Mental Health Management in a Remote Team, A Personal Experience

As the manager of a technical team in a fully remote environment, I’ve always made it a priority to maintain regular communication with my team members. I schedule short weekly one-on-one meetings specifically to preserve individual connections despite the distance.

When Reality Shifts

Several months into this routine, I began noticing concerning changes in one team member’s behavior. During our one-on-ones, they started expressing increasingly paranoid thoughts that seemed completely disconnected from the cooperative, healthy environment I was striving to create within our team.

These concerning statements continued and intensified over several weeks, eventually becoming incoherent and irrational. It took me some time to fully grasp that, as a manager, I was facing a significant challenge. I still vividly remember my distress and anxiety, feeling powerless and ill-equipped to handle the situation. A sense of responsibility and genuine concern for my colleague ultimately spurred me into action.

I later learned that this wasn’t just a moral obligation but a legal one as well. French labor law explicitly states that employers — and by extension, managers — have a duty to protect both the physical and mental health of their employees.

My Response Plan

Faced with this situation, I implemented five specific actions:

1. Maintain routine structure: We continued all regular activities—one-on-ones, daily meeting, and other team ceremonies. Structure provides stability and predictability, which can be reassuring during difficult times.

2. Make thoughtful accommodations: I adapted certain requirements that might trigger distress or anxiety. Is the annual in-person seminar truly essential if it causes fear? Is camera-on mandatory for someone experiencing anxiety during video calls?

3. Practice discreet communication: While maintaining confidentiality with the broader team, I consulted with relevant leadership. I chose to speak with my supervisor and an HR representative, who subsequently initiated communication with the team member.

4. Seek professional guidance: I scheduled an appointment with occupational health services—in France, employees can regularly consult with physicians in a professional context. My goal was to discuss this situation with a healthcare professional. I later learned I could have simply called our affiliated health center directly. This meeting allowed me to process my own shock as a manager and resulted in arranging a medical appointment for my team member, with the doctor informed about the symptoms I had observed.

5. Focus on work quality: Throughout this period, the quality of their work remained consistent, which provided a reassuring framework and allowed me to maintain regular contact. I deliberately increased opportunities for collaboration through pair programming and code reviews.

What I Avoided

I also made conscious decisions about what not to do:

• Avoiding amateur psychology: I resisted the temptation to diagnose or analyze, though as a manager, I admit this detachment was challenging. I reminded myself that I’m not a physician, and my abilities to help were limited to being supportive and alerting proper channels if work capacity became compromised.

• Sidestepping direct confrontation: When paranoid statements arose, I didn’t directly contradict them. Instead, I gently steered conversations back to reality, often using humor, without pressing the point too firmly.

• Respecting medical privacy: I didn’t try to discover what was discussed during their medical appointment. Doctor-patient confidentiality applies in occupational health as well. However, I did receive guidance on appropriate managerial approaches (communication, listening, maintaining support and structure, alerting professionals if conditions worsened).

Moving Forward

Over time, the symptoms gradually subsided. The team member eventually indicated they were receiving medical care.

This experience stands as one of the most impactful episodes in my management career. Nothing in my preparation had equipped me to handle such a situation. Technical managers expect to manage roadmaps, backlogs, technical challenges, ego clashes, and inter-team conflicts—but this blindsided me completely.

An increasing number of organizations now offer training on preventing psychosocial risks, which seems worth exploring. I wonder if full remote work environments should make us managers even more vigilant about mental health issues. Team members can become isolated despite our digital connections. Despite our overloaded schedules, we must create space to truly listen to our colleagues.

Further Reading

I used Elicit and Google NotebookLM to deepen my research on this topic. My methodology involved searching for studies that confirm my intuitions and personal experience—which is, admittedly, the exact definition of confirmation bias. Nevertheless, I found these papers interesting and worth sharing:

1. WHO, Mental health at work

Reasonable accommodations at work adapt working environments to the capacities, needs and preferences of a worker with a mental health condition. They may include giving individual workers flexible working hours, extra time to complete tasks, modified assignments to reduce stress, time off for health appointments or regular supportive meetings with supervisors.

2. Psychological Safety in Remote Teams

A concrete study, easy to read, conducted at Savings Bank (Norway) examining psychological safety, which ultimately recommends synchronized hybrid practices (entire teams working remotely on the same days and in-person together on designated days).

Perhaps not surprisingly, we found remote work to hinder psychological safety in teams.

Finally, we found that organizational norms and routines are effective at supporting team psychological safety.

3. Impact of Telework on Psychological Health and Worker Performance During COVID-19

A publication (in french) exploring the impact of telework on the psychological health and performance of Canadian public service employees during the COVID-19 pandemic, based on a survey of over 3,700 teleworkers.

les résultats révèlent que l’isolement professionnel réduit la performance des télétravailleurs. Ceci concorde avec les résultats des recherches antérieures suggérant qu’en contexte de crise, les télétravailleurs accusent une baisse de performance à mesure qu’ils se sentent isolés de leurs collègues et de leurs organisations (Carillo et al., 2020 ; Toscano et Zappala, 2020). En outre, les résultats montrent que les demandes du télétravail réduisent indirectement la performance des employés en augmentant la fréquence des symptômes de stress.

le soutien organisationnel joue bien un rôle de modérateur dans la relation entre l’isolement professionnel et le niveau de performance des télétravailleurs. Lorsque l’organisation met des ressources à la disposition de ses employés pour leur permettre de bien accomplir leurs tâches, cela peut stimuler leur performance en atténuant les effets négatifs de l’isolement professionnel.

4. Remote Work and Employee Isolation

Research from the European Journal of Work and Organizational Psychology investigating how both remote work frequency and mediated communication (email, online meetings) affected Finnish employees’ feelings of isolation and psychological distress during COVID-19

I quote a synthesis generated by notebooklm, summarized by Claude… :

Remote work frequency increases isolation. The more frequently employees worked remotely at an earlier time point, the more isolated they felt at a later time point.

Mediated communication frequency reduces isolation. Using mediated communication more frequently with colleagues led to reduced feelings of isolation over time.