The Invisible Redistribution of Work

COVID-19-induced remote work was initially a survival strategy. During the pandemic, organisations adapted quickly because they had no other choice. Offices emptied almost overnight, dining room tables became workstations, and companies focused on one immediate priority: keeping work moving.

At that time, speed mattered more than structure.

Employees had to adjust, managers improvised, and HR departments rewrote (‘the most important’) policies in real time. Teams learned how to collaborate digitally, and organisations discovered that many forms of work could continue without employees physically sharing the same environment.

However, since then, continuity has become more important than intentional design. What began as a crisis response has evolved into a permanent operating model, yet many companies have never fully reconsidered how work itself needs to change afterwards. Instead, office-era systems, expectations, and assumptions were transferred directly into remote and hybrid environments with surprisingly little structural redesign.

In the process, the work that physical office structures once carried did not disappear; it simply resurfaced elsewhere.

In traditional office environments, organisations relied heavily on physical proximity without realising it: Communication happened naturally through shared spaces. Employees observed how leaders behaved during meetings, how colleagues handled pressure, and how conflict was managed in real time. New hires absorbed the organisational culture through daily interactions, while managers gained visibility and relational trust simply by being physically present. The physical setting unconsciously carried far more organisational work than many companies realised.

When remote work removed the environment, however, many organisations failed to redesign the systems they had previously supported. Coordination, clarification, communication management, onboarding support, culture reinforcement, and emotional labour still need to happen. The difference was that these responsibilities no longer sat naturally within the structure itself. Instead, they began redistributing themselves among employees informally.

This is why many employees today find themselves performing work they were never properly prepared, trained, or supported to do.

Today, more than ever, the highly responsive employee becomes the unofficial coordinator because they always respond quickly. The emotionally intelligent manager absorbs increasing levels of team support because nobody else is addressing it. HR departments quietly become operational support systems for unclear structures, while reliable employees fill process gaps simply because they can keep things running.

And now, these responsibilities have become normalised.

This is not necessarily the result of bad leadership or organisational exploitation. Many of these structures emerged during periods of rapid adaptation where functionality mattered more than long-term sustainability. The issue, however, is that many organisations never paused long enough afterwards to ask whether the systems they created during crisis conditions still make sense for the realities of modern work.

One of the clearest examples of this can be seen in recruitment and onboarding practices. Before remote work became widespread, organisations relied heavily on in-person interaction to assess organisational fit. Candidates entered office environments, observed team dynamics, interacted informally with employees, and developed a sense of organisational rhythm through physical exposure. Organisations could also evaluate interpersonal presence, communication style, and behavioural alignment through significantly more contextual interaction.

Today, many interviews happen entirely online. Candidates present carefully curated versions of themselves through digital platforms, often from highly controlled environments that reveal relatively little about how they actually function within teams. Organisations do the same thing. Company culture becomes a presentation rather than an experience. Yet, despite this shift, many organisations continue using hiring approaches designed for environments that no longer exist in the same way.

This creates a massive gap in employee-organisation configuration: if organisations can no longer rely on physical proximity to assess alignment and integration naturally, then recruitment and onboarding processes need to be far more intentional. Communication expectations, behavioural norms, reporting structures, collaboration styles, and organisational values can no longer remain implicit assumptions that employees gradually absorb through observation. They need to be communicated deliberately.

Research (well before remote work was even a topic of discussion) on organisational socialisation has long shown that early organisational experiences significantly influence employee adjustment, engagement, role clarity, and long-term organisational commitment (Van Maanen & Schein, 1979). More recent research on remote integration similarly highlights the importance of communication quality, role clarity, and social support in distributed environments (Allen et al., 2015; Saks & Gruman, 2018).

And still, many organisations approach onboarding as an administrative process rather than a structural one. A welcome pack, a few introductory meetings, and access to digital systems are not enough to integrate employees into increasingly complex remote environments. The gap between convenience and organisational need widens further. Employees still need clarity on decision-making, communication rhythms, accountability, behavioural expectations, and psychological safety. Without that clarity, many new hires spend months attempting to decode how the organisation actually functions.

The same pattern appears in management structures: In traditional office settings, managerial visibility was reinforced naturally through proximity and ongoing interaction. Employees could approach managers informally, observe leadership behaviour directly, and gradually build relational trust. Remote work changed this significantly by removing proximity and reducing informal visibility, and many organisations responded by increasing reporting requirements and administrative oversight rather than strengthening connection and managerial capability itself.

As a result, many managers today are expected to coordinate distributed teams, support employee well-being, maintain communication continuity, manage performance systems, oversee operational delivery, and absorb interpersonal complexity simultaneously, often without the developmental support necessary to do so effectively.

Although hiring capable individuals into managerial roles may seem like a logical solution in theory, performance reviews and reporting structures do not create managers; training, role clarification, and strength identification do. Leadership capability still depends on communication, emotional regulation, conflict management, judgment, and relational intelligence. In remote environments, these capabilities become even more important because misunderstanding, ambiguity, and disengagement are far easier to hide behind digital interaction.

