The phrase “remote work” frames the thing wrong, and it matters.
“Remote” implies a center. There’s a place — an office, a headquarters, a room where the real work happens — and you are remote from it. You’re the outlier. The person calling in from somewhere else while everyone else is together.
This framing was accurate when the minority of people weren’t in the office. It made sense to call them remote. But it stops being accurate the moment the distributed model is the primary model. When 70% of your team is “remote,” there is no center. The office is just another node.
The word that actually describes this is online.
What changes when you change the word
When work is “remote,” you design around the exception. The office is the default. You have conference rooms with one screen and six people crammed in, plus two faces in a video tile that can’t see the whiteboard. The people in the room are present; the people on video are remote. The asymmetry is baked in.
When work is “online,” you design around the network. Every participant, whether they’re in a WeWork three blocks away or on a mountain in Montana, is a node. The experience is designed for nodes. Nobody gets special status because they’re physically co-located.
Online-first organizations have figured this out. Async by default. Written communication as the primary medium. Decisions documented, not announced at the whiteboard. Meetings with clear agendas and explicit outputs. Everyone on their own screen even when they’re in the same building, because the call works better that way.
The management implications
“Remote management” is about managing someone who isn’t there. The problem it’s trying to solve is presence: how do I know they’re working? How do I keep them connected? How do I maintain culture across a gap?
These are the wrong questions, or at least the wrong frame. They presuppose that proximity is the mechanism of good management. It isn’t. Proximity is a substitute for good management. When you can see someone, you can correct them in real time, know what they’re working on without asking, and build rapport through osmosis. Presence covers for a lot of management that isn’t happening.
Online work removes the cover. You can’t see what people are doing, so you have to manage outcomes instead of activities. You can’t assume alignment through proximity, so you have to create it explicitly. You have to write things down, because verbal hallway conversations don’t exist.
In other words: online work requires you to actually manage. For a lot of organizations this is painful, because they’ve been using the office as a management substitute for years without noticing.
The location question
The other thing “remote work” gets wrong is the implied geography. Remote work is a thing you do at home, or in a coffee shop, or in the second bedroom you’ve repurposed. The physical location is defined by contrast with the office.
Online work is locationless. The only constraint is connectivity. I work from a house in Big Sky, Montana, population roughly 3,000, in a bowl surrounded by mountains. I have a fiber connection and a good setup, and from an online-work standpoint, I am exactly as present as someone in a WeWork in SoHo.
The concept of “remote” would put me at a disadvantage — I’m physically far from anything. The concept of “online” makes my location irrelevant, which is the accurate description of how it actually works.
Getting the framing right matters because you design to the frame. If you’re designing a remote-work policy, you’ll get something that accommodates the exception. If you’re designing an online-work organization, you’ll get something built for how knowledge work actually functions now.
The word you use is not just vocabulary. It’s a model.