Changing how people are managed is critical for improving employee wellbeing and increasing workplace engagement. Dominic Ashley-Timms and Laura Ashley-Timms share the strategies that can make a real difference
According to Gallup’s latest State of the Global Workplace, 41% of employees report experiencing “a lot of stress” at work. What’s more, it identified that those who work in companies with bad management practices are nearly 60% more likely to be stressed than those working in environments with good management practices. Managers are also more likely to be worried and stressed than other employees.
Managers find themselves overburdened, stressed and managing a workforce who are mostly disengaged
The findings are clear: to reduce stress at work, we need to change how people are managed. But what is causing so much friction and overwhelm between staff and managers across the board? And what can L&D do to initiate the change in management practice that organisations desperately need?
Why management as we know it just isn’t working
Since the turn of the millennium, the workplace has faced constant and unprecedented change, with employees and leaders alike having to adapt to new challenges and ways of working. Looking at the resulting change in our expectations of the modern manager, it’s easy to see why 50% of this population report being burnt out.
Organisations report having several generations in the workplace, and each cohort – from baby boomers to Gen X, millennials to Gen Z – comes with its own sense of how work should be accomplished and with different priorities in terms of what’s most important to them in their career choices and expectations. Serving the needs of these different generations is challenging organisations and their leadership, training and HR practices.
The changes to working practices brought about by digital transformation also bring unique challenges to management. Take the rise of remote and hybrid working, for example. While providing employees with more flexibility, working from home (WFH) does put extra strain on managers to keep teams connected digitally and ensure individuals aren’t isolated. Because employees are becoming more isolated as, globally, one in five employees who are fully remote report chronic loneliness. WFH staff just aren’t getting the right support they need to feel connected and develop.
This feeds into the mass re-evaluation of what work means to people post-pandemic. For many, the Covid-19 pandemic brought home the importance of finding balance between professional and personal lives, with workplace wellbeing becoming a top priority in business. Covid was also a wakeup call for many regarding how purposeful their work is. Now more than ever, people want to believe in the mission of the organisation they work for; they want to feel purpose in what they do, and see the impact they have, both in the business and in wider society.
As a result, managers are feeling the pressure to also be wellbeing experts, expected to navigate the intricacies of what mental health and wellbeing means for different employees, while also keeping them motivated, engaged and feeling valued in the workplace.
The real kicker is that managers aren’t being trained to handle these unique issues in the modern workplace. According to the Chartered Management Institute (CMI), 82% of all managers who enter a management position have received no formal management and leadership training.
These ‘accidental managers’ are often promoted not for the strength of their people management skills, but because of their high performance in another area. Suddenly tasked with managing a team, these managers haven’t been given the opportunity to hone the necessary skills to handle the ‘people’ side of leadership and aren’t able to cultivate the right environment for their new teams to thrive.
Ultimately, managers have been adapting to new technology, new ways of communicating and new ways of working. As a result, they find themselves overburdened, stressed and managing a workforce who are mostly disengaged.
Operational Coaching: The key to transforming management practice
It’s important we lean into this crisis and use it to spur on urgently needed change. From a financial perspective, high stress and low engagement levels cost economies $8.9trn (about £6.8trn) in lost productivity, severely impacting the life chances of millions.
In their report Great Job, the UK’s Confederation of British Industry (CBI) calculated that an improvement of just 7% in the quality of UK management (bringing it to par with our G7 partners) would unlock an additional £110bn to our economy. The time to transform the way people are managed is now.
So, what can L&D do to achieve this? The answer is deceptively simple: teach managers the skill of asking better questions. For most managers, the only instruction they’ve ever received about asking questions is to “ask open questions”. Adopting an enquiry-led approach, however, requires managers to master asking more powerful questions in a way that fits in with the flow of their daily conversations, and that are genuinely intended for the benefit of the other person.
Mastering how to ask more insightful questions in this way requires training – it’s not something managers have been taught how to do but, as a developed skill, can quickly encourage their team to step up and begin to share accountability for the workload.
It also builds resilience, confidence and trust within teams, which is key for effective delegation as managers feel more able to distribute their workload or particular activities more equitably.
This ultimately boosts the wellbeing of both employees and managers, as it