid work continues to be a net positive for the majority of people in Ireland. Flexibility is no longer a perk. It’s a pillar of how people work and live. A recent IBEC survey found that 68% of employees identified hybrid or flexible work as key to their wellbeing.

Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace report found that remote workers reported higher rates of loneliness compared to their in-office counterparts.

Buffer’s State of Remote Work report consistently identifies isolation and the struggle to truly switch off as the top challenges for remote workers year after year.

And closer to home, counselling psychologist Niamh Delmar has spoken about the specific challenges of remote isolation for those who relied on the workplace for their social connection: “The difficulty with it is the lack of socialising. If people have a big social network at home and in their area, that’s great, but a lot depend on work for that.”

However, none of this is an argument against remote work. It’s a reason for making sure its done well!

Isolation is not inevitable. It is a workplace wellbeing design challenge, and it can be solved. That starts with individual remote workers taking ownership of their own wellbeing, and it is strengthened enormously when managers lead with intention.

For Remote Workers: Practical Ways to Protect Your Wellbeing

Belonging in a distributed team is something you actively participate in, not just receive. The habits below protect your own wellbeing and, when practised across a team, create the kind of environment where everyone feels seen. Whether you’re a seasoned remote professional or still finding your rhythm in a distributed team, these are the habits and practices that make the biggest difference.

1. Anchor Your Day With Routine

Without the structure of a commute or office hours, days can blur at both ends. Wellbeing experts consistently point to keeping your routine as anchored as possible. Wake up at a consistent time, have breakfast, get dressed. If you used to commute, use that time for something that sets you up well: a walk, a workout, or ten minutes with no screens. Create daily goals to keep your mind focused and give your day a shape.

A consistent start signals to your brain: work mode begins now. An equally intentional end signals: it’s done for today.

2. Create a Workspace That Works for Your Mind and Body

Your environment shapes how you feel. Designating a specific workspace, even a corner of a room, creates the mental boundary between work and home life. Keep it clear of clutter, comfortable, and as separate from living space as your home allows.

Don’t underestimate the physical dimension of this either. Ergonomics and mental health are more connected than many people realise. A chair that supports your back (one of our team members Graham will always recommend the Ikea Markus chair) , a screen at eye level, good lighting: these aren’t luxuries. Poor physical setup creates cumulative stress that compounds over time. Investing in your home workspace is investing in your wellbeing.

3. Manage Your Work-Life Boundaries Actively

Remote work doesn’t automatically deliver better work-life balance. It gives you more control over it. That control has to be actively used. Set clear working hours and stick to them. Communicate your availability to your team. When the day is done, log off fully. Checking email after hours might feel harmless in the moment, but it chips away at the recovery time your brain needs.

As Deel’s guidance for remote workers notes, remote work gives workers more control over their time than a physical office, but it can spiral without active management. Build a routine that includes non-work time as intentionally as you schedule meetings.

4. Stay Connected. Make It More Than Work.

Communication with colleagues isn’t just a productivity tool; it’s a lifeline for wellbeing. Regular video check-ins, informal chats, virtual coffee breaks: these are not noise in your workday, they’re essential signal. Seeing someone’s face when you talk really does make a difference to how connected you feel.

Here’s what often gets forgotten: don’t let every interaction be about work. Begin and end your day with a bit of personal conversation. Ask how people are. Share something non-work related in team channels. The human texture of office life doesn’t disappear when you go remote. It just needs to be recreated with a little more intention.

And when your team has in-person retreats or meetups, prioritise them. Regular face-to-face time, even if infrequent, builds the trust and psychological safety that makes distributed collaboration work well.

5. Take Breaks. Intentionally.

‘Presenteeism’, the habit of staying glued to your screen to appear productive, is particularly common among remote workers. It’s understandable, but it’s counterproductive. Regular breaks, whether a coffee, a walk during lunch, or a proper step away from the screen, are what allow you to come back focused and effective. Your brain is not a machine. Treat it accordingly.

6. Look After Your Physical Health

Physical wellbeing has a direct and significant impact on mental health. Daily exercise, even a short walk, matters. Eating well matters. Getting outside matters. When working from home, it’s easy to fall into patterns that feel fine in the short term but take a toll over time. Build movement into your day with the same seriousness you bring to your work calendar.

7. Know the Signs: In Yourself and Others

Being aware of when wellbeing is slipping, in yourself or a colleague, is one of the most important skills a remote worker can develop. Signs to watch for include: starting work later than usual, becoming harder to reach, changes in how someone shows up in meetings, only ever talking about work when you speak one-to-one, or a noticeable drop in energy or engagement.

If you notice these signs in yourself, reach out to your manager or a trusted colleague. If you notice them in someone else, reach out to them. You don’t need to fix anything. You just need to not look away.

Two Things Worth Trying This Week

If there are two practical moves any remote worker in Ireland can make right now to support their own wellbeing, these are them.

Come to a Grow Remote Event

If isolation is one of the biggest challenges of remote work, belonging is the answer. Belonging doesn’t require an office. It requires community. That’s exactly why Grow Remote runs regular social events for remote and hybrid workers in towns and cities across Ireland, with over 50 chapters and growing.

These aren’t networking events in the traditional sense. They’re genuinely fun, low-pressure, locally rooted gatherings built specifically around the challenges remote workers face. The impact numbers speak for themselves:

– 90% of attendees say they meet interesting people and have fun,
– 80% feel more connected to their local community, and
– 30% learn something new about the remote working ecosystem in Ireland.

If there isn’t a chapter near you yet, our national volunteer programme can help get one started.

Visit our Community page for all the details and find your nearest event →
https://growremote.ie/community/

Get Out of the House. Try a Hub.

Remote work doesn’t have to mean home-only work. Ireland’s national network of digital hubs gives remote and hybrid workers access to professional, connected workspaces in towns and communities across the country, and the benefits go well beyond a decent chair and fast wifi.

Working from a hub one or two days a week brings flexibility without sacrificing focus. It gives you control over your environment and your schedule in a way that works around your life, not against it. It puts you in a room with other professionals, creating the kind of casual, energising interaction that remote work from home can’t replicate. And it keeps you productive and sharp: the change of scene, the structure of leaving the house, the absence of household distractions all contribute to getting good work done.

Visit Connected Hubs to find your nearest hub, book your first day, and start building it into your remote working routine.

For Managers: Wellbeing Is Part of Your Job

If there’s one shift we’d love to see from this year’s National Workplace Wellbeing Day, it’s this: managers fully understanding that supporting the wellbeing of their remote team is a core part of their role, not an added extra.

No matter the size of your organisation, and no matter how many formal policies or programmes are in place, an employee’s day-to-day experience of wellbeing is shaped most directly by one person: their manager. You set the pace, the tone, the communication habits, and the culture of your team.

Managing a distributed team is genuinely different from managing people in the same building. The signals are different. The interventions are different. Getting it wrong carries real consequences. Burnout, disengagement, and quiet departure can all take hold before a manager even notices something is wrong.

Here’s what the research, and what we have learned from our own experience working with employers across Ireland.

Wellbeing Looks Different for Everyone

Before anything else: there is no one-size-fits-all formula for wellbeing. Some people thrive with quiet, focused days and minimal interaction. Others need regular collaboration and connection to feel energised. One person’s balance is finishing at 5pm sharp; another’s is flexible hours with space for life in between.

You can’t support someone’s wellbeing effectively if you assume it looks the same for everyone. Getting to know what’s normal for each person on your team, their usual energy, pace, tone, and communication style, is foundational. It also gives you the baseline you need to notice when something shifts.

This is what belonging looks like in practice for a manager: not treating your team as a uniform group, but making the effort to understand what makes each person feel genuinely included and valued.

Create the Conditions That Support Wellbeing

Supporting your team’s wellbeing isn’t about having all the answers or fixing everything. It starts with creating an environment where people feel safe, clear about what’s expected of them, and able to do their work at a sustainable pace.

That means building genuine psychological safety, so people feel they can speak up, ask for help, or flag when something isn’t working without fear. It means setting clear expectations, because vagueness and ambiguity create stress, especially in distributed teams where casual clarification isn’t as easy. It means protecting time for rest and recovery and building flexibility into how work gets done. A constantly busy team isn’t always a high-performing team.

