Stop sorting roles into front office and back office. Sort them by whether anyone needs to walk down the hall to them.
Last updated: September 2026
Short answer
A role can go remote when the work lives in software and on the phone and has a clear result. Keep it local when people need to walk down the hall to someone, or when the work needs hands on crews, sites or clients in person. Five VirtueStaff clients in five industries drew the line in exactly that place.
The usual answer to this question is a list: admin, bookkeeping, customer support, design. Lists don’t decide anything about your own team. A test does.
At VirtueStaff, a remote staffing company in Gilbert, Arizona, we looked at how five of our clients made the call. A commercial contractor, a roofer, a leak detection company, a law firm and a marketing agency. Different trades, different sizes. Almost the same line.
In this guide
- The Hallway Test: how do you decide which roles go remote?
- What did five of our clients keep local, and what went remote?
- Which role went remote first?
- Does client-facing work have to stay local?
- What makes a remote role work?
- How do you run the Hallway Test on your own team?
- Frequently asked questions
The Hallway Test: how do you decide which roles go remote?
Ask one question about the role: does anyone need to walk down the hall to this person, or put hands on the work?
That’s the Hallway Test. If people need to find this person in the building, or the job needs hands on crews, sites or clients in the room, the role stays local. If the work lives in software and on the phone, and you can say what “done” looks like, it can go remote. The test is not front office versus back office. It isn’t client-facing versus behind the scenes either. It’s presence versus output.
Two of the five put it in their own words. Willmeng Construction started from their field teams:
Construction has a unique constraint: field teams want to walk down the hall and talk to someone.
Willmeng Construction case study
Titan Roofing & Construction put it as a rule:
If a role needs someone to be a face in the office and hands-on with the crews and contractors who come through, it stays local. If the work can be done from anywhere, it’s a candidate for a remote hire.
Titan Roofing & Construction case study
What did five of our clients keep local, and what went remote?
Each of them kept their in-person roles and moved the work that is judged by output.
| Client | Kept local | Went remote | Their reasoning |
|---|---|---|---|
| Willmeng Construction, commercial construction | Roles heavily supporting construction and operations teams; work where people expect in-person answers | Accounting and back office; HR, legal and other back-office work | Any role with a clearly defined scope and no quality difference in or out of the office can go remote |
| Titan Roofing & Construction, roofing | Roles that need a face in the office and hands-on work with crews and contractors | Invoicing, subcontractor insurance tracking, preliminary notices | If the work can be done from anywhere, it’s a candidate for a remote hire |
| Leak Science, leak detection and repair | A planned local hire who will learn alongside the office manager, so the knowledge is shared | Running the office: its systems, SOPs and handbook, and the phones when needed | The owner needed someone who could run the office when she had to step away almost overnight |
| McCarthy Law, estate planning and elder law | Attorneys, paralegals and elder care coordinators, who work with clients daily | Operations, the founder’s inbox, finance support, intake calls, client check-ins, part-time marketing | Administrative work that can be done from anywhere, plus phone-based intake, is a natural fit |
| Growth Lab Advertising, digital marketing | Client-facing roles and roles that drive account strategy | Tracking setup, email marketing technical work, video and design | Behind-the-scenes, project-based work with a clear outcome: the tracking works, the video looks great |
Read across the table and the Hallway Test explains almost every row. Attorneys meet families. Crews need someone on site. Field teams want an answer down the hall. None of that moved.
What moved is judged by output. An invoice is entered correctly or it isn’t. An insurance certificate is current or it has lapsed. The tracking fires or it doesn’t. When you can describe the result, you can hand the work to someone outside the building.
Which role went remote first?
The work swamping someone who should have been doing something else. Here’s where each client started:
- McCarthy Law started with an executive assistant. The founder and the firm administrator were already buried in day-to-day tasks when their finance manager resigned and her work landed on them too. “Every day we were just in the weeds, just trying to keep our heads above water,” said Stacy Hanson, the firm administrator.
- Titan Roofing started with finance. One person was handling billing, payables, receivables and insurance compliance, averaging at least 60 hours a week.
- Growth Lab started from their engineer’s week. Much of it went to ad and call tracking setup, work that helped to have technical know-how for but didn’t need an engineering degree. They brought on three remote specialists, and one of them, a web and tracking specialist, now handles that work.
