“Hey, have a few minutes today?”

You get that Teams or Slack message from your boss without any other information or context. Where does your mind go? For a lot of us, probably not somewhere good.

What now? Did I do something wrong? Is there a problem? 

The message itself didn’t say any of those things. But our brains love filling in missing information. We draw on past experiences, our relationship with the person sending the message, what happened earlier that day, and whatever else happens to be on our minds.

And when there are unknowns, we often assume the worst.

That simple example gets at one of the challenges of emotional intelligence in a remote workplace: we have fewer signals, but we don’t stop creating stories about what those signals mean.

Emotional intelligence gets harder at a distance

At a recent WFH Alliance virtual meeting, Doug Ward joined us for a conversation about emotional intelligence and what changes when leaders and employees aren't working together in the same physical space.

One useful definition from the discussion:

Emotional intelligence is the ability to notice what is happening in ourselves and others, then use that information to respond effectively.

In practice, that means moving through three steps:

Awareness → Choice → Response

That matters in any workplace. But remote work changes the information leaders have available to them. We have less physical context. Fewer informal conversations. More interactions happening through Teams, Slack, email, and other digital tools.

We still see signals. But we often don't see everything happening around them. And that makes the distinction between what we know and what we're filling in especially important.

Signal → Story → Response

One of the most useful frameworks from the conversation was surprisingly simple:

Signal: What can I actually observe?

Story: What do I think it means?

Response: What am I going to do next?

Imagine an employee who has suddenly started having attendance or adherence issues. The signal might be clear. They aren't where they're expected to be when they're expected to be there.

The story comes next.

They aren't taking the job seriously.

They're taking advantage of working from home.

They're disengaged.

Those explanations might be true. Or they might not be.

During our discussion, we heard an example involving an employee whose adherence problems had a very different explanation. She was experiencing homelessness and living in a car. At times, she was stepping away to check on her children or bring them food. 

The performance issue was real. The context behind it was invisible.

That doesn't mean leaders ignore the performance issue. It means good leadership requires separating the behavior we can observe from the explanation we've created for it. Instead of immediately asking, “What does this mean?”, start with:

What changed? What did I see or hear? What can I verify? What am I adding to the story myself?

Start with observation. Stay curious about the explanation.

Trust determines how much context we get

There's another side to this. Leaders can ask questions, but employees have to be willing to answer them.

Trust changes what people are willing to tell us.

That's particularly important at a distance, where leaders don't have the benefit of casually noticing that someone seems distracted, frustrated, overwhelmed, or simply different than usual.

Remote leaders have to intentionally create room for questions, disagreement, uncertainty, and context they cannot see. Consider another example we discussed.

A leader announces a workflow change in a shared Teams channel. An employee professionally questions whether the new process will work. Twelve other people can see the exchange.

What happens next?

Does the leader debate the employee publicly? Move the conversation immediately to a private message? Acknowledge the concern but keep the decision moving? Agree to test the change and revisit it after two weeks?

There isn't necessarily one correct answer. But the leader's response sends a signal of its own. It tells everyone watching what happens when someone disagrees.

If disagreement is routinely shut down or immediately moved behind closed doors, people learn something about what is safe to say publicly. If thoughtful questions are welcomed, acknowledged, and handled constructively, they learn something different. Over time, those small interactions shape trust.

Coaching doesn't only happen in a scheduled 1:1

The same principle applies to coaching. In a remote environment, it can be tempting to think of coaching as the scheduled video conversation between a leader and employee.

But coaching happens everywhere.

It happens in a Teams or Slack message. In an email follow-up. In a team channel. During a quick conversation after something happens. And, yes, during a formal 1:1.

The medium changes. The fundamentals shouldn't.

A useful structure is:

Behavior: What happened?

Impact: Why does it need attention?

Context: What else do I need to understand?

Next step: What needs to happen differently?

That third step, context, is particularly important. It creates space to understand the situation without eliminating accountability.

Emotional intelligence does not remove accountability. It improves how we reach it.

A leader can be curious about why something happened and still be clear about what needs to happen next. Those aren't opposing ideas.

Visibility isn't the same as clarity

Remote leadership conversations also have a tendency to drift toward visibility.

Can I see you? Are you online? Are you at your desk? Should we have another check-in?

But before adding another meeting, monitoring tool, camera expectation, or check-in, ask a more important question:

What problem are we actually trying to solve?

Sometimes the issue really is visibility. But often what we actually need is clarity.

Does the employee know what's expected? Do they understand the outcome they're responsible for? Do we have a shared understanding of when they need to be available? Do they know what good performance looks like?

More visibility doesn't automatically create more clarity. And more check-ins don't automatically create more trust.

Reading the remote room

Leading remotely doesn't require an entirely different definition of emotional intelligence. But it does require leaders to be more intentional about it.

We have fewer signals. More communication happens through screens. Informal context disappears. And both leaders and employees are constantly interpreting incomplete information.

The goal isn't to somehow recreate every signal we had in an office. It's to get better at leading when some of those signals aren't available. That means recognizing what we can actually observe before deciding what it means. Building enough trust that people are willing to give us the context we can't see. And coaching with both curiosity and clarity when something needs to change.

Recognize the signal. Question the story. Understand the context. Then choose the response.

That's how we get better at reading the remote room.

Thanks to Doug Ward for joining WFH Alliance and leading this conversation. You can find more of Doug's work at: https://elevatingeveryone.com/