Recognition matters too. In distributed teams, small wins and hard work can go unnoticed unless someone builds in the habit of naming them. Say thank you, specifically and frequently. Praise effort and progress, not just outcomes.

Notice Changes and Offer Support

In a distributed team, early signs of stress or struggle are easy to miss. Remote managers need to stay alert to subtle shifts: a change in tone, slower response times, less engagement in meetings, or someone who used to contribute going quiet.

If something feels off, trust that instinct. Reach out privately. Lead with care and curiosity, not assumption. Something as simple as “I’ve noticed you’ve seemed a bit quieter lately, just wanted to check in” can open a door that someone needed opened. You’re not expected to solve anything. Your role is to create the space, show you care, and let people know support is there.

Walk the Walk

Your words set expectations. Your actions set the culture. If you send messages when your calendar says you are offline, respond to emails over the weekend, skip your lunch break, or never take your full holidays, your team will take their cues from what you actually do, not what you say you value.

Modelling healthy boundaries is one of the most powerful things a manager can do for their team’s wellbeing. Log off visibly. Protect your own time. Normalise flexibility by using it yourself. When you demonstrate that sustainable work is genuinely valued, it gives your team permission to do the same.

A Note on Manager Wellbeing

Here’s something that doesn’t get said enough: managers need to look after themselves too.

Being a manager of a distributed team is a demanding role. You’re supporting your team, delivering on organisational goals, staying on top of communication across flexible work schedules , and trying to live your own life at the same time. In a distributed context, you can also lack the informal peer support that comes naturally in an office. The hard days can feel harder when you’re facing them alone.

There’s an important distinction between stress and overwhelm. Stress is a normal part of the job and, with the right support, manageable for short periods. Overwhelm is what happens when stress continues with no pause and no recovery. At that point, it’s no longer possible to show up well for your team.

Self-care isn’t a luxury. It’s what keeps you able to lead. Know what energises you and what drains you. Build your support network and lean on it when you need to. Protect your own rest and recovery with the same intention you bring to protecting it for your team.

Your team doesn’t need a perfect manager. They need someone who is steady, realistic, and genuinely invested in the wellbeing of everyone on the team, themselves included.

Lead From Anywhere: Training Built for Remote & Hybrid Managers in Ireland

If you’re a new manager of a distributed team that wants to lead with more confidence, connection, and impact, we have built a solution to many of the challenges you and your team will face.

Lead From Anywhere is a fully funded short course for managers of distributed teams in Ireland. It’s industry expert-led, practical, and purpose-built to address the real challenges of remote and hybrid leadership, including remote work culture, team wellbeing, psychological safety, and building the kind of distributed team where people genuinely thrive.

Access to this course is fully funded through “Skills to Advance” in Ireland.

Find out more and register your interest here →
https://growremote.ie/lead-from-anywhere/

Or book a 1:1 call with Ciara from our Employer Services team to discuss a bespoke group just for your organisation.

One Last Thing

National Workplace Wellbeing Day is just a single day in the calendar.
What matters is what comes after it.

We believe remote work, done well, is one of the most powerful levers for improving the wellbeing of workers across Ireland. It gives people back their time, their autonomy, and their proximity to the communities where they actually live. But it asks something of both individuals and managers: intentionality.

Wellbeing doesn’t happen by default in a distributed team. Belonging doesn’t either. Both are built through habits, through check-ins, through honest conversations, through great management, and through the kind of community that Grow Remote exists to support.

Happy National Workplace Wellbeing Day 2026. Let’s keep building it.

About Grow Remote Our mission is to solve the challenges of remote work in order to unlock social, economic and environmental change for individuals, employers and local communities.

www.growremote.ie


Featured Image Credit: Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

The post To Thrive From Anywhere – Remote Work Wellbeing & Belonging Matters in 2026 appeared first on Grow Remote.

At Grow Remote, we have explored the research and have spoken directly with over a hundred leaders in the last year to learn about the challenges of remote. Encouragingly, the evidence suggests that remote work can help companies thrive – but only if we invest in managers.

Remote Work is a Sustainable Solution

Distributed employment is being framed as a solution not just to business management, but also to broader geopolitical and environmental challenges.

This month, the European Commission is proposing that member states encourage companies to mandate at least one day of compulsory remote working per week, where possible, as a means of reducing fossil fuel demand and enhancing energy efficiency.

This is a significant development in the public narrative on remote work we have seen across our screens in recent years. Remote employment is no longer considered merely a perk or a legacy of the pandemic. Due to its myriad social, economic and environmental benefits (the research is overwhelming), distributed operating models have become a pillar of sustainable economic policy for policymakers and corporations alike.

Throughout 2026 and beyond, we are likely to see leaders continue to explore this data-driven opportunity to keep costs down and reduce energy consumption while increasing productivity and engagement from employees.

The Numbers Speak for Themselves

Grow Remote has consistently documented the real-world impact of remote work. For every 1,000 remote jobs created in Ireland,Grow Remote’s data show:*

• €13M in local economic spend generated
• 700 additional jobs sustained locally
• 223,100 commuting hours returned to workers and their communities
• 600 tonnes of CO₂ avoided annually — equivalent to 9,500 Dublin–London flights per year

On the ground, these somewhat abstract figures represent an opportunity for thriving regional towns and rural villages, more families getting involved in communities, additional volunteering time and local spend, as well as cleaner air.

So why isn’t distributed work delivering on its full potential everywhere? The findings from Grow Remote’s interviews with employers are consistent: the biggest barrier to sustainable remote and hybrid work isn’t technology, productivity, or collaboration. It’s leadership.

Ibec confirmed this recently — Leadership Development was the number one talent management priority for Irish employers in 2025. Gallup’s multi-year research tells the same story: managers of remote and hybrid teams are under-supported, under-trained, and under pressure.

The tools and technology exist. What’s missing is the training for managers to build confidence and skills to lead effectively – from anywhere.

Solving the Management Problem

That’s precisely why Grow Remote has secured full funding for Lead From Anywhere – a leadership training programme open to managers and leaders across Irish companies of any size. The course provides the tools, frameworks, and confidence to lead distributed teams effectively. And it costs employers and individuals nothing, funded through SOLAS and the National Training Fund.

The results speak for themselves:

• 90% of participants implemented initiatives that positively impacted their business
• Over 80% felt more confident managing the challenges of distributed leadership.

As Grow Remote’s Head of Programmes, Dónal Kearney, puts it:

“As the benefits of well-designed remote work persist into 2026, we are seeing an increase in employer demand for supports and training at the same time as society’s need for them is growing too.”

Limited spaces available. First come, first served: Register for Lead From Anywhere today

* Impact data are modelled on 1,000 newly created, fully-remote jobs in the Republic of Ireland. See Grow Remote’s full workingsfor details.

The post The Positive Impact of Remote Work in 2026 appeared first on Grow Remote.

The newly released State of the Global Workplace: 2026 Report by Gallup delivers another crucial snapshot of a world and workforce in transition. Employee engagement has now fallen for two consecutive years, a first in Gallup’s history, and the data makes it clear that the question for leaders is no longer about if flexible work is viable but how employers and leaders manage it.

At Grow Remote, this question sits at the core of our mission. We work with employers, policymakers, and communities to unlock the full potential of remote work. Let’s unpack Gallup’s latest findings through the lens of remote and hybrid work and explore what it means for building a more productive, competitive inclusive and teams in the future of work in Ireland.

Remote Work by the Numbers (Global 2025 Data)

Note: Work location data drawn from Gallup’s 2026 Global Insights. Life Satisfaction data shown for exclusively remote (45%) and hybrid (45%).

The Engagement Slump Deepens

Global employee engagement has now fallen to 20%, down from its 2022 peak of 23% and continuing the consecutive-year decline that began in 2024. This is the first time in Gallup’s history of measuring engagement that it has dropped two years in a row. Every region of the world saw engagement decline or stay flat; no region improved.

The financial cost of this disengagement is staggering. Last year alone, low engagement cost the global economy an estimated $10 trillion in lost productivity, equivalent to approximately 9% of global GDP.

Manager engagement has been the biggest driver of the overall decline. Since 2022, manager engagement has dropped nine percentage points, falling from 31% to just 22% in 2025. The gap between manager and individual contributor engagement, once a reliable “engagement premium”, has now effectively disappeared.

