Att styra på distans : En kvalitativ studie om hur chefer med hjälp av styrmedel har styrt digitalt på distans

Sammanfattning: The pandemic's restrictions led to organizations being forced into working from home. This posed a major challenge for many managers, including companies that previously already had experience with digital work. This means that managers had to meet these arousing challenges as a result of pandemic restrictions by applying management tools to their digital supervision. The purpose of the study was to analyze how managers during the pandemic have had to adapt their manager role at a distance and how they used instruments to meet the challenges. This has been investigated to gain a broader understanding of how managers can use instruments in their managerial role when businesses have switched to work on a distance. The study also aims to contribute to a new theory regarding how managers can handle challenges with the help of instruments.  In this study, a qualitative inductive research method has been applied where semi-structured interviews were conducted with five different managers from production and industrial companies. In order to get as broad and truthful answers as possible, we chose to anonymize both the respondents but also their companies. The results of this study showed that the biggest challenge in managing employees who worked from the officesite while managers work from home was to maintain communication between them. What the respondents take with them from this challenge is that structure and digital tools are an essential part of being able to control a business, and be able to continue communicating with their employees, regardless of whether the control takes place on site or at a distance. A model has been developed to help managers in similar situations in the future. The four steps identified are: 1. How IT-oriented the unit is, 2. Identify shortcomings in the management, 3. Structure tasks and address shortcomings, 4. Follow-up.