Work is a Verb

A newsletter by

A leader posts in Slack at 4:57pm on a Thursday:

“Quick update: we’re making some changes. More details tomorrow.”

That single sentence is a morale test.

Not because people are fragile. Because morale is the story your team tells itself when information is missing — and in distributed teams, the “story gap” fills fast.

This week: Morale — the capacity to maintain belief in the organization and its goals, even in the face of opposition or hardship.

Great morale isn’t the absence of bad days.
It’s resilience to them.

Morale isn’t “happiness.” It’s belief.

A team can be “happy” and still have low morale.

Happy: “Today was easy.”

High morale: “Even if today is hard, we’re still headed somewhere worth going.”

But the best remote-first companies have figured something out. They know that strong morale doesn't happen by accident. They make transparency the default, eliminating the opportunity for everyone to come up with their own theory for what's going on behind the curtain.

People can handle hard realities. They can't handle mystery.

How to measure morale (without becoming a Survey Company)

• Are questions going up or down at all-hands? (Silence is not alignment.)
• Are decisions sticking…or constantly getting re-litigated?
• Are people volunteering ideas…or only executing tickets?
• Do “small fires” turn into long email threads because no one wants to own it?

The hidden morale crisis

Here's what makes all of this harder: the people most responsible for holding the line, middle managers, are themselves running on empty. Seventy-one percent report burnout, more than any other group. They're squeezed between executive pressure and team needs, often without training for the unique challenges of distributed leadership.

And when manager morale breaks, it cascades. Research shows that manager well-being directly transfers to their teams. You can't maintain belief in the mission when the person you report to has stopped believing.

What the best companies do differently

They invest in supporting people before they burn out, not after. They treat transparency as infrastructure, not a nice-to-have. They surface wins deliberately, because remote teams don't see momentum unless you show it.

And when things get hard, they don't go quiet. They communicate more, not less.

Morale shows up as speed of recovery. The companies that get this right aren't the ones that never have bad days, they're the ones that bounce back before the story gap fills with fear.

P.S. Next week we’re diving into Onboarding: the “O” in REMOTE Score. It’s not about day-one swag (although that doesn't hurt either) - It’s whether a new hire gets real context, real relationships, and a real path to impact or if we let out of sight be out of mind.

If you know someone that would enjoy Work is a Verb, forward this their way and I’ll grant you one ‘no meetings’ blessing for next week 🙏📅

Working remotely—but never alone,

Jim