Key Insights from Gallup’s 2026 Data

1. Remote Workers Remain the Most Engaged

At a global level, exclusively remote employees continue to report the highest engagement levels of any work arrangement at 25%, with hybrid workers close behind at 24%. On-site remote-capable workers trail significantly at just 17%, the lowest of any group. This is a striking finding: employees who could work remotely but are required to be on-site are the least engaged of all.

A previous bit of work we did says that there could be up-to 350K jobs in Ireland that could be done remotely but are not! That will be a major contributing factor to Ireland’s well below average engagement score and will be costing businesses some serious employee engagement related €.

Gallup has previously reported that upto 70% of team engagement is influenced by the manager. This makes the manager crisis described above especially acute for remote and hybrid teams, where intentional leadership is not just a nice to have – it is a key competitiveness and productivity lever.

2. Hybrid and Remote Workers Report Equal Life Satisfaction

Both exclusively remote and hybrid employees report the highest life satisfaction (“thriving”) rates at 45% each. On-site remote-capable workers score noticeably lower at 32%. The pattern continues to support what we’ve seen in previous years: flexibility, whether fully remote or a blend, is consistently linked to higher overall wellbeing.

3. Remote Workers Continue to Experience Higher Stress

Fully remote and hybrid employees both report daily stress at 46%, considerably above the on-site remote-capable rate of 39%. Loneliness figures have shifted: exclusively remote workers now report 23% daily loneliness, while hybrid and on-site remote-capable workers are similar at 22%.

While these figures have moderated from the highs reported in previous years, they remain a clear signal. Remote work, even with its engagement and wellbeing advantages, requires deliberate investment in social connection and mental health. This is precisely why our programme of localised social events for remote workers across Ireland continues to grow.

In 2025, we hosted more than 250+ events across 16 counties with over 2,000 attendees. 

90%+ said they met interesting people and had fun

70%+ felt more connected to their local community

30%+ learned something new about Ireland’s remote ecosystem

Learn more about our grassroots community work supporting remote and hybrid workers across Ireland here.

4. Remote Job Market Optimism Is Falling

The 2026 report introduces a noteworthy shift: the overall improvement in global job market optimism came entirely from non-remote-capable, fully on-site workers (+2 points). Job market optimism fell for fully remote workers (-5 points) and dropped sharply for remote-capable, on-site workers (-14 points). Hybrid workers remained flat.

Gallup suggests this may reflect a real or perceived narrowing of remote job availability as employers tighten return-to-office policies. For the remote work community, this is a trend worth watching closely, and a signal to employers that flexibility is increasingly valued as a deciding factor when workers weigh up their options.

Here in Ireland our Policy & advocacy work is seeking to address this and our 2025 Pre Budget submission has proposed that Ireland set a national target for remote jobs and more supports for employers who are struggling to transition to remote or hybrid operating models. This will increase the supply of remote jobs and reduce the amount of return to office mandates that influence job market optimisim.

2025 vs 2026: What Has Changed for Remote and Hybrid Workers?

Gallup’s 2026 report allows us to track meaningful year-on-year shifts for remote and hybrid workers. The picture is more nuanced than it might first appear.

Year-on-Year Comparison: Remote and Hybrid Workers (Global)

2025 Report = data collected in 2024. 2026 Report = data collected in 2025.

Remote engagement fell, but so did everyone else’s

Exclusively remote worker engagement dropped from 31% to 25% year on year, a six-point decline. That sounds significant, but it needs context. Hybrid engagement fell only marginally (23% to 24% is actually a slight rise), while on-site remote-capable engagement collapsed from 23% to 17%, a full six points too. The global average fell from 21% to 20%. Remote workers still lead all groups, but the gap between remote and on-site has actually narrowed, driven by a sharp deterioration for those required to be in the office despite their roles being remote-capable.

Thriving jumped sharply for remote workers

One of the most striking shifts in the 2026 data is in life satisfaction. Exclusively remote workers went from 36% thriving in 2025 to 45% in 2026, a nine-point improvement. Hybrid workers also rose, from 42% to 45%. This is a significant finding: even as engagement dipped, the overall sense of life wellbeing among remote and hybrid workers improved meaningfully. For on-site remote-capable workers, thriving actually fell from 42% to 32%, a ten-point drop. The divergence between remote/hybrid and office-required workers is growing sharper.

Loneliness among remote workers is improving

Daily loneliness reported by exclusively remote workers has fallen from 27% in the 2025 report to 23% in 2026. This is a meaningful four-point improvement, and it narrows the gap with hybrid (22%) and on-site workers (21-22%). It suggests that intentional investment in social connection, including programmes like our community events, is having a real impact over time.

Anger among remote workers is easing

Daily anger reported by exclusively remote workers dropped from 25% to 24%, a modest but consistent decline. Hybrid workers also sit slightly lower at 18% compared to 17% previously, remaining the group least likely to report daily anger. On-site remote-capable workers reported 21% anger in the 2025 data; in 2026 that figure sits at 21% also, flat.

The job market outlook has diverged sharply by work type

Perhaps the starkest year-on-year shift is in job market optimism. Fully remote workers saw a five-point fall in optimism. On-site remote-capable workers fell by a striking 14 points. The entire global improvement in job market perception was driven by on-site non-remote-capable workers (+2 points). This may reflect the real or perceived narrowing of remote job availability as employers tighten return-to-office policies, and it is a trend the remote work community needs to watch closely.

The On-Site Divide: Remote-Capable vs Not Remote-Capable

One of the most underreported stories in Gallup’s data is the stark difference between two groups of on-site workers: those whose roles could technically be done remotely but are not, and those in roles that genuinely require physical presence (healthcare, manufacturing, retail, etc.).

The 2026 data makes this divide even more striking.

Engagement: being forced on-site costs more than being unable to work remotely

On-site remote-capable workers are the least engaged of all groups globally at 17%, lower even than on-site non-remote-capable workers at 18%. The gap is small but the direction is telling: workers who know their role could be done remotely but are required to be in the office every day are slightly less engaged than colleagues in roles that have no choice. The perception of denied flexibility may matter as much as flexibility itself.

In Europe, the pattern is even more pronounced. Europe already has the lowest regional engagement in the world at just 12%. The high proportion of knowledge work roles across European economies, roles that are in principle remote-capable, makes the forced on-site dynamic particularly relevant for European employers.

Wellbeing: the thriving gap is dramatic

On-site remote-capable workers report a thriving rate of just 32%, which is 13 points below exclusively remote (45%) and hybrid workers (45%), and actually below the global average of 34%. On-site non-remote-capable workers are not separately broken out in the thriving data, but their general profile suggests a different dynamic: workers who never had the option of remote work may have different expectations and reference points. The frustration and dissatisfaction visible in the remote-capable group likely reflects a sense of what could be, rather than simply what is.

Stress: lower for on-site workers, but not uniformly

Both on-site groups report lower daily stress than remote or hybrid workers. On-site remote-capable workers report 39% daily stress versus 46% for fully remote and hybrid workers. This likely reflects the absence of the boundary-blurring, always-on dynamic that contributes to remote worker stress, but it does not translate into higher engagement or wellbeing for the remote-capable on-site group, suggesting that lower stress alone is not a driver of engagement.

Job market optimism: the sharpest signal of all

The job market data offers a particularly revealing window into how on-site remote-capable workers are feeling. Their optimism fell 14 points year on year, the largest decline of any group. This is a group that knows remote-capable roles exist, may have held or coveted them, and is watching those opportunities contract. The emotional undercurrent here is one of diminishing options rather than stable circumstances. For employers, this is a retention risk signal worth taking seriously.

In Europe specifically, job market confidence sits at 57%, above the global average of 52%, and European workers benefit from stronger labour market protections and a generally tighter talent market. As remote job availability fluctuates with shifting employer policies, European organisations that maintain genuine flexibility will have a meaningful advantage in attracting and retaining talent.

What this means for employers

The on-site divide carries a clear message for organisations. Workers in remote-capable roles who are required to be on-site are not simply the same as remote workers, just in the office. They are a distinct group with distinct engagement and wellbeing profiles. The data suggests they are among the most at-risk of disengagement and departure. Return-to-office decisions made without addressing the underlying leadership and culture issues will not resolve this. The answer is not location. It is how teams are led, regardless of where they sit.

