Recapturing Skillful Managerial Performance in Remote Work: The Phenomenology of How to Be a Great Manager When You Can’t “Be There”

Abstract

Remote work is increasingly a workplace feature, rendering employee return-to-office (RTO) directives into flashpoints of conflict between managers and employees. Within this employee resistance we suggest that researchers and practitioners have overlooked a far more fundamental and consequential concern: the serious and multidimensional challenges to manager–employee relationality presented by remote work. Remote work is not working from the office, yet current managerial practices and organizational norms assume that the only difference is location. In this paper, we use McKnight's phenomenological managerial approach to argue that because managers and employees can’t “be there” together, remote work creates information-impoverished environments that complicate and impair informal communication and increase misattributions. We unpack the characteristics of remote work that hinder many of the tools of skillful managerial performance. We then discuss a series of recommendations for how to return phenomenology to the practice and study of skillful management in remote work contexts.