Episode 97: Remote Work Leadership Report Card

Published: December 14, 2022

Details

Due to the pandemic, the past few years have ushered in the past century’s most significant shifts in working environments. According to data scientist at Ladders projections, 25% of all professional jobs in North America will be remote by the end of 2022, and remote opportunities will continue to increase through 2023. We have had a couple of years to work the kinks out of this new way of work, but is it really going as well as we think it is? We looked through our leadership database to issue a report card on how leaders are doing managing remote/hybrid workers.

Key Points

In our dataset, we had 261 leaders working in offices and co-located with their direct reports and 207 working remotely.
working remotely may make it easier for a person to quit a job because of having fewer close relationships with coworkers.
There do not appear to be huge downsides for leaders working remotely from their team members. In fact, working remotely may motivate leaders to try harder to connect with employees or to do it more effectively.
Motivation and engagement of employees who work for remote leaders appear slightly higher, and discretionary effort significantly higher. This study supports the assumption that remote workers may be—certainly have been—- more productive.
Whether the manager gave negative feedback did not make a big difference — unless the leader avoided giving positive feedback. This was also true when you looked only at the ratings of direct reports.
There are still some undeniable advantages associated with those who work in offices, such as stronger interpersonal connections and more collaboration—and better mental health.

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