The Real Story: Leadership Is the Lever

Gallup’s 2026 report touches on AI adoption, but the finding that matters most for remote and hybrid organisations is not about technology at all. It is about managers. Gallup has previously reported that 70% of team engagement is attributable to the direct manager, and in organisations where managers actively champion new ways of working, teams perform measurably better on every metric that counts.

This is not a new finding, but the 2026 data sharpens it. Manager engagement has fallen nine points since 2022, hitting 22% globally. Managers are increasingly squeezed, expected to drive performance and culture while navigating distributed teams, shifting policies, and evolving employee expectations. They need better support, not just more pressure.

Manager Development: Still a Missed Opportunity

Gallup’s multi-year findings paint a consistent picture: managers of remote and hybrid teams are under-supported, under-trained, and increasingly under pressure. The largest single-year drop in manager engagement on record occurred between 2024 and 2025, a five-point fall to 22%. Managers are now only as engaged as the people they lead, having lost the engagement premium they once held.

The good news is that this is not inevitable. Gallup’s data shows that within best-practice organisations, 79% of managers are engaged, nearly four times the global average. These organisations prioritise manager development as a strategic investment, not an afterthought. The difference is not the type of work or the location. It is the quality of leadership and the support structures around it.

Gallup’s previous research reinforces this directly: management performance metrics improved by 20% to 28% in organisations where managers received best-practice training. Even basic training showed meaningful benefits. The return on investment is clear, and the cost of inaction is visible in the engagement figures above.

What Employers Must Prioritise

Gallup’s 2026 findings point to a clear set of priorities for any organisation with remote or hybrid workers:

• Invest in manager training, the single highest-leverage action an organisation can take. Managers of distributed teams need specific skills: how to build connection at a distance, how to coach without proximity, how to sustain culture and performance across locations.
  
• Foster intentional connection. Remote and hybrid employees still experience elevated stress and loneliness. Social design within distributed work is not a nice-to-have; it is a performance driver.
  
• Rethink flexibility policies with care. The data is unambiguous. Workers in remote-capable roles who are required to be on-site are the least engaged of any group. Return-to-office decisions made without addressing the underlying engagement and leadership issues will not solve the problem.
  
• Redefine the role of the manager. Not as an enforcer of attendance or a monitor of output, but as a coach, connector, and culture carrier for their team, wherever that team sits.

Remote & hybrid work is not the future of work. It is 30%+ of the Irish labour force today. The organisations that will lead are those that invest in the human infrastructure around it: the managers, the connections, and the culture that make distributed teams thrive.

Ireland: A Wake-Up Call in the Data

Gallup publishes country-level data alongside the global report, and the Ireland figures deserve particular attention from anyone working in or with Irish organisations.

Source: Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2026, Ireland Country-Level Data. Three-year rolling averages ending 2025.

Only 9% of Irish workers are engaged

Ireland’s employee engagement sits at just 9%, less than half the global average of 20% and below even the already-low European average of 12%. This figure has been stuck in single digits or just above since 2018, with no meaningful recovery. Despite Ireland’s strong economy, tight labour market, and high concentration of knowledge-work roles, exactly the kinds of jobs most suited to remote and hybrid arrangements, and the engagement picture is deeply concerning.

The global data is clear that remote and hybrid workers consistently outperform their on-site counterparts on engagement. Ireland has a significant proportion of knowledge workers in roles that are, in principle, remote-capable. The question for Irish employers is not whether flexibility could help. The global data strongly suggests it can. The real question is whether they are creating the leadership and culture conditions that make it work.

High wellbeing, low engagement: a paradox with a risk

Irish workers report strong life satisfaction, with 49% thriving, matching the European average and well above the global figure of 34%. But this sits alongside the 9% engagement rate, creating a striking paradox: Irish workers feel good about their lives, they just do not feel good about their jobs.

This combination is a retention risk. Ireland also has one of the strongest job market confidence scores in Europe at 62%, above the European average of 57% and well above the global average of 52%. Workers who are disengaged at work, satisfied with life more broadly, and confident they could find another job are exactly the workers most likely to leave. For Irish employers, that is a pressing challenge.

Stress is rising and loneliness is above the European average

Irish daily stress jumped 3 points to 42%, now above the European average of 39% and the global average of 40%, reversing several years of gradual improvement. This rise is a signal that Irish workers are under increasing pressure, reinforcing the need for managers who can recognise and respond to the emotional load their teams are carrying.

Ireland also reports daily loneliness at 17%, notably higher than the European average of 13%. Given the prevalence of remote and hybrid working across Irish knowledge sectors, this is both a direct challenge and a direct opportunity. We know from Grow Remote’s own work that localised social connection makes a measurable difference. In 2024 we hosted more than 300 meetups for almost 2,500 remote workers across Ireland, with 4 out of 5 attendees saying they met interesting people and had fun. Loneliness among remote workers is not inevitable, but it requires deliberate investment to address.

The opportunity for Ireland

Ireland cannot draw on country-level remote work breakdowns from Gallup. That data does not exist at country level. The global evidence is consistent: remote and hybrid workers engage more, thrive more, and when supported well, perform better. Ireland has the workforce profile, the infrastructure, and the appetite to be a world leader in distributed work. What the data tells us is that leadership quality is the missing piece. Closing the gap between Ireland’s 9% engagement and the global best-practice benchmark of 79% among well-managed teams is not a technology problem or a location problem. A key part of it is a leadership problem, and it is entirely solvable.

Lead From Anywhere with Grow Remote

Our 2026 “Lead From Anywhere” training programme is built directly for this challenge. Designed for managers and team leaders of remote and hybrid teams, it equips leaders with the practical skills to build engagement, connection, and performance across distributed work environments, drawing on the very best management science and the real-world experience of Ireland’s leading remote work organisation.

If Gallup’s data tells us one thing above all, it is this: the difference between a thriving distributed team and a disengaged one comes down to leadership. That is a skill that can be developed. And the time to invest in it is now.

Fully funded training is available through the LOTEB scheme for qualifying employers in Ireland. Find out more and register your interest for the next available group here.

You can also book a direct call with Ciara in our Employer Services team to find out more about the training for your wider leadership team (we accept multiple individuals from the same employer) – just book a time that suits you best here.

About Grow Remote. Our mission is to solve the problems of remote work in order to unlock social, economic and environmental change for individuals, employers and local communities. www.growremote.ie

Source: Gallup

Featured Image: Photo by Corinne Kutz on Unsplash

The post Grow Remote Pulse – Special Update on Gallup’s 2026 State of the Global Workplace Report appeared first on Grow Remote.

Grow Remote community events have been designed to close this very gap.

In the first three months of 2026, remote employees nationwide have been building community and facilitating connection.

69 events have already taken place across the country this year, welcoming 452 remote workers. Behind those numbers are hundreds of individual moments: coffee shared with a stranger who turned out to be a neighbour, a one-off board game night that turned into a regular gathering, a sauna session that sparked friendships better than any networking event ever could.

Remote workers in Munster are leading the charge. 30 events took place across the province, drawing 236 attendees – a strong signal that the appetite for local connection among remote workers is not slowing down.

But what’s the impact of these events?

90% of survey respondents met interesting people and had fun

80% of survey respondents feel more connected to their community

30% of survey respondents learned more about the remote ecosystem, jobs and hubs

What People Are Doing Together

One of the most important things Grow Remote has learned over the years is that remote workers do not need a single event format. They need options.

The data from Q1 reflects that well. “Group Activities” made up the largest share of events at 59%, while “After Work Socials” accounted for 38%. That split matters, because it tells us something about who is showing up and why.

The After Work Socials is basically a drink in a pub. This familiar format provides a predictable space and a low social barrier to entry – people know what to expect! Group Activities, on the other hand, are a real mix of experiences and usually spring from the individual preferences of our volunteers. Across Q1, remote workers came together for sauna sessions, board game nights, food events, talks with pizza, and casual co-working with lunch. These are not traditional networking events. They are shared, local experiences that make connection feel natural and creative.

One attendee who attended a smaller sauna event summed it up:

“It was a smaller and cosier event type. Met some great and interesting people! Will defo attend more sauna events here.”

