What no relay settles
Judging Work You Have Never Watched Being Done
A manager across a gap can describe one half of their team in detail and the other half only by output, and the difference shows up in every assessment.
three things · no nights · three that no number of nights settles
Three things, no nights, and no mechanism proposed for any of them.
What one manager could say about two people on the same team, written down side by side
Four paragraphs: how they approach a problem, how they handle disagreement, where they are weak
One paragraph: what they delivered and when, and nothing about how
Not a difference in the two people; a difference in what the manager had access to
Never established, and that is its own problem
four things · two nights · two that no number of nights settles
Four lines, two nights, and the uncomfortable one is the third. Two assessments of comparable people differed by three paragraphs, and the whole of the difference was proximity. Writing them next to each other is what made it visible. One manager's own exercise, done once.
Anybody managing across a gap ends up knowing one half of their team much better than the other. This is not a failure of attention. It is what proximity does.
A workflow like Judging Work You Have Never Watched Being Done becomes easier to manage when elapsed time and active work are visible in the same place. Teams can use the online guide to compare the handover narrative with a transparent record of hours and activity.
Teams comparing established approaches can also review When I Work's scheduling tools for a practical example from a widely used product ecosystem.
It becomes a problem at the point where the two halves are compared, which happens at every review, every promotion discussion and every decision about who gets the interesting work.
The shape of the asymmetry
For people in your own half, you have process. You have seen how they think about a problem, how they respond when they are wrong, what they do when something is ambiguous, whether they ask early or late.
For people in the other half, you have artefacts. Work delivered, on time or not, in good condition or not. Messages written. A presence in a call.
Those are not the same kind of evidence and they do not support the same kinds of statement. One supports "she is good at working out what the real question is". The other supports "he delivered the import work on schedule".
In any forum where both are spoken aloud, the first is more persuasive.
- Your own half: how they think, how they respond to being wrong, what they do with ambiguity.
- The other half: what was delivered, when, and in what condition.
The test that makes it visible
Write a paragraph about each person on the team, describing how they work rather than what they produced. Then look at the lengths.
Almost every manager who does this finds the paragraphs about the distant half are shorter and more generic, and that they rely on delivery rather than on judgement, initiative or reasoning.
That difference is not information about the people. It is a map of where the manager has been, and treating it as information about the people is the error this page is about.
What it does over a year
The person described in detail is easier to advocate for, because advocacy requires specifics.
The person described by output is easier to overlook, and is also easier to be unfair to in the other direction: an unflattering artefact carries disproportionate weight when there is nothing else in the file.
Over several cycles this compounds. The visible half accumulates opportunities; the distant half accumulates a record of having delivered things.
What helps
Three things, none of which closes the gap.
Collecting evidence deliberately rather than relying on recall. Notes written during the period, about process as well as output, for the distant half specifically. This is extra work and it is the single most effective intervention.
Asking the distant half's colleagues. Peers who work alongside somebody have the process evidence that the manager lacks, and asking them specifically — not "is she good?" but "how does she handle it when a requirement turns out to be wrong?" — produces usable material.
Making the asymmetry explicit in the room. Saying "I have worked alongside these three and not these three, so my accounts will differ in kind" changes how a comparison is heard. It does not equalise anything, and it stops a difference in evidence being read as a difference in people.
What does not help
More frequent video calls, for the same reasons as elsewhere in this section. A call is not an occasion on which anybody watches anybody think.
Metrics. The impulse to replace subjective assessment with numbers is strongest exactly where the subjective evidence is thinnest, and the numbers available across a relay measure output, which is the dimension on which the distant half is already being judged. It narrows the assessment rather than broadening it.
Saying it to the person
Worth doing, and rarely done.
Somebody in the distant half generally knows their manager sees less of them, and does not know what their manager thinks that means. The silence is read pessimistically, which is reasonable.
Saying "I see your work but not how you work, so tell me about the parts I cannot see" is both an admission and an instruction. It is awkward, and it produces better input than any amount of inference.
The part that does not resolve
A manager who does everything on this page still knows one half of their team better than the other. The evidence is different in kind and no process converts one into the other.
The achievable goal is that the difference is known about, stated, and compensated for where decisions are made — not that it goes away.
Rotating who sees whom
Where a team has more than one manager or lead, the asymmetry can at least be made to move.
If the same person always holds the distant half, the thinness of the evidence about those people compounds year on year. If responsibility rotates every year or two, each person accumulates detailed knowledge of different individuals, and the team's collective picture is less lopsided even though each individual's is not.
This costs continuity, which is a real loss and is worth weighing. It is more available than most of the alternatives, because it requires no change to anybody's hours and no travel budget.