- Leak Science needed an office manager who could run the office when the owner had to step away from the business almost overnight.
- Willmeng‘s first hire joined their accounting team. They needed more people to keep up internally, but couldn’t grow their budget as fast as their workload.
Growth Lab’s CEO, Mandy Holman, has a way to find your own first role:
Track your time for an entire week, then see how much of it was actually strategic and how much anybody could have done. It’s way more than you think.
Mandy Holman, Growth Lab Advertising
Does client-facing work have to stay local?
No. Two of the five moved client-facing phone work to remote staff and kept it working.
McCarthy Law’s remote team handles intake calls from potential clients, appointment confirmation calls, and quarterly check-ins for their Client Care Plan members. The firm trains their intake hires the way they would anyone: one-on-one, with role-play, example calls and live calls, plus sales training twice a week alongside the in-house intake team.
Leak Science’s office manager stepped up to run the phones when the business needed it, even though back-office work is her natural strength.
So the Hallway Test doesn’t ask whether the role talks to clients. It asks where. A phone call can be answered from anywhere. A signing, a site walk or a crew hand-off can’t.
What makes a remote role work?
A clear scope, a careful choice of person, and a manager who trains them like any new hire. The five case studies describe no failed remote hire, but two describe what made the difference.
Titan had often hired the first candidate who interviewed well, on earlier roles, and started over when it didn’t work out. For their finance hire they interviewed several pre-vetted candidates side by side instead. We call the old habit the First-Good-Interview Trap.
Willmeng’s Mark Chapman had used international outsourcing before, and knew it worked only with the right partner:
It’s all about the partner. But you’ve got to invest the time to share your vision and train them.
Mark Chapman, Willmeng Construction
The training part is its own playbook. Our guide to a remote hire’s first 30 days shows how three of these clients run it.
How do you run the Hallway Test on your own team?
Five steps. The first three take an afternoon; the time log takes a week.
- List the work, not the job titles. Write down every recurring task your team did last week.
- Mark what needs the hallway. Anything that needs someone in the room, on the site or at the front desk stays local.
- Mark what has a clear result. Tasks where you can say what “done” looks like are your best remote candidates.
- Start where a leader is losing time. Follow Mandy Holman’s advice and track a week of your own hours first.
- Keep a path to local. Leak Science plans to add a local hire who can learn alongside their remote office manager, so the knowledge is shared across the office.
If the tasks that pass cluster around one person’s week, that cluster is your first remote role. For trades companies, our guide to the first office hire shows how that cluster usually looks.
Do this week
List every recurring task your team did last week and mark each one H (needs the hallway) or R (lives in software and on the phone). The biggest cluster of R tasks sitting on your most expensive person is your first remote role.
Frequently asked questions
Work with a clear result that lives in software and on the phone. Across five of our clients, that meant accounting and back office, HR and legal back-office work, invoicing and insurance tracking, office management, intake and confirmation calls, and technical marketing work like tracking setup, email and design.
Roles that need a physical presence: meeting clients in person, working hands-on with crews or on site, and answering the questions people expect to ask down the hall. Among our clients, a law firm keeps their attorneys, paralegals and elder care coordinators in person, and a marketing agency keeps their client-facing and account-strategy roles stateside.
Yes, when the work is on the phone. One of our clients, a law firm, has their remote team handle intake calls, appointment confirmations and quarterly client check-ins, trained one-on-one with role-play, example calls and live calls.
Run the Hallway Test: if nobody needs to walk down the hall to the person and the work doesn’t need hands in the room, it can go remote. Then check that you can describe what “done” looks like, which is how one of our construction clients filters roles: a clearly defined scope and no quality difference in or out of the office.
The role that frees your most expensive person. Among our clients, a law firm started with an executive assistant, a roofer with finance and a commercial contractor in accounting, and a marketing agency brought on three specialists, one of them to take tracking work off their engineer. Track a week of your own time to find yours.
Each of these clients’ stories is in full, with the roles, the results and the owners’ own words, on our client case studies page.
Sources
- VirtueStaff client case studies, published with each client’s permission, September 2026: Willmeng Construction, Titan Roofing & Construction, Leak Science, McCarthy Law, Growth Lab Advertising.