Grow Remote also builds community partnerships with other organisations and initiatives. Seven events took place for Daffodil Day, a fundraising day for the Irish Cancer Society. In March, 13 volunteers from the Grow Remote community got involved in local campaigns and contributed to raising over €28,360 for Daffodil Day, all of which will support victims of cancer.

The Experience Matters

We ask attendees for their honest feedback after every event. The headline number from Q1 is a 9.2 NPS score – a strong endorsement from people who have experienced these events firsthand and would recommend them to others. After 69 events, a few clear themes stand out behind that score.

Belonging is the word that comes up again and again. Remote workers are finding, in these rooms, a community of people who understand what it means to work from home – the good parts and the harder parts.

“The group was lovely and welcoming, and it was really great to be able to get out of the house and connect with people who understand what it’s like to work from home and remotely.”

“It was lovely to see people again that I met at the last event as well as new people. I feel as though there’s a great community forming and we’re all sharing our knowledge and offering to help others.”

For those who are new to an area or feeling the quiet isolation that remote work can sometimes bring, these events are proving to be more than a social outing.

“Great way for remote workers to meet others – especially if isolated via WFH or new to a town.” 

One attendee told us they had already recommended the events to two people since attending.

Variety and format also came through strongly. The breadth of activity on offer in Q1 meant that people who might not attend a typical pub social found their way in through a different door. As one attendee put it:

“Aside from the organisers (who I had met before), it allowed me to meet a diverse group of people I may never have bumped into otherwise.”

The food-and-conversation formula continues to resonate too. 

“Great opportunity to meet new people, get out of the house, eat lovely food.” 

From Cloughjordan’s good fresh local food to surprise pizza at a talks event, sharing a meal remains one of the most natural ways to build community.

Local Leaders Making It Real

None of this happens without people on the ground choosing to make it happen. Local leaders booked the venues, sent the reminders, welcomed newcomers at the door and made sure everyone felt included. Attendees noticed.

“The event was well organised, and the local leader was very friendly and welcoming to all attendees new and regular alike. There was a real sense of community as we were all local and living in the same place.”

“It was well organised and Mary was very welcoming. Lovely people, so friendly and open.”

That consistency – a welcoming host, a reliable format, a group that keeps coming back – is what turns a one-off event into a community. We welcome new local leaders every month.

This month, we also marked International Women’s Day and platformed some of our Local Leaders in our community. Have a look at the image below!

What We Are Listening To

Not all the feedback is without challenge, and that is how it should be. Some attendees would like more structure or purpose to certain formats. Others called for more effort to bring introverted attendees into the fold – more games, paired activities, or icebreakers that remove the pressure of cold conversation.

These are good signals. They come from people who care about these events enough to want them to be better. As always, we are listening.

The first quarter of 2026 shows a community in motion. 69 events. 452 people. Hundreds of new connections made across Ireland.

If you have not found your local group yet, now is a great time to start!

Find your local chapter via the Grow Remote website or start up the next one yourself by becoming a Local Leader. Join our April Local Leader Info Session by registering here.

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Every year we keep a close eye on the data that shapes how Irish employers and employees experience work. Today Morgan McKinley released their Employee Benefits Ireland Guide 2026: What our Workforce Really Wants report, drawing on responses from over 1,200 employers and employees representing an estimated workforce of more than 600,000 people. It brings us some findings and insights that every leader, HR professional and people manager in the future of work in Ireland should have eyes on if they want to thrive in the future of work.

The headline story is not what you might expect. It’s not about perks, pay or pensions (though all three feature heavily). The real story buried in this data is about the gap between what employers think they’re offering and what employees are actually experiencing and nowhere is that gap more consequential than in hybrid and flexible working.

Here are our key takeaways, and what they mean for building a thriving remote and hybrid team in 2026.

The Quick Headlines

• Hybrid working is now a baseline expectation, not a differentiator, ranked in the top benefits by ~30% of employees across every generation.
• 73% of employers offer hybrid working, but only 61% of employees say they receive it, a 12-point gap that points directly to a management and execution problem.
• 46.8% of employers offer other flexible working options, but only 28% of employees report receiving them, a gap of nearly 19 points that suggests flexibility is being lost in translation between policy and practice.
• 38.5% of employers say their model requires 5 days on-site, but only 23.1% of employees report actually working fully on-site, meaning the lived reality of work is already more flexible than formal policy in many Irish organisations.
• Fully remote working has significant unmet demand, with employee desire consistently outpacing availability, particularly in Technology (43%), Professional Services (26%) and Financial Services.
• Leadership Development is confirmed as the #1 talent management priority according to IBEC’s 2025 HR Trends data, the missing link between policy and practice.

What Do These Mean For Your Business?

1) The Debate About Where People Work Is Over. The Question Now Is How Well They’re Being Led.

Despite media noise about return-to-office mandates and big brand policy shifts, the Morgan McKinley data tells a clear and consistent story: hybrid working is now a permanent fixture of the Irish employment landscape.

Almost one in three employees across every generation, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Gen Y and Gen Z alike, rank hybrid working amongst their most important benefits. This cross-generational consistency is striking. It tells us that hybrid working is no longer a millennial preference or a pandemic hangover. It responds to universal workforce needs: reduced commuting, greater control over time, and improved work-life balance.

And employers know this. Nearly three quarters (73%) say they offer hybrid working. The challenge is that only 61% of employees say they actually receive it.

That 12-point gap is not a policy gap. Organisations have written the policies. It is a leadership and delivery gap. Team leaders and managers who haven’t been equipped to make hybrid work in practice are the single biggest barrier between a hybrid policy on paper and a hybrid experience employees actually value.

This mirrors exactly what we saw in IBEC’s 2025 HR Trends data, where only 16% of companies reported full compliance with their own hybrid policies, and over 60% estimated their staff were less than 100% compliant. The lesson is the same in both datasets: compliance follows confidence, and confidence comes from capability.

What this means for your business: The companies pulling ahead right now are not the ones adding more policies. They’re the ones investing in how work gets done, equipping their managers with the tools, frameworks and mindset to lead distributed teams with intention and consistency. That’s the competitive edge in 2026.

2) Benefits Are a Powerful Retention Lever, But Only When Employees Can Actually Feel Them

The Morgan McKinley data is unambiguous on this: over two-thirds of employees (68%) say their benefits package plays a significant role in their loyalty to their employer. Benefits are not window dressing. They are a retention strategy.

But here’s the tension. More than one in three employees (38%) perceive their benefits package as below market, even as employers largely rate their own offering as competitive. That perception gap is quietly eroding the return on investment that organisations are making in their people.

Hybrid working is at the heart of this dynamic. Employees who feel they have real, consistent access to flexibility are more likely to feel their benefits are competitive. Employees who are told they have hybrid working but experience inconsistency, manager resistance or unspoken pressure to be in the office more than the policy suggests, those employees feel underserved, regardless of what the policy document says.

The report is direct on the solution: hybrid working appears to be most effective when it is structured, clearly communicated and applied consistently.

What this means for your business: Offering hybrid where a job can be done remotely is now a market expectation. Delivering hybrid consistently, equitably and with management confidence is what actually drives loyalty. If your managers are not equipped to do that, you are spending on a benefit that isn’t landing and that’s an avoidable loss.

3) The Generational Picture Has a Critical Blind Spot and It’s Your Junior Talent

One of the most important findings in the report is one that tends to get overlooked in broader hybrid conversations. While hybrid working is valued consistently across all generations, Gen Z employees are the least likely to report actually receiving it, at 49% compared to 62-63% for Gen X and Gen Y.

This is not a coincidence. Early-career employees are more likely to be in junior roles, on probation or in positions where managers feel less confident about remote delivery. When a manager hasn’t been trained to onboard, develop and build trust with someone they rarely see in person, the path of least resistance is to quietly apply a higher in-office expectation to junior staff.

The data also shows that younger employees are significantly less likely to have access to pension and health insurance, reflecting how eligibility rules and tenure thresholds disadvantage people at the start of their careers. The same structural inequity is playing out in flexible working.

For employers, this is a retention and talent pipeline risk. Gen Z workers who experience inflexibility early in their careers are exactly the cohort most likely to leave and most likely to share that experience publicly.

