When something breaks in a remote team, the first instinct is to question productivity, communication, or accountability. And from there, it often leads to a familiar conclusion: Maybe people just need to be back in the office.

But in a What Worked episode, Steven Puri, Founder and CEO at Sukha Company, points in a different direction.

“A lot of the RTO tug-of-war with remote or hybrid is really about bad hiring.”

That line reframes the problem entirely. Because now the issue isn’t remote work, it’s whether the right people were placed in the right environment to begin with.

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The problem starts earlier than most teams think

Steven simplifies leadership into two core responsibilities. 

• Define the mission (What you’re trying to accomplish)
• Define the culture (How your team operates while doing it)

When those two things are clear, something subtle but important happens. You don’t just fill roles. You attract people who actually want to work that way. And that alignment changes how the team behaves.

He makes this point very directly. If you find yourself wondering what someone is doing at 3 PM on a Tuesday while they’re working from home, that’s not a visibility problem. That’s a hiring problem. Because the right person, in the right environment, doesn’t need to be monitored. They already understand the mission. They already know how to operate. They’re already moving the work forward.

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A hidden issue

The challenge is that misalignment rarely shows up in obvious ways. It doesn’t look like failure at the start. It looks like small inefficiencies. Work takes a little longer than expected. There’s more back and forth than there should be. Tasks need to be revisited, clarified, or adjusted.

Individually, these can be easily dismissed. But over time, they start to compound. More back-and-forth leads to delays, more delays lead to more oversight, and what started as a few small gaps turns into a broader concern about performance.

While it may feel like something went wrong during execution, the issue really started when expectations weren’t fully aligned.

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What actually fixes it

The solution isn’t to add more control after the fact. It’s to remove ambiguity before the work even begins. 

This is where Steven’s point on mission and culture becomes practical.

A clear mission sets the direction for the team and anchors what the company is trying to accomplish. It also shapes how you hire. The focus is not just on capability, but on whether someone actually buys into that goal. When that alignment is there, motivation is not something you have to manage closely. People are not just working for a paycheck. They understand what they are contributing to, which makes it easier to take ownership, make decisions, and keep the work moving without constant check-ins.

With the goal set, the only thing left to decide is how the team will get there.

That is where Steven's concept of company culture comes in. It is a groundwork that defines how people work with each other, with customers, and across the business. Creating a culture (and properly conveying it during hiring and onboarding) sets the conditions that allow people to do their best work without friction. While new hires may still have practical needs like SOPs, there will not be a question of how to get the help they need.

When those expectations are clear, remote workers can focus on execution.

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What this means for remote teams

Teams that struggle with remote work often focus on fixing symptoms. They add more check-ins, more tools, or more oversight to stay on track.

But the teams that perform well focus on what happens earlier in the process. They are deliberate about who they bring in, how success is defined, and how work is expected to get done.

When those pieces are clear, the need for control drops. Work tends to move more predictably, communication becomes more straightforward, and execution improves because there is less guesswork involved.

Not because people are being watched more closely,but because they’re working from the same understanding.