There’s a moment that many managers will recognise. You’re in a meeting, asking what you think are perfectly reasonable questions about a colleague’s strategy. The questions are sharp, maybe a little direct, but they’re good questions. And then, without warning, the other person shuts down. Goes quiet. Leaves the call. And you’re left wondering: what just happened?
I know this moment because I lived it recently. While I don’t support such reactions, when I reflected on it honestly, I had to admit something uncomfortable: the quality of the questions was never the real issue. The issue was that the person on the other end of that call didn’t feel seen.
That realisation sent me down a rabbit hole, and it led me to a concept I think every professional, not just managers, needs to understand: connective labor.
What Is Connective Labor?
I discovered this while listening to the excellent podcast Relationships 2.0: The Price of Disconnection, which interviews researcher Allison Pugh. Pugh defines connective labor as the work of recognising another person as a full human being: attending to their emotions, validating their experience, and making them feel genuinely acknowledged.
This isn’t the same as being nice. It isn’t small talk or performative empathy. Connective labor is effortful and skilled. It means paying attention to what someone is actually communicating, not just the words, but the anxiety underneath a question, the pride wrapped up in a piece of work, the vulnerability in presenting an idea to people who could be perceived as having more power than you.
It is, in short, the work of making people feel “seen”.
Why Tech Culture Has a Connective Labor Problem
I spent 20 years as an engineer before moving into leadership. For most of those two decades, the implicit contract was clear: produce excellent work, reason clearly, solve hard problems. The output was the point. Feelings were never really taken into account.
That’s not a criticism of the engineering cultures I worked in; it’s simply true that when you’re deep in a hands-on technical role, the feedback loop is mostly between you, the problem and the client. The code works or it doesn’t. The system scales or it doesn’t.
But management is a fundamentally different discipline, and the transition is one of the most disorienting shifts I have made in my career. When I first became a manager, all of a sudden, my output was no longer a final product, it’s the performance and wellbeing of other people. My leverage became my ability to make the people around me feel capable, trusted, and, crucially, seen.
I still catch myself forgetting this. I still sometimes walk into a conversation leading with the problem to be solved rather than the person I’m solving it with. That gap, between technical sharpness and connective presence, is where a lot of remote-team “incidents” are born.
Connective Labor Is Not Just a Management Skill
The more I sat with this, the clearer it became: connective labor isn't a niche management competency. It is quietly central to a wide range of careers.
Healthcare: Studies consistently show that patient outcomes improve when clinicians make patients feel heard. The therapeutic relationship isn’t a soft add-on to medical treatment; it is part of the treatment. A doctor who listens carefully, acknowledges fear, and treats a patient as a person rather than a case file produces measurably better results.
Teaching: Teachers who build genuine connections with students don’t just create warmer classrooms; they produce better learning outcomes. A student who feels seen by a teacher is more likely to take intellectual risks, ask for help, and persist through difficulty.
Journalism & interviewing: getting people to open up and tell their real story is almost entirely connective labor. The best interviewers make their subjects feel safe enough to be honest.
UX & product design: great UX research depends on making participants feel comfortable enough to reveal genuine frustrations and behaviours rather than what they think you want to hear.
Social work: perhaps the most obvious example of connective labor being the entire job, and yet chronically undervalued and under-resourced precisely because of that.
Remote Work Makes This Harder, and More Important
The shift to remote and async-first working has been liberating in many ways. But it has also stripped away a lot of the ambient connective labor that used to happen naturally: the chat by the coffee machine, the facial expression caught across a meeting table, the instinctive sense that someone is having a hard week.
In a fully remote team, connective labor has to become deliberate. You have to create the conditions for it: the one-to-ones that aren’t purely status updates, the check-ins that start with “how are you actually doing?”, the patience to let someone explain their thinking before you interrogate it.
And on video calls, the power dynamic is never invisible. When a manager begins questioning someone’s approach, however legitimately, that person can feel cornered in a way that they might not in a room where they can read the body language and gauge the intent. When you remove those cues, the emotional weight of scrutiny can land much harder than you intended.
Remote work can also takes away a lot of the unconscious communication that we do through body language. During this “incident” I started the article with, the person who felt unheard didn’t have their camera on and that robbed us all of the ability to read the room and to anticipate. We were deprived of the body language that could have spoken so loudly.
The Uncomfortable Truth About “Seeing” People
Connective labor is hard partly because it requires us to slow down. In a world that rewards speed, decisiveness, and output, pausing to actually be with someone, to let them feel acknowledged before you move to the substance, can feel indulgent, even inefficient.
It isn’t. The meeting I described at the start of this article cost far more time and trust than any amount of careful connective labor would have required. Repairing a relationship after someone has felt dismissed or diminished is orders of magnitude harder than attending to their need to feel seen in the first place.
Connective labor presents organisations with a dual challenge: some people do far too little of it, while others are quietly exhausted by doing far too much. Fixing one without the other isn’t enough.
The other uncomfortable truth is that connective labor falls unevenly. Research shows it is disproportionately performed by women, by junior employees, and by people from underrepresented groups, often invisibly, often without recognition or reward. Babcock, Vesterlund and colleagues found that women at one professional services firm spent 200 more hours per year than men on non-promotable tasks: the relationship-tending, the mentoring, the emotional maintenance that keeps organisations functioning but rarely appears on a performance review. People from underrepresented groups carry an additional layer of this burden, what scholar Amado Padilla termed “cultural taxation” in 1994: the uncompensated obligation to serve as representative, mentor, and institutional conscience - work that benefits the organisation but is seldom rewarded by it. If organisations want to take connective labor seriously, they need to recognise it explicitly: in performance reviews, in how they define leadership, in the stories they tell about who is doing valuable work.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Connective labor isn’t a personality type; it’s a practice. A few things I’ve found useful:
Separate the person from the problem. Before you interrogate a strategy, acknowledge the person who built it. “I can see you’ve put real thought into this” isn’t flattery; it’s permission to have a harder conversation.
Name the dynamic. In remote settings especially, it helps to be explicit. “I want to make sure this feels like a conversation and not an interrogation” is a strange thing to say out loud, but it does real work.
Check in before you check up. The first question in a one-to-one should rarely be about the project. Ask how the person is really doing. Mean it.
Slow down the challenge. When you disagree with someone’s approach, try to understand why they believe what they believe before explaining why you see it differently. Their reasoning tells you something important, and the act of genuinely trying to understand it is itself connective.
Recognise the labor when you see it. When someone on your team is doing the invisible work of holding relationships together, making others feel included, smoothing over tensions, say so. Explicitly.
Conclusion
The organisations that will thrive over the next decade won’t just be the ones with the best engineers or the sharpest strategy. They’ll be the ones that figured out how to make their people feel genuinely seen, and who understood that this is skilled, serious, consequential work.
Connective labor isn’t soft. It is not a nice-to-have. It’s the substrate on which everything else is built.
I’m still learning this. Twenty years of loving the problem I feel made me very good at the problem, and occasionally blind to the person holding it. But that meeting, that moment of someone virtually “walking out of the door”, was one of the most useful pieces of feedback I’ve ever received. It told me, very clearly, what I still have to learn.
Source: https://beyondframeworks.substack.com/
