Setting Performance Metrics for Remote Work: How to Measure Remote Team Performance without Micromanaging

If you manage a remote team, one of the hardest parts of the job is knowing whether the work is actually moving forward, especially if you don’t want to be in everyone’s chats all day. You need a way to see progress, talk about it fairly, and coach your team members to keep things on track without micromanaging.

This is what the “M” in the MAP Framework is for: Mission and Metrics. In Mission and Metrics, we cover the basics of what every remote team manager needs to assess and manage a remote team’s performance.

Step 1: Put Your Remote Team’s Mission into One Sentence

Does your remote team need help aligning on your mission? Contact us for a virtual, interactive workshop.

In a remote team, clarity of purpose is critical for success. Without the casual touch points that working in-person presents, it’s easy for remote teams to drift apart or for individual work to feel disconnected from the larger goal. Start by distilling what your team does into a single clear sentence. This is most often called a mission statement, and we’ll call it that for simplicity, but what we mean is a simple and concise statement to anchor daily tasks to your team’s larger purpose. 

A good mission statement should generally have three parts to it: what you do, who you do it for, and why it matters.

• What you do - the core function or service your team delivers, in plain language.

• Who you do it for - this is the audience or the beneficiary of your work (internal or external)

• Why it matters - the impact your work has, connecting day-to-day tasks to a larger purpose

Here’s a formula that can help: 

We <what you do> for <who you do it for> so they can <why it matters>.

Here are some examples:

• We resolve customer issues quickly for the marketing team so they can keep their campaigns running smoothly.

• We deliver clear, actionable data dashboards for sales leaders so they can make data-driven decisions.

• We design learning programs for employees so they can grow their skills, advance their careers, and add value to our organization.

Step 2: Use Metrics that Matter to Your Remote Team

Does your team need help setting and tracking key performance indicators (KPIs)? Need to brainstorm objectives and key results (OKRs?)? Want to think creatively about how to measure your remote team’s impact? Contact us for a custom virtual workshop.

Once your team’s mission is clear, the next step is to decide how you’ll measure progress intentionally with metrics. Without good metrics, remote managers often fall into a few common traps:

• Visibility bias: the loudest or most self-promoting employees appear to contribute the most.

• Little-green-dot bias: subconsciously equating “online” with “engaged” or “productive.”

• Task counting: judging productivity by the number of boxes checked off, without factoring in complexity or value-add.

The temptation to use convenient but insight-poor metrics like these to gauge performance is certainly not unique to remote work. But it is important to consider the impact of relying on convenience metrics is magnified when your ability to casually observe progress is limited to what you can see on your computer screen. The opposite extreme is also dangerous: tracking so many metrics that you end up with dashboards and reports full of noise but little real insight.

The trick is to strike a balance by keeping measurement simple but meaningful. We recommend focusing on three dimensions of what you’re trying to measure: Output - Complexity - Value (O-C-V). 

• Output: what got done

• Complexity: how challenging it was

• Value: why it mattered

The O-C-V Framework is a practical way to set remote work metrics that gives you enough nuance to be fair while being nimble enough to use in day-to-day check-ins. It also gives employees a shared language to describe their contributions beyond “I stayed on late” or “I finished my tasks.”

Let’s look at a few examples:

Traditional metric: number of tickets closed per week

This is a popular metric used to track workload, but it does not do a good job of tracking the complexity or priority of the ticket.

Tracking the metric with the O-C-V framework:

• Output: number of tickets closed

• Complexity: also capturing average time to resolve or the issue category

• Value: factoring in the number of tickets in a high-priority lane or through customer satisfaction

Traditional metric: % of tasks marked complete in a project management tool

This is a popular metric that managers use consciously or subconsciously to gauge how much work is being completed, but it fails to track the complexity or value that the task adds to the team.

• Output: % of tasks marked complete in the project tool

• Complexity: Tasks with multi-team dependencies

• Value: Project delivered on time or blockers removed from high-priority work

Traditional metric: # of calls made

This is a common sales metric that can be a proxy for how aggressively a sales lead may be chasing leads. It does, however, bias towards the volume of calls instead of the strategy behind them.

• Output: # of calls made, meetings booked or opportunities advanced as a result

• Complexity: account size, new/old industry

• Value: revenue closed or potential for new references or business

Notice how you can still use a relatively easy-to-capture metric of the number of tickets closed, but it is now supplemented by additional quantitative and qualitative metrics to enhance the story. Layering output, complexity, and value enables managers to create a system that is both practical and insightful.

Step 3. Make your mission and metrics visible for remote work

Need help finding ways to make your mission and metrics work for remote work? Contact us for a virtual workshop today.

Mission and metrics only work if they stay visible. In co-located offices, visibility happens almost by accident with posters, overheard updates, hallway conversations. Remote teams, unfortunately, do not have as many of those touchpoints. The implication is: if the mission and metrics are not reinforced intentionally, they fade into the background.

The takeaway is that remote leaders need to over-communicate and over-display both mission and metrics. Done well, this build trust and ensures everyone sees how their contributions connect to the larger mission.

Consider the following practical ways to enhance your mission and metrics in the remote world.

Pin them to central pages

Pin your mission statement to the top of your Slack or Teams general channel, your SharePoint home page, and any other central location. O-C-V metrics can go in the respective project management channel.

Create “ambient reminders” digitally

Use a “mission slide” as the standard title slide for every online All Hands meeting. Reminders of targets and progress to them can go on standard slides during respective project check-ins. Use automated nudges to remind people to make note of specific metrics (e.g., every time a client meeting ends, add a work flow that reminds you to take notes or jot down any contextual metrics).

Repeat them often

Repeat your mission statement at the beginning of every All Hands meeting, company-wide video recordings, or broad email announcements. Announcing updates to metrics does not have to be synchronous. You can also provide regular asynchronous updates to disseminate across time zones so team members can watch them when it suits their schedule

Create opportunity for conversations around metrics

Create opportunities for your team to have organic conversations about metrics outside of formal 1 on 1s or All Hands meetings. Consider creating a general channel or side conversations about the metrics in action where staff can share updates. Use some conversation starters during meetings to get your team talking about the numbers and thinking creatively around them.  

Defining a mission, setting metrics that capture outputs, context, and value, and adjusting the visibility for remote teams can provide a transparent and accessible idea of your team’s performance and set it up for success. If you’re struggling to see whether your remote team is truly moving forward, we can help. Framewell Facilitation offers tailored workshops to help you craft a mission statement, build fair and insightful metrics, and make them stick in a remote environment. Contact us to book a session.