Culture Is What Happens When No One Is Watching.
I called a colleague one evening. He cancelled. An hour later, he called back and said: "Sorry, was playing a game and was deeply engrossed in that." He could have said anything else. He said the truth. That small exchange is the entire argument for why building a culture of transparency is the only real answer to managing a team that nobody can see.
For most of the history of organised work, monitoring was the default. You came to an office; your presence was visible. Your effort could be observed. Your manager could see whether you were at your desk, whether you looked engaged, whether you were in a meeting or slipping out early. The DNA of the organisation mattered, of course... but external oversight was always there as a parallel system, catching what culture missed.
WFH changed this. And it changed it permanently. Each home cannot be fitted with a security camera... and it should not be. So the question became: what is left when the last layer of external oversight is removed?
This is why building culture is not a soft, aspirational activity. In a WFH world, it is the only operational one. You cannot hire a monitoring system; you can only build a set of values that people carry with them when they sit down at their desk at home at 9am with nobody watching and decide what to do next. And those values start at the hiring decision — which is why I hire for trust before performance.
To my mind, the key is transparency. Not performance transparency... output dashboards and sprint velocity metrics. Something deeper: the transparency that makes people comfortable being honest about what they are doing, even when the honest answer is inconvenient.
He could have said he was in a meeting. He could have said he was on another call. He could have said nothing at all and called back in the morning. He said: he was playing a game. Deeply engrossed. That is the whole story.
He said that because we built a culture where saying that was safe. Where honesty about how you spend your time is more valued than the appearance of constant availability. Where nobody would think less of him for being human. That is the DNA. That is what runs when nobody is watching.
The distinction matters enormously in practice. An organisation that has built monitoring rather than culture will find WFH catastrophic; they will reach for surveillance software, mandatory video calls with cameras on, activity trackers. These are not culture; they are monitoring with extra steps. They will fail at the same point monitoring always fails: the moment someone finds a way around them.
An organisation that has built transparency will find something surprising: WFH works better than the office did. Not because people are more disciplined at home, but because they are more honest about their time. And that honesty, ironically, makes them more productive... not less.
Building this culture is not quick. It is not a policy you announce or a values document you laminate. It is built through every interaction where honesty was safe, every moment where a leader admitted they did not know something, every time someone said "I took the afternoon off" and the response was "good" rather than a raised eyebrow. It accumulates. Slowly. And then, one day, a colleague cancels your call and calls back an hour later to tell you exactly why... and you realise the DNA is real.
That is when you know you have built something. Not a team that performs productivity. A team that is honest about being human... and chooses, freely, to do their best work anyway.