Companies are still treating “hours worked” like it’s the heartbeat of performance. Green dots, badge swipes, online activity windows can be associated to productivity only in the most superficial way. Companies issue RTO policies to promote alignment. Whenever a company says that out loud, what they mean is: We don’t know how to measure the work, so we’re going to measure the workers.

Yikes. When you measure hours, you aren’t measuring talent, impact, or contribution. You’re measuring your own proximity anxiety. In hybrid environments meant to optimize productivity, that measurement error has consequences.

The Seduction of the Visible Metric

Leaders gravitate toward hours for the simple reason being that they can see them. Hours are precise, countable, and objective. In a world where work happens across time zones, tools, and schedules, effort measured in hours becomes the one metric that can’t hide. Good, right?

But hours don’t tell you who’s learning. Hours don’t tell you who’s innovating. Hours don’t tell you who’s carrying the load quietly so others can move faster. Hours tell you who is present, not necessarily who is contributing.

I learned this long before remote work became mainstream. Early in my career, I was a quiet performer. I wasn’t loud in meetings, never put my name on my deliverables, and I wasn’t the person pulling leaders aside in hallways. I simply did the work, many times the deep and complex work, and delivered it consistently. Years later, even after I became fully remote, people were still using the process documentation I created. My work left a long shadow, even though my presence didn’t.

That was the first time I realized invisibility isn’t caused by distance. It’s caused by measurement. If visible effort is treated as more important than lasting impact, the quiet high performers stay quiet in the data too.

The Proximity Penalty

Hybrid environments widen the gap between what’s seen and what’s true. The people who are physically in the office, even sporadically, get tiny moments of recognition. They get a nod in the hallway, a “quick question,” a casual mention in a meeting. Meanwhile, remote contributors may be doing extraordinary work that never collides with leadership’s line of sight. For a while, I was told being overlooked for assignments was the “equalizer” and the “tradeoff” of being remote. That didn’t serve the organization.

In environments like this, presence gets confused with commitment. Effort gets confused with excellence. Visibility gets confused with value. And companies double down on their in-office policies, hoping proximity will repair something that wasn’t broken by distance. It was broken by lack of clarity in the leadership.

Work Outlives Presence

Some of the work I remember most fondly continues to run in the background and deliver results. Long after I left the office, those processes and products keep delivering value. People rely on them daily without ever thinking about who built it. That’s the thing about good work: it’s durable and it sticks. It shapes outcomes long after the meetings are over. Hours, on the other hand, vanish the moment the week comes to a close. When organizations prioritize effort over results, they invest in what disappears and ignore what endures.

This is where talent begins slipping through the cracks. Good people aren’t just overlooked, they become structurally invisible.

There is a Danger to Overcome

If you listen closely to leaders today, you’ll hear the reasoning underneath the policy changes, the hybrid rules, and the return-to-office pushes:

• “What if I miss something?”
• “What if someone is drifting?”
• “What if performance slips and I don’t see it happening?”
• “What if I’m accountable for results I can’t monitor?”

It’s not micromanagement for the sake of control. It’s micromanagement for the sake of certainty. There is something here that demands attention.

Leaders need outcomes, but they want effort too, because effort feels like the early warning system. A green dot, a long meeting list, a busy calendar all become proxies for engagement, but not good ones. Those proxies end up distorting the picture more than they clarify it.

Leaders say, “We have to measure outcomes, but we also have to measure effort.” They remain convinced because hours are what they “contracted” for, right? Effort feels safe. Effort is visible. Effort is trackable. Effort is the assembly line equivalent.

Effort doesn’t question whether the system is working. The system of assuming that effort and outcomes travel together and one leads to the other. Some people produce extraordinary results with clean efficiency. Others drag work out, padding the hours while adding no real value.

If you mix effort metrics with outcome expectations, and you end up missing both measures. You will mistake the high performers for low-effort sneaks because they work cleanly. There’s a huge danger here, because this is how talent gets missed and eventually lost.

What Companies Really Want

They want clarity. They want confidence that they know who is doing great work without guessing. They want to prevent problems before they turn into resignations. They want teams to be aligned, and not scattered.

Hours in the office feel like the simplest way to get that clarity. But they don’t deliver on that promise. They distort what’s really happening, reward the wrong behaviors, and cause the very attrition companies fear.

Every time a leader leans harder on visibility theater (more days in office! more meetings! more monitoring!), they widen the gap between real performance and perceived performance. And in that gap, high performers slip away.

A Better Way: Measure the Work, Not the Worker’s Location

I’m not here to romanticize remote work or diminish the leadership challenge. Leading remote teammembers and managing a hybrid environment are complicated leadership endeavors. Distributed teams are complex. But the solution isn’t dragging talented people back to the office in hopes you’ll “see” more.

The solution is building a system that makes the right things visible.

A system where:

• outcomes are defined
• progress is shared consistently
• visibility is intentional, not accidental
• communication norms support clarity
• leaders can assess performance without resorting to surveillance metrics
• individuals know how to make their impact seen without performing presence

You don’t need more eyeballs on people. You need better visibility into the work.

That’s the inflection point. When you shift from hours to outcomes, hidden stars emerge

Every time a leader moves away from effort-based measurement and into outcome visibility, the quiet high performers rise. The ones keeping the engine running finally get credit. Remote contributors stop being ghost talent. Leaders stop guessing. Turnover drops because people feel seen, not scanned. The stars were always there, hidden behind the wrong metrics.

Closing: The Talent You Miss is the Talent You Lose

New RTO policies won’t fix what worries the companies issuing them. It won’t make people more aligned. It won’t surface talent they couldn’t see before. It won’t improve outcomes. It will increase proximity, not performance.

If you measure hours, you’ll miss talent. If you keep missing talent, you’ll lose it.

The future belongs to organizations that measure contribution, not presence. And to professionals who learn how to make their impact visible in systems built for clarity (not surveillance).

Because when you finally measure what matters, talent stops hiding. It starts leading.