Culture presents a similar challenge, and is probably one of the most discussed yet least intentionally addressed: For years, organisations experienced culture in physical terms. Employees learned organisational norms through repeated observation, shared routines, spontaneous interaction, and leadership behaviour. We reinforced culture through ongoing environmental exposure and team-building initiatives that strengthened team cohesion.

Many organisations now attempt to replicate this model through online social sessions, virtual engagement initiatives, motivational messaging, or large-scale retreats. Some of these initiatives can absolutely create meaningful connections. Still, others risk becoming symbolic substitutes for deeper organisational alignment: A virtual coffee session where everyone discusses their favourite colour does not automatically create psychological safety. A five-day company retreat does not resolve unclear communication structures or inconsistent leadership behaviour during the other 360 days of the year.

Culture was never built primarily through events; it was reinforced through consistency, trust, and repeated behavioural experience.

The outcome of culture initiatives should not be limited to their occurrence. Organisations need to ask whether these initiatives serve a clear purpose, whether that purpose translates into meaningful cultural return on investment, and whether the experience strengthens or undermines the culture they claim to be building. Well-intentioned initiatives can do more harm than good when they feel performative, disconnected, or misaligned with employees’ everyday work experience.

Research on organisational culture and psychological safety consistently demonstrates that employees learn behavioural norms through everyday leadership modelling, environmental reinforcement, and continued, and often informal, social interaction (Schein, 2010; Edmondson, 1999). When physical environments disappear, organisations need to become far more deliberate about how culture is communicated and reinforced operationally, daily (for example, through the tone of regular email/inter-company communications, behaviour towards an employee who misunderstood an assignment or made a human error, a non-scheduled check-in to find out whether a new hire is coping or whether someone’s flu symptoms are feeling better, or to listen instead of micromanaging with that ever-present ‘but’ on the tip of your tongue), not only at visible events.

This is where many organisations are still struggling. Culture creation is not a grand gesture, and everyday actions and interactions should not be underestimated.

CULTURE REMAINS ONE OF THE MOST POWERFUL ORGANISATIONAL STRUCTURES OF ALL.

Remote work itself is not the problem. In many industries, it clearly works. The problem is that many organisations have changed the location of work without redesigning the systems supporting the human experience of work itself.

Research on emotional labour has long shown that many forms of work involve managing relationships, communication, emotional stability, and interpersonal expectations beyond the formal execution of tasks (Hochschild, 1983). Remote work has not removed this labour. In many organisations, it has intensified.

Employees now spend significant amounts of time maintaining responsiveness, coordination, communication continuity, visibility, and relational stability across fragmented digital environments. Because this labour is difficult to quantify, organisations often underestimate the extent of the work employees perform to keep systems functioning smoothly.

This is ultimately where the next phase of organisational redesign needs to happen.

The organisations adapting most successfully to modern work are not necessarily those demanding a return to traditional office structures, nor those unquestioningly embracing remote work. They are the organisations willing to intentionally redesign recruitment, onboarding, management development, communication systems, performance structures, and culture-building practices around how people actually experience work today.

This intentional design initiative is important for companies that were established as remote or hybrid organisations from the start, because they have an advantage: they are not forced to dismantle decades of office-based assumptions. However, that advantage can quickly disappear if leaders unconsciously recreate what they experienced in previous workplaces simply because it feels familiar. Remote-native organisations still need intentional design. They are not automatically modern simply because they don't have an office, but they have the upper hand because they don’t have to undo concrete systems built in the past.

In redesigning our organisational functioning to accommodate remote and hybrid settings, HR can't handle this alone. It requires alignment between leadership, operational management, HR, and organisational development functions to intentionally reconsider how work is structured, communicated, supported, and sustained in modern environments.

Remote work is no longer an experiment. For many organisations, it is now the operating environment. The companies that will navigate it most successfully are the ones willing to intentionally redesign the structures that support people, leadership, communication, and culture, rather than relying on employees to continuously compensate for gaps those structures no longer cover.

Yes, this can feel overwhelming, especially when organisations assume that meaningful change requires a complete overhaul. It does not. Often, the most sustainable shifts begin with small, deliberate adjustments: clarifying one communication rhythm, redesigning one onboarding touchpoint, strengthening one management practice, or reviewing one process that no longer fits how work gets done now. Work does not need to be rebuilt all at once, but it does need to be redesigned intentionally.

Sources:

• Allen, T. D., Golden, T. D., & Shockley, K. M. (2015). How effective is telecommuting? Assessing the status of our scientific findings. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 16(2), 40–68.

• Edmondson, A. (1999). Psychological safety and learning behaviour in work teams. Administrative Science Quarterly, 44(2), 350–383.

• Hochschild, A. R. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialisation of human feeling. University of California Press.

• Saks, A. M., & Gruman, J. A. (2018). Socialisation resources theory and newcomers’ work engagement. Career Development International, 23(1), 12–32.

• Schein, E. H. (2010). Organisational culture and leadership (4th ed.). Jossey-Bass.

• Van Maanen, J., & Schein, E. H. (1979). Toward a theory of organisational socialisation. Research in Organisational Behaviour, 1, 209–264.