Fixing Remote Work Behaviors That Wouldn't Fly In Person

Remote work was sold as the ultimate escape from the annoyances of sharing a physical space with other people during working hours. No more micromanagers hovering over your shoulder, and no more exhausting watercooler gossip.

But there is a dark side to remote work. Remote environments have not cured counterproductive behavior, and they have stripped away some of the social guardrails that keep malicious and destructive colleagues in check.

Although a screen makes it easy to temporarily dodge a destructive coworker, avoiding the person also means avoiding the confrontation required to stop them. This has the potential to create an accountability vacuum. Rather than being challenged or corrected, manipulative people can get away with far more when they can hide behind their screens.

The Virtual Weaponization of Rudeness

In a physical meeting room, human behavior tends to be kept reasonably civil by a shared sensory environment. Bad manners carry an immediate, painful social cost.

If a colleague talks over you, ignores you, or rolls their eyes in a physical meeting room, the entire room sees the hostility. People quickly check the reactions of others to understand if their colleagues are seeing the same behavior and interpreting it in the same way. There’s a shared understanding of the social reality that comes across differently in shared physical spaces.

Crossing your arms defensively, sighing heavily, or engaging in a blatant side conversation requires a massive amount of overt, aggressive confidence. The physical presence of your peers creates social accountability, forcing people to regulate their impulses.

Virtual meetings completely shatter these guardrails. On a video call, rude behavior is compartmentalized and stripped of context when people are in their separate little boxes on screen.

When isolated incidents harden into a chronic, unaddressed pattern of undermining others, the technology becomes an ideal camouflage for several distinct types of workplace disrespect.

1. Muted Laughs

In a physical room, bursting out laughing while a colleague is speaking is an overt act of social aggression that instantly halts the meeting. On a video call, however, bad actors can actively laugh, smirk, or scoff while hitting the mute button. Because the audio doesn’t interrupt others, the behavior is easily shrugged off as a minor digital distraction. A presenter can be left watching someone visibly mock them in real time, while the rest of the room assumes the person is just reacting to a private message. The technology provides a layer of plausible deniability for cruelty.

2. Digital Interruptions

In a physical workspace, interrupting someone repeatedly creates a jarring, uncomfortable social experience that tends to mark the interrupter as aggressive. On a video call, constant interrupting can be disguised by the environment and equipment. Bad actors can cut people off repeatedly, talk over their colleagues, and then casually blame their connection when challenged. Indeed, sometimes people use a poor connection to disrupt conversations and continuously interrupt their colleagues. The tech provides a ready-made excuse for rude or unprofessional behavior.

3. Backchannel Whispers

Whispering to a coworker during a live presentation in a physical office is glaringly obvious and universally considered rude. Online, however, the backchannel is a superpower for bullies. Some people use private Slack messages or personal phones to run a live, invisible commentary during a colleague's presentation, undermining a peer in real time while staring directly at the camera with a polite, fake smile.

4. Continuous Partial Attention

In a shared space, staring blankly out the window or scrolling on your phone while a colleague is speaking to you is deeply insulting and instantly caught. On a video call, people can completely check out. They open another tab, scroll social media, or answer emails while their team members are speaking, weaponizing the digital screen to completely ignore their peers.

To be fair, this is a highly common remote behavior and is rarely malicious if it happens occasionally. Tuning out naturally happens during bloated meetings, at the end of an exhausting day, or when the specific topic under discussion is genuinely irrelevant to that person’s immediate work.

The problem is when this behavior bleeds into critical, shared discussion times. Tuning out important, collective information and then later demanding that colleagues backtrack to re-explain everything that was already covered is where the behavior becomes disruptive. It is social loafing, avoiding the cognitive work of a meeting, effectively offloading the burden of paying attention onto the rest of the team.

Workplace Dynamics Essential Reads

Who Are We When the Meeting Is Over?

Why Workaholics May Not Be Team Players

The Avoidance Loop

Why don’t we fix this? Because remote work makes it far too easy to choose temporary comfort or avoidance over the difficult task of conflict resolution.

Most people naturally default to conflict avoidance when given the chance. In a shared office, if a colleague is setting out to sabotage your work or insult you, there is more pressure to deal with it when avoidance is not an option.

Online, you can simply close the laptop, mute their notifications, or decline their calendar invite. For a few days or weeks, you may actually forget how unpleasant they are. But this avoidance allows the behavior to continue unchallenged. Managers avoid the awkwardness of a digital confrontation over behavioral nuances that seem difficult to prove, and the damage is done daily, but not all at once to the same people.

The Necessity of Collective Accountability

Anyone who has seen the worst behavior in remote environments run unchecked knows exactly how exhausting this dynamic is. Most people who work remotely will have watched a chaotic colleague run roughshod over a virtual meeting, hiding behind the safety of their screen while the rest of the team sits in their separate spaces, virtually checking out.

Some aspects of contemporary HR culture love to push the cliché of "bringing your true self to work." But sometimes a person's "true self" is lazy, irritable, or completely self-absorbed. In collective spaces that demand productivity, the team doesn't need your true self, they need your best behavior.

Shame gets a bad reputation, but some evolutionary and moral psychologists would argue that it is actually a highly calibrated defense mechanism designed to prevent us from ruining our reputation. Bullying and undermining colleagues are inherently shameful behaviors. When our actions are fully exposed to a physical room, the natural threat of group disapproval triggers this social alarm system, forcing us to self-regulate.

Shared physical environments force a necessary level of psychological and physical self-control. They demand that we restrain our petty impulses, monitor our body language, and actively perform the cooperative, professional version of ourselves.

Visibility is an important part of working together. Flexibility is a brilliant tool for autonomy, but when we completely remove the physical room, we strip away the shared guardrails that keep human behavior civilized.