The Remote Employee Experience
The Remote Employee Experience (TREE)
Nine principles for remote and hybrid companies: a framework for the whole remote employee lifecycle, built on trust and responsibility and refined by Blend Me for more than a decade.
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What is the remote employee experience?
The remote employee experience is everything a person lives through while working for a company they don't share a building with every day. It starts with the interview and moves through the first year, the meetings and feedback, to how their departure is handled.
What's different about the remote employee experience?
It's the same idea as the employee experience, under different conditions. What changes is how much of it happens on purpose.
In an office, much of it happens by proximity. A new hire overhears how decisions get made, and a manager notices someone struggling. At a remote company none of that happens unless someone designs it. At a hybrid company it happens for some people and not others, which can quietly split one workforce into two experiences.
Tools matter, but most of the remote employee experience is about managers, norms and the systems that replace what the office used to do for free.
REX names it. TREE designs it.
Software vendors often shorten the term to REX. The remote employee experience is broader than digital employee experience, which covers devices and apps. But naming the experience isn't the same as designing one, and most of that software is built to measure activity, not to design it.
TREE starts somewhere else. Two of its nine principles run through all the others: trust, where a company trusts people to do good work unwatched, and people trust what they're told, and responsibility, where a company owes people clarity and resources, and people owe it their results. Distance means neither can be assumed.
Why the remote employee experience matters
The remote employee experience decides whether remote and hybrid work pays off, because the same arrangement can raise engagement or drive people out the door depending on how it's designed. The research points both ways at once:
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More engaged, and more alone
Gallup's State of the Global Workplace 2026 found remote employees more engaged than on-site workers, 30% versus 24%, but also lonelier, 24% versus 18%.
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Many remote workers are looking
Gallup reported in May 2025 that 57% of fully remote workers are looking or watching for a new job, falling to 38% among those who are engaged and thriving.
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Flexibility keeps people
In Pew Research Center's October 2024 survey, 46% of workers whose jobs can be done from home said they'd be unlikely to stay if remote work ended.
Remote work raises the ceiling and lowers the floor. Where a company lands depends on whether the experience was designed or left to chance.
The TREE framework for the remote employee experience
TREE, The Remote Employee Experience, is Blend Me's framework of nine principles for designing the employee experience at remote and hybrid companies: Trust, Responsibility, Attract, Hire, Onboard, Engage, Perform, Develop and Depart. Nine is the whole of it, and Blend Me works in all nine. Trust and Responsibility are the two that show up inside every other one.
Trust and Responsibility are not a stage to complete and move past. Both run in two directions, and both turn up inside the rest. Hiring fairly is Responsibility. Judging output instead of hours online is Trust. That is why Blend Me treats all nine as one body of work rather than a checklist to work down.
| Principle | The question it answers |
|---|---|
| Trust | Do people and managers believe in each other's work without watching it happen? |
| Responsibility | Does the company know what it owes its people, and do people know what they owe back? |
| Attract | Would the right candidates recognize themselves in how the job and culture are described? |
| Hire | Is selection structured and fair for candidates who may never visit an office? |
| Onboard | Does a new hire know what good work looks like and who to ask? |
| Engage | Do people feel connected to the mission, their work and each other? |
| Perform | Is performance judged on results, with regular and fair feedback? |
| Develop | Can people see how they grow here without being in the room? |
| Depart | When someone leaves, do they leave well, and does what they knew stay behind? |
Put TREE to work at your company
The most practical way to use TREE is to find the principle where your company is weakest and start there, rather than fixing all nine at once. Each principle also has its own page, which goes deeper and collects the articles, Return to People episodes and guides tagged to it.
The TREE Assessment
- What it does
- Looks at your organization through the nine principles
- What you get
- Your results, sent to your inbox
The Remote Employee Experience eBook
- What it covers
- Each principle, for anyone who wants the long version
- Length
- Nearly 30 pages
Questions about the remote employee experience
The remote employee experience is everything a person goes through while working for a remote or hybrid company, from the job post they first read to the day they leave. It covers hiring, onboarding, connection, performance, growth and departure. It's the same idea as the employee experience, but more of it has to be designed, because an office no longer supplies it by default.
The employee experience covers the whole relationship between a person and their employer, wherever they work. The remote employee experience is that relationship when people don't share an office every day. Things that happened by proximity, like overhearing decisions, informal mentoring and a manager noticing someone struggling, have to be built on purpose.
TREE, The Remote Employee Experience, is Blend Me's framework for the experience employees actually live through in a distributed organization. It has nine principles: Trust, Responsibility, Attract, Hire, Onboard, Engage, Perform, Develop and Depart. Trust and Responsibility turn up inside all the others. Jennifer Cameron and Kaleem Clarkson created it and have refined it across more than a decade. Blend Me uses it as the lens on every engagement.
In TREE, the journey runs Attract, Hire, Onboard, Engage, Perform, Develop and Depart, and Trust and Responsibility turn up inside every part of it. All nine are principles Blend Me works in. General employee lifecycle models vary in how many steps they use; TREE is designed for people who don't share an office.
Measure it principle by principle rather than with a single engagement score. For each TREE principle, pair a few survey questions with data you already have, such as time to first contribution for onboarding or regretted turnover for departure. The pattern across the nine shows where the experience is breaking down and where to start.
Build trust through design rather than monitoring. Set clear, written expectations, judge people on results rather than hours online, explain how decisions are made, and follow through on what leaders commit to. Trust between peers matters too, so create regular, planned chances for colleagues to work together and get to know each other.
Yes. TREE applies to fully remote and hybrid companies alike, and hybrid companies often need it more, because two experiences can form depending on who's in the office. By Blend Me's definition, an office-based company with even one fully remote department is hybrid.
Jennifer Cameron and Kaleem Clarkson, who founded Blend Me, created TREE. Blend Me has worked with remote and hybrid companies since 2013. Jennifer is a Prosci Certified Change Practitioner, and Kaleem hosts the Return to People podcast and was named a LinkedIn Top Voice in remote work.
Not sure which principle to start with?
The TREE Assessment points you to the part of the remote employee experience that needs attention first. Blend Me works with remote and hybrid companies of 3 to 300 employees.
