Tired of Improvising Your Remote Work Strategy? Here's a Framework for Success.

Remote work has become central to modern employment, with more than half of Fortune 500 companies now offering remote or hybrid options. Yet despite this widespread adoption, most organizations still lack a coherent strategy for making it work.

According to Darden Professor Roshni Raveendhran, who studies the future of work, companies face a fundamental tension: they seek control over where, when and how work gets done, while employees demand autonomy.

“Companies must carefully balance this tension,” says Raveendhran.

The stakes are high. A 2025 Gallup poll found that 64 percent of remote workers would consider leaving their jobs if employers eliminated remote work flexibility. Yet organizations frequently address remote work on an ad hoc basis rather than adopting a cohesive, long-term strategy. Only 26 percent of CEOs surveyed by Accenture reported having a proactive remote work strategy, while about one-third acknowledged they simply “go with the flow.”

New research from Raveendhran and Matthew Perrigino, an assistant professor of management at CUNY Baruch College's Zicklin School of Business, offers a way forward.

In their article “A Theory of Strategic Boundary Control for Remote Work,” published in the Academy of Management Review, Raveendhran and Perrigino provide a practical framework for designing remote work strategies that support organizational performance and sustain competitive advantage.

The Strategic Gap in Remote Work Planning

Most organizations approach remote work reactively — taking cues from competitors, employee demands, or informal notions of fairness. The result is often a compromise that satisfies no one and undermines organizational performance.

“Remote work is no longer a random perk,” says Raveendhran. “Organizations have to be strategic about it and do it in a way that fits their work and people. You're making strategic choices about how to enhance organizational performance while allowing employees flexibility to control their work-life boundaries.”

The Blueprint: Two Critical Strategic Decisions

Raveendhran recommends that organizations start by making two strategic choices.

1. How does your organization view employees?

Raveendhran and Perrigino call this your “human capital view” — which falls somewhere on a spectrum from transactional to relational.

A transactional view sees employees' knowledge and skills as useful and valuable but not especially unique. Because those employees’ abilities are considered fairly common, organizations assume that it wouldn’t be hard to recruit similar employees. Even a highly paid attorney who does something useful but not unique, like non-disclosure agreements, could fall into this category.

A relational view recognizes that employees' knowledge and skills are unique to the organization and help create competitive advantage. Think senior engineers, client relationship managers, or specialized researchers. Because of this uniqueness, such employees are harder to replace.

This perspective emphasizes long-term results and views employment as a mutual exchange: employees go above and beyond in their work, and the organization provides incentives and benefits in return.

A single organization can hold both views simultaneously, treating some employees transactionally and others relationally. Neither view is inherently wrong, but pretending all roles deserve identical treatment creates problems. Managing a patent attorney like a customer service agent — or vice versa — wastes resources and frustrates everyone.

2. How interdependent is the work?

The second key strategic choice is the degree to which work is reciprocally interdependent.

Reciprocally interdependent work requires people to rely on one another, where tasks can only be completed through sharing information and resources, and collaborating. Jobs with high interdependence demand frequent interaction among coworkers, while jobs with low interdependence can be completed with little or no collaboration.

A product development team making daily trade-offs about features and timelines needs frequent interaction. A graphic designer creating marketing materials might need only weekly check-ins. This isn't about preference or management style — it's about the fundamental nature of the work itself.

These two dimensions — your company's view of human capital and the degree of work interdependence — create four distinct scenarios, each requiring its own approach to remote work management.

Matching Your Tools to Your Strategy

Once you've clarified your strategic position, you can configure two sets of management tools accordingly.

Remote work policies govern where and when work happens. These include requirements for office presence, core collaboration hours, or complete scheduling flexibility. These are your formal rules about time and space boundaries.

Technology systems govern how you direct and monitor employee attention. This includes everything from activity monitoring software to expectations about response times, from blocking after-hours email to requiring video during meetings. These tools shape whether and how you control your people’s attention.

The key insight: these two sets of tools must work together and align with your strategic choices. Misalignment creates situations where valuable employees feel micromanaged, or critical collaboration suffers because everyone works different hours from different locations.

Four Configurations for Success

Raveendhran and Perrigino's central argument is that the most effective combination of policies and technology depends on your two strategic choices. These combinations enhance organizational performance by focusing either on controlling employee behavior or controlling employee output.

Behavior-oriented boundary control (hereafter behavior control) focuses on closely monitoring where, when and how employees do their work — through supervision, rules, and procedures.

Output-oriented boundary control (hereafter output control) focuses less on where, when, and how the work is done and more on the results employees produce, giving them greater freedom to decide how to achieve those results.

Here are four configurations that work:

Configuration 1: Highly collaborative work + interchangeable employees

Example: Shift-based customer service teams

Align everything toward behavior control. Require consistent on-site or online presence during specific hours. Use technology to monitor activity and maintain connectivity. This ensures the coordination you need while maintaining clear expectations for a transactional workforce.

Configuration 2: Independent work + strategic asset employees

Example: Specialized consultants or researchers

Align everything toward output control. Give people maximum flexibility about when and where they work. Focus technology on measuring results rather than monitoring activity. Avoid constant-connectivity norms that lead to burnout. This configuration protects the autonomy and commitment of people you can't afford to lose.

Configuration 3: Independent work + interchangeable employees

Example: Field sales representatives or content moderators

This creates a dilemma. You can't justify expensive oversight of interchangeable workers, but you worry about productivity without direct supervision. The solution: give flexibility on location and schedule but use technology to monitor activity closely. People appreciate the flexibility while you maintain accountability.

Configuration 4: Highly collaborative work + strategic asset employees

Example: Senior leadership teams or R&D groups

This presents the opposite problem. You need people together for critical coordination, but you can't risk alienating them with heavy-handed oversight. The solution: require on-site presence or core collaboration hours to enable teamwork but focus technology on tracking outcomes rather than watching their every move. This balances organizational needs with personal autonomy.

What This Means for Your Organization

Raveendhran and Perrigino's research offers a structured approach to designing remote work strategies that align with an organization's performance objectives rather than merely reacting to employees’ flexibility demands.

Their framework directly addresses the tension between control and flexibility. With 64 percent of remote workers willing to quit if flexibility is withdrawn, this is critical. The framework shows leaders how to resolve this conflict through strategic trade-offs.

A leader dealing with highly collaborative but highly valued employees, for instance, can use strict policies like core hours or required on-site days to ensure necessary coordination, while simultaneously using output-focused technology to protect employee autonomy and dedication. This balance maintains organizational needs without alienating essential talent.

Perhaps most importantly, the framework demands strategic clarity. The authors insist that organizations must first clarify their fundamental strategic choices — how they view their employees and the type of work they do. This means leaders cannot simply copy competitors' policies. The effectiveness of each organization's remote work strategy depends on the internal alignment of policies and technology with their core strategic choices.

A Theory of Strategic Boundary Control for Remote Work by Matthew B. Perrigino and Roshni Raveendhran was published in October 2025 in the Academy of Management Review.