Remote Work Didn’t Kill Productivity — Bad Management Did

Remote work killed productivity — or so the story goes. In this episode we argue it did something more uncomfortable instead: it stripped away the things that let weak management pass as leadership.

We get into the presence trap, where being at a desk stood in for working, and why removing the building left only the actual job — clear goals, real trust, and judging work by outcomes. For managers who led that way, little changed. For those who led by line of sight, the ground vanished.

We’re honest about what genuinely broke too: juniors lost ambient learning, teams lost some glue, and a lot of people lost the line between work and home. The real scorecard is mixed — which is exactly why “productivity collapsed” was never an honest reading of it.

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