It has to be real of course - not “we have 30 minutes to fill what do you want to talk about”.
Unless the manager was also a friend, but that usually isn't the case (nor should it be).
And you won't. No one is ever going to be real and honest with their manager or with anyone in a position of power over them.
Even if your reports don't like all the attention, as a manager you become a better manager as you understand your reports better and they understand you better.
I don't find that difficult at all. That's what work is, you become a person who can find into the machine. I think you are overestimating your abilities.
As a manager you might know a report does not like you and is being two faced, but you won’t do anything about it unless it is affecting performance.
As a manager I would rather not know about your personal life unless it is impacting on work. One of the downsides about devoting so much time to people is they feel like they can share their most intimate personal feelings with you. The stories I have been told over the years still continue to amaze me.
Now, i'm not saying that more one-on-one time isn't helpful with many employees. Nor am I saying that your experience isn't true.
But given that its in direct opposition to my own experience, i'm guessing its either a low-probability thing, that we're in different jobs/fields, different cultures, that some of your staff are either shutting up and bearing it just to get a paycheck, or the ones that disagree with you have quit/resigned/gotten another job/transferred.
Here's where I think it cause problems: right now, if I feel like working from home on a given day, and I have no meetings, I just do it. If I was supposed to meet with my manager every single day, then now it's like I'm cancelling that meeting, so now I'm self-conscious that he thinks I'm slacking, and I would probably just not bother and drag myself in every day. Boom, reduced morale.
The best managers I've had would just show up at your desk either at the start or end of the day and ask about how it's going. The worst ones show up at my desk and ask what I'm working on.
He's often in meetings the majority of the day (or doing code reviews, or writing up tasks), so the onus is more on me not to bother him too much unless I really need to.
That seems to work out pretty well.
I've also been the project lead on several projects for a couple of previous companies, and except for priority, design, or time estimate meetings (usually one or two a week), I left them alone almost completely, and simply worked on development tasks unless they came to me with questions.
Some days there'd be enough questions at random intervals that I couldn't ever get into the flow of things and didn't get much coding done on my own, and some days there'd be no questions and I'd get a ton of coding done.
One time the boss brought me into his office to say how well he thought I was doing as project lead, and I was like "Really? I kind of just let them work." And he said "Maybe that's why you're good. You know how to leave them alone."
We mostly stayed on top of things and never really had a crisis moment, though, because we had a boss that would talk to the client and "manage his expectations" since he made so many ridiculous claims and demands anyway (inventing features he never discussed with us and wondering why it wasn't in the builds yet, asking for things that were pretty much impossible and thinking it could be done in a couple of weeks, changing the entire direction of the project based on an article he read the night before, etc.)
That's basically shooting the shit during coffee/pomodoro/eye-strain breaks.