What this means for your business: Manager training that specifically addresses leading early-career employees in hybrid environments is not a nice-to-have. It is a talent retention priority. If your managers don’t know how to build trust, set expectations and develop junior people remotely, you are losing your pipeline.

4) Fully Remote Is Not Going Away and Unmet Demand Is a Talent Risk

The report shows that fully remote working is currently offered by around 19% of employers overall, but employee demand for it consistently outpaces supply, particularly in Technology (43%), Professional Services (26%) and Financial Services.

The BCG and Flex Index research we referenced in our IBEC Special Edition remains instructive here: fully flexible firms grew revenues 1.7x faster than mandate-driven firms between 2019 and 2024. The competitive case for enabling remote work is not just about employee satisfaction. It is a business performance argument.

For employers not yet offering fully remote options, the question is not whether to do it. It’s whether you have the management infrastructure to do it well. Poorly managed remote work is worse than no remote work. But well-managed remote work, with clear expectations, structured communication and leaders who know how to build culture across distance, is a genuine differentiator in a competitive talent market.

What this means for your business: The organisations winning the talent market right now are not just advertising remote roles. They are building the management capability to back it up. That’s what separates an employer of choice from an employer making promises they can’t keep.

5) The Leadership Moment and the Data Has Named the Priority

Perhaps the most significant signal in the entire Morgan McKinley report is not about hybrid working at all. It’s about what makes hybrid working succeed or fail.

Across multiple sections of data there is a consistent thread: the benefits that employees feel and value are the ones that are visible, frequently used, and embedded into day-to-day working practices. Benefits that live in policy documents, that employees aren’t sure they’re entitled to, or that vary unpredictably depending on who their manager is – are below the line or invisible. And invisible benefits don’t retain people.

This is a leadership problem. And the IBEC 2025 HR Trends data confirmed it directly: Leadership Development is the #1 talent management priority for Irish employers, with 14% naming it as their top focus and 44% placing it in their top three.

The best managers today are learning to empower rather than control, build culture regardless of location, drive performance by outcomes rather than presence, and create consistency of experience for their teams wherever they sit.

The Great Place to Work 2025 Employee Experience in Ireland study reinforces this. Among Ireland’s Best Workplaces, 49% of employees work hybrid and 16% are fully remote. When trust leads, success follows.

What this means for your business: The differentiator in 2026 is not your policy. It is not your office. It is how well your managers lead. The businesses that equip their leaders to work intentionally across distributed teams will be the ones that attract talent, retain it, and build cultures that outlast market volatility.

The Grow Remote Takeaway

Taken together, the Morgan McKinley 2026 Benefits data paints a picture that will be familiar to anyone who has been working in this space.

Ireland’s organisations have done the hard work of defining and creating hybrid policies. Most of them are good policies. But policy without capability is just a document. The gap between what employers say they offer and what employees say they experience, that 12-point hybrid gap, the Gen Z access gap, the EAP awareness gap, the L&D gap, these are all symptoms of the same underlying challenge.

Managers have not been equipped to deliver the hybrid employee experience that organisations are promising.

That is the gap we built Lead From Anywhere to close.

Our training gives managers and team leaders the practical frameworks, skills and confidence to lead hybrid and remote teams with clarity and consistency, from onboarding and performance conversations to building culture and managing outcomes across distance.

The question is no longer whether hybrid is here to stay. It clearly is. The question is whether your managers are equipped to make it work, for every employee, at every career stage, every day.

Ready to close the gap between your hybrid policy and your people’s experience?

Explore Lead From Anywhere: https://bit.ly/grlfamarch

Sources: Morgan McKinley Ireland Benefits Guide 2026; IBEC HR Trends 2025; Flex Index / BCG 2019-2024 Revenue Growth Analysis; Great Place to Work Employee Experience in Ireland 2025.

Featured Image by by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

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1) Remote Work is a Lifeline for Disabled Workers – But Only If Leaders Choose to Make It So

New research from Lancaster University makes a compelling case: for disabled workers, remote and hybrid working is not a perk. It’s a performance enabler. And whether employees get to access it depends almost entirely on leadership.

The Inclusive Remote and Hybrid Working Study surveyed 1,221 disabled workers across the UK and conducted 45 in-depth interviews. The findings are significant. Most disabled workers reported that remote or hybrid working had positively impacted their mental and physical health, their work-life balance, productivity, and their ability to manage their health conditions. Crucially, the data shows a clear dose-response relationship: the more remote, the better the outcomes. 64% of fully remote disabled workers said their work pattern had positively affected their physical health, compared to just 31% of those working remotely less than half the time.

The research also explored experiences of requesting workplace adjustments, accessing equipment and support, and the role of digital tools in enabling inclusive work. Unmet needs remain significant, but the direction is clear: flexibility is foundational to this cohort’s ability to perform, progress and stay in work.

For Irish employers, there is also a legislative dimension worth noting. The Department of Children, Disability and Equality is the lead Department for the right to request a remote working arrangement that was integrated into the Work Life Balance and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 2023, enacted on 4 April 2023 which also provides the right to request flexible working arrangements for parents and carers. The Department of Enterprise, Tourism and Employment is then responsible for the provisions within the Act in relation to the right to request remote working arrangements.

Grow Remote Opinion:

This research matters. For disabled workers – who represent a significant share of every workforce, remote and hybrid working can be the difference between staying in employment or leaving it entirely. Between thriving and burning out. Between contributing fully and masking just to get through the day.

Workplace adjustments are still too often treated as a burden to be managed rather than an investment to be made. Many disabled workers still face friction, scepticism and inconsistency when requesting the flexibility they need.

The organisations that get this right in the future of work have leaders who understand that designing for the needs of disabled employees doesn’t create a two-tier workforce. It creates a better one. Inclusive design, done well, raises the floor for everyone.

Ireland’s Work Life Balance Act creates the framework only. The leaders who will build the most competitive and resilient organisations are those who go well beyond the minimum, not because they have to, but because they understand the talent, diversity and performance they unlock when they do.

Sources: Inclusive Remote and Hybrid Working Study, Lancaster University | Work Life Balance and Miscellaneous Provisions Act 2023

2) Your CEO’s Age Tells You More About Your Remote Policy Than Your Employee Handbook Does

A new working paper from Stanford, Harvard and the NBER has put some numbers behind the idea that the single biggest predictor of how much flexibility employees get isn’t industry, company size or even location. It’s who’s in charge.

Researchers at Stanford, ITAM, the ifo Institute and Princeton analysed data from over 76,000 US workers across two years.

Employees at firms founded after 2015 work from home almost twice as often as those at firms founded before 1990. Employees under CEOs aged under 30 average 1.4 WFH days per week. Under a CEO aged 60 or over, that drops to 1.1 days. The relationship is monotonic, every decade of CEO age correlates with a step down in remote working rates. And when the researchers controlled for firm age, the CEO age effect diminished, suggesting that it’s the organisation’s culture (shaped by its founders and leadership0 that drives the pattern, rather than individual management style alone.

As of December 2025, full WFH days account for 27% of paid workdays in the United States. That figure has been stable since 2023, suggesting the market has found its current equilibrium. But this research suggests that equilibrium is not uniformly distributed, it’s shaped, firm by firm, and in many cases by the people at the top.

Grow Remote Opinion:

This research should prompt a direct question for every business leader in Ireland: Is our remote work policy based on what works for people profit and planet, or on what we’re comfortable with?

The evidence here points to something many of us have observed on the ground but rarely see quantified like this. Remote and hybrid work policies are not primarily outputs of strategy or HR process. They are outputs of leadership culture. A younger founder who built their company during the pandemic, with Notion and Slack and Zoom baked into the operating model from day one, makes different decisions and strategies almost organically vs a CEO who built their leadership identity in an era where physical presence was the primary signal of commitment.

Neither is wrong by default. Remote is not for everyone or every company. But the data is clear that the organisations limiting flexibility based on leadership preference rather than operational needs are paying a price though talent, in retention, and revenue growth.

For Irish employers navigating this, the insight is practical. If your remote or hybrid policy is based primarily on the instincts of senior leadership rather than evidence about what supports your people and your output, it’s worth asking why. Culture is shaped from the top. But the best leaders know when to let data challenge their defaults.

