Post-covid performance management: the impact of remote working experience during the pandemic

The Covid-19 pandemic forced organizations to suddenly shift their people to remote work. The unexpected situation created a brand-new organizational landscape. It has been filled with uncertainty and required great openness and adaptability from both employees and organizations. The age-old dilemma of performance management, the trust vs. control, was seen in a new light. The primary challenge of managers became to establish the balance between trust and control by keeping employees involved and motivated in the online space. This paper explores the main features of remote work and its effects on employees' performance management by considering organizational learning as a critical cultural effect of remote work. We investigated the adaptation process from both the employees' and employers' perspectives. Our findings comprise the critical questions and new directions of performance management in the context of remote work, considering the technological and cultural issues. Assuming that remote working will remain present post-Covid and reshape workforce strategies in the long run, the findings of this paper might be highly relevant for organizations as they rethink their processes of working, thinking, and operation. Based on the current study, in the future we want to explore the phenomenon of employees' informal learning, which seems to have disappeared during the course of shifting to remote working.