I’m a manager of an entirely WFH team, it’s easy. I have weekly one on one catch-ups with everyone in my team, where we discuss the work they are doing any blockers or anything like that that has come up. And a fortnightly team meeting.

And if anything urgent does come up they just call or message me at the time.

You measure the output not some BS KPI or how long they worked that day. I trust my people to be adults and come and go from work as needed, as long as they are still getting their work done idgaf how many hours a day/week they work.

Ultimately as their manager I’m there to try to remove as much of the corporate or political BS from my team’s lives as possible, so they can focus on doing great work (whilst also being accommodating to any personal issues that crop up for them)

Thanks to Goodhart’s Law, that doesn’t work. Any number used as a performance target ceases to be a useful measure, because people minmax them. You need to be able to look at a feature in a system, and evaluate if they completed it in an amount of time commensurate with their experience.

You need to think of productivity more abstractly, and have a lot of relevant expertise to assess it. Good management is hard, basically.

Sadly, I don’t think so. The pandemic-era cash grab solution was software that’s basically spyware, logging keystrokes, mouse movements, taking screenshots, etc. Some clever individuals just taped vibrators to their mice and walked away for breaks. You’re asking middle management to do real work here, ya silly.

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