This is precisely why leadership capability is at the heart of what we do at Grow Remote. Our Lead From Anywhere programme is designed to equip Irish managers and leaders with the skills, frameworks and confidence to lead distributed teams well – not because hybrid is the fashionable choice, but because it is increasingly the competitive one.

Sources: Younger Firms and CEOs Allow More Work from Home, NBER Working Paper No. 34795

3) Nick Bloom on The Ripple Effect of Remote & What Leaders Still Get Wrong

Stanford economist Nick Bloom, a global workplace expert and researcher on remote and hybrid work recently joined the SIEPR podcast to discuss how flexible work is reshaping not just the office, but the labour market, housing, leisure and the economy. The conversation is good listening for anyone curious about the ripple effect of remote work.

In the US, remote work has stabilised at around 25% of workdays, with hybrid arrangements now the dominant model for most Fortune 500 companies. About half of Americans work from home roughly half the time. CSO Data in Ireland paints a similar picture.

While productivity is still one of the most contested questions in the remote work debate circles, Bloom cites a large-scale randomised control trial published in Nature in 2024, run with Trip.com and its 40,000 employees. They found no productivity difference between employees coming in three days a week versus five, across marketing, accounting, finance and engineering. What hybrid did change, dramatically, was quit rates. They were down by a third in the hybrid group. When Trip.com ran the numbers, they calculated that rolling out hybrid across the full firm would increase profits by approximately $50 million a year through reduced turnover costs alone. As Bloom puts it: “If you like work from home, capitalism is your friend.”!

The latest Dublin Chambers report suggests the same is valid here in Ireland re productivity.

Bloom also raises a point that firms calling for full return to office are often using it as a tool for headcount reduction, not operational improvement. That’s a strategy with serious risks. The people most likely to leave when forced back full-time are precisely the people you most want to keep – as covered by RTE.

The podcast also touches on what Bloom calls the “ripple effect” – remote work’s broader social and economic impacts. The shift in leisure patterns, the growth in suburban housing demand, the changing role of city centres. These aren’t peripheral observations. They reflect the scale of transformation that flexible work has triggered and the degree to which it is now structurally embedded in how people live and work.

The leisure economy has been transformed. Using GPS data tracking journeys to golf courses, Bloom’s team found a significant surge in weekday golf post-pandemic. Wednesday afternoons, once quiet on the fairways, are now busy. The same pattern shows up in yoga studios, hair salons and pickleball courts – anything that used to be crushed into evenings and weekends has spread across the working week. The leisure economy hasn’t shrunk. It has redistributed. And that redistribution is a direct consequence of millions of people gaining flexibility over their time.

Housing markets have been fundamentally repriced. Bloom coined the term “the donut effect” to describe what has happened to urban geography since 2020. When you only need to commute two or three days a week instead of five, your calculus about where to live changes significantly. En masse, people have moved outward to suburbs with more space, gardens, and quieter streets.

Data from the last WDC Remote Work in Ireland Survey defines that this is already happening in Ireland.

City centres are recovering but differently than before. Rather than being sustained by worker footfall five days a week, city centres are increasingly driven by leisure and consumption. Workers who spend Monday and Friday at home are more likely to head into the city for dinner on a Wednesday evening. Research presented at Stanford’s own remote work conference showed that the best-performing urban areas are the ones with strong amenities (restaurants, culture, nightlife) rather than simply the ones with the most office space. The implication for city planning, retail and hospitality is significant.

Even crime has been affected. Bloom notes, with some wryness, that burglars have figured out that suburban homes are now occupied during the day. Residential burglaries in suburban areas have declined. Meanwhile, city centre crime (already a challenge) became more visible during the pandemic as the natural surveillance of busy streets disappeared.

Grow Remote Opinion:

There is a clear link between the global data and what we hear from employers in Ireland every week. The productivity debate has largely been settled. The retention case for hybrid is robust. The remaining challenges are not about whether flexible work works, they are about whether leaders have the capability to make it work well.

What makes this podcast worth sharing with your leadership team is not the headline productivity numbers. It is the breadth of what remote and hybrid work has actually changed.

The ripple effect is real and it is wide. The leisure economy, the housing market, urban geography, commuting patterns, suburban crime are not peripheral side effects. They are evidence of a structural shift in how people organise their lives. And that shift was not driven by policy. It was driven by millions of individual decisions made by people who, given the choice, elected to use their time and energy differently.

For Irish employers and HR leaders, the question this raises is not just “how many days should we mandate in the office?” It is “do we understand what our people’s working lives actually look like, and are we making decisions based on both that reality and the business needs.

The organisations that will lead in the next decade are not necessarily the ones that get the number of office days exactly right. They are the ones that understand why those choices matter, who they affect, and how to build the management capability to make distributed work genuinely productive rather than just compliant.

In terms of the ripple effect of remote work in Ireland – we looked at what would happen if “Six Remote Roles Open at Buffer in Feb ’26” landed Ireland here.

Sources: Myths and truths: How remote work is redefining our lives, Dublin Chambers, Grow Remote Blog, RTE

About Grow Remote

Our mission is to solve the challenges of remote work in order to unlock social, economic and environmental change for individuals, employers and local communities.

One of the ways we deliver this is through fully funded training courses for leaders and aspiring managers in Ireland – Lead From Anywhere and the next group starts March 25th with a deadline to register your interest here by March 18th.

www.growremote.ie

Featured Image Photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

The post Grow Remote: Future of Work Pulse (Edition #8) appeared first on Grow Remote.

Is remote working good or bad for women?

What happens with gender equality and inclusion when organizations go remote or hybrid, allowing their employees more flexibility in where they work? One would hope that it brings a lot of benefits to women, by giving them access to jobs or roles that they may not been able to take previously due to their family caring responsibilities. Does it indeed work this way? Beware: this opportunity comes with a darker lining.

What do employers say (and do)?

Indeed, when I talk to senior HR leaders (e.g. Mulcahy & Andreeva, 2023) or read industry reports, most of them happily report an increase in the diversity and inclusivity of the workforce since the broader introduction of remote work opportunities. Mainly, it results from hiring new talent from previously
underrepresented groups – women, working parents, neurodiverse employees. This is wonderful news.

However, if we are to capitalize on this opportunity, it’s not enough to hire diverse talent; it’s important to make sure they are included after they’ve been hired. And this is the aspect I have big concerns about. While many leaders report hiring more diverse workforce, I didn’t hear in my interviews what companies are doing to make sure these people are supported once they are hired. We are potentially heading into
a dangerous situation where we have a more diverse workforce but we are not guaranteeing they will be included properly. Belonging, career progression and retention remain a concern – especially as companies start rolling back on their remote work options and push for return-to-office.

What do employees experience?

Existing evidence on employee experiences also paints a complicated picture. In their comprehensive review of existing research on the gender aspects of remote work, Villamor et al (2023) demonstrate that remote work has the potential both to enable and inhibit career outcomes for women. For example, working virtually may both reduce gender-stereotyping social cues and at the same time provide fewer
social cues to counter already existing negative stereotypes. Similarly, working virtually may further increase the exclusion of women from informal networks (Milliken et al, 2020), or enable women to more easily access a company’s knowledge and expertise, if a company uses digital collaboration tools (Wu and
Kane, 2021). It is much easier to be ignored or omitted from important conversations when you’re working remotely; and at the same time, some women report that thanks to the “hand up” function on online meeting platforms, they have more chances to be heard in a meeting.

On the positive side, women report less everyday gender discrimination when they work remotely compared to on-site work (Doering, & Tilcsik, 2025). This drop in discrimination was particularly pronounced for younger women and those who interact mainly with men. At the darker side, Schertler et al. (2024) found that working remotely hurt women, but not men, when it came to authenticity, that is, feeling their true self at work – because they feel they can be less authentic over a screen. Women also experience more zoom meetings fatigue (Fauville et al., 2021).

In sum, remote work may both diminish and amplify the challenges women often have at the workplace. These problems can be further escalated by the fact that line managers find it more difficult to monitor these issues in the remote work setting, and most managers do not receive training to address these issues (Andreeva et al., 2025).

What can we do?

If you are an employer – ensure that you not only hire more women but also provide supports so that they feel they properly belong. To capture the benefits of remote work for enhancing diversity and inclusion, and at the same time minimise the risks these work arrangements may bring for women, you need to consciously manage the process. For example, line managers need to diagnose and monitor potential gender biases and discrimination and develop team norms and expectations that
enable everyone to thrive. To enable managers to do so, organisations need to train them and develop supportive guidance policies. Mortensen and Haas (2021) can serve as a useful starting point to develop those. If you are an employee and a woman – consider whether your boss and your company are ready to counteract potentially discriminating effects of remote working, and whether you personally have the skills and energy to do so. If you are a man, consider how you personally can help your female colleagues to feel more included when they work remotely – every little step helps.

The content above is a guest blog contributed by an independent industry expert.

Author: Dr. Tatiana Andreeva (she/her)
Role: Associate Professor in Management and Organisational Behaviour
Organisation: Maynooth University, School of Business

Tatiana’s research focuses the challenges of managing knowledge in organisations and the effects of the shift to hybrid work. For example, Tatiana’s ongoing projects examine how employees and line managers experience hybrid work, why people share or hide knowledge in hybrid work settings, how men and women experience hybrid work, and what HR managers can do to build a fair and productive hybrid workplace.

Her work has been published in the leading international academic journals and featured in practitioner outlets and mass media such as Irish Times, The Times and RTÉ Brainstorm.  As a researcher and educator, Tatiana is passionate about helping organisations making better-informed decisions. She actively engages in translating her research into actionable insights accessible to broad audience through media articles, podcasts, and invited talks and workshops for practitioners. Prior to joining academia, Dr. Andreeva worked in HR and management consulting. You can find Tatiana on Linkedin

Additional resources from Dr. Tatiana Andreeva:

Andreeva, T., Trullen, J., & Copeland, J. (2025). The evolving role of line managers in hybrid work: Challenges, experiences, and solutions, Agile-Lean Ireland. Report for practitioners

Hybrid workplaces Ibec WorkTalks (30-min listen)

4 strategies for fostering effective knowledge sharing in a distributed workplace (5-min read)

——————————————————————————————–

The author is not affiliated with Grow Remote. We are grateful for their contribution to the
Grow Remote blog and to the wider remote‑work ecosystem in Ireland.

___________________________________________________________________________________________

About Grow Remote

Grow Remote is on a mission to solve the challenges of remote work in order to unlock positive
social, economic, and environmental change for individuals, employers, and local
communities across Ireland.

One of the ways we deliver on this mission is through our fully funded leadership training
programme “Lead from Anywhere“.

Designed for current and aspiring leaders navigating remote and hybrid teams.

● 8‑week short course combining live expert‑led sessions and flexible e‑learning
● Fully funded for those employed in Ireland through Skills to Advance
● Delivered by industry experts and recognised by leading EU employers

Find out more and register your interest here:
https://bit.ly/grlfa

______________________________________________________

Featured image photo by Vitaly Gariev on Unsplash

The post Future of Work – Industry Expert Guest Blog: The Flexibility Trap: Remote Work’s Promise and Peril for Women” appeared first on Grow Remote.

By Week 5 of Lead From Anywhere, something was starting to click for me.

In a remote or hybrid team, I’m realising that good intentions are not enough. If roles are blurry, if feedback is vague, or if KPIs are overly prescriptive, trust can erode.

Here are five learnings that have changed my approach to leadership.

1. Responsibilities Drift. Leaders Have to Reset Them.

One of the biggest insights for me was how easily ownership can change without anyone formally acknowledging it. Someone might start off responsible for a project and somehow priorities shift. So someone else steps in to help or a deadline moves. All of a sudden, two people think the other owns it and we’re left with confusion.

Instead of working on assumptions, conversations with other learners on the Lead From Anywhere cohort showed me the importance of using RACI: Who is Responsible? Accountable? Consulted? Informed?

The person ultimately accountable should make sure roles and clear and, if any confusion arises, bring the relevant people together for a focused 1 to 1 alignment as soon as possible.

Sometimes simple clarification is all that’s needed. Sometimes the work needs to be reassigned. Either way, ambiguity gets replaced with agreement.

My takeaway: Remote teams survive on explicit clarity, not assumptions.

2. “Passive Aggressive” communication

In distributed teams, most communication is written. That means there is recorded evidence of conversations and decisions (or ambiguity!).

If a message is interpreted as passive aggressive, for example, it can be analysed: What was written? What was the intent? Is there a pattern? Is this possibly a time zone issue or context gap?

Passive aggression is subjective. Written communication gives you something objective to work with, so as to understand context and interpersonal dynamics.

I learned from other leaders on the course how they have actively called out poor communication on their own teams. Likewise, it is a leaders’ responsibility to celebrate what is working. When updates are clear, when tone is professional but urgent, when decisions are well-documented – these can be held up as indications of a strong culture.

My takeaway: Don’t wait until communication falls apart. Celebrate when it’s done well!

3. Trust Needs Structure.

When conflict appears in remote teams, it can feel magnified. The process we worked through in Week 4 was simple but reassuring:

1. Clarify roles and expectations.
   
2. Address concerns directly and privately.
   
3. Align on forward actions.
   
4. Escalate to HR if necessary.
   

Escalation is not dramatic. It is part of a structure. Building team trust is less about emotional speeches and more about predictable, consistent processes and boundaries.

On the group call, we also explored how small operational signals affect trust. For example, video norms in meetings are a big part of distributed workplace culture. It is not about forcing cameras on. It is about creating shared awareness of what’s expected. One learner discussed using a simple traffic light for video meetings:

• Video off could signal red, meaning an employee is not comfortable sharing their video (treated as an exception to the norm, with an expectation to be green next time)
• Video on and engaged, green.
  

Another learner explained how they rotated meeting chairs, which meant that different colleagues took the lead on regular calls. It can be a challenge when the same people are represented in regular conversations and the same people are invisible and unheard. This meant that different people spoke and, over time, more employees were represented on the calls speakers.

My takeaway: Ownership spreads when airtime spreads.

4. Teams Need Three Things.

One of my favourite frameworks from the programme was this:

Teams need:

• WHY: What is our shared purpose?
  
• SYSTEMS: How do we operate?
  
• SUPPORT: What culture are we reinforcing?
  

When something feels off, it usually maps back to one of these. If performance dips, is the WHY clear? If collaboration stalls, are the SYSTEMS defined? If tension grows, is SUPPORT visible? It simplified leadership for me.

Remote and hybrid operations expose weak systems quickly. Whereas an experienced office-based manager might have ways to solving problems when everyone is working in the same room, the same manager may struggle a great deal to lead a distributed team. If roles are unclear, hybrid can exacerbate the issue. If communication lacks structure, poor remote working systems can increase confusion. If performance is managed top down, things can fall through gaps in a distributed environment.

But when you put the right structures in place, people take ownership and, as a manager, you stop carrying everything yourself.

My takeaway: Remote leadership is less about control and more about optimal design.

5. Performance Conversations Should Be talking “through” the work, not talking “down” to a report.

This was a useful insight for me. Previously, in monthly reviews, I have told a team member where they went wrong. I would focus on the targets they missed. I would explain what needed to improve.

I thought that was management. Now, I have started letting them walk me through their month.

They outline:

• What worked
• What did not
• Where they fell short
• What they would do differently
  

My role is to ask questions and to talk through the process with them. This way, we can problem-solve together. And – crucially – it gives them more accountability and more ownership over how they reach their goals.

For example, if a recruitment KPI is 4 new starts, that North Star goal is clear. The overall outcome is non negotiable. But how they get there is up to them. Instead of micromanaging the steps, I can coach the strategy.

It feels completely different. Accountability increases. Ownership increases. Defensiveness decreases. I have realised that micro-management is often a confidence issue on the manager’s side. 

My takeaway: I have changed my approach from seeking control to focusing on clarity.

If you are leading an Irish SME right now and you feel stretched, reactive or unsure how to handle some of these dynamics, I can honestly say this course gives you practical tools you can use immediately.

It did for me.

The March cohort of Lead From Anywhere is now open. Full funding to the value of €1,350 per person is available until 9th March. Limited availability – first come, first served.

Register here.

The post Building Trust: 5 Things I Learned By Week 5 of Lead From Anywhere appeared first on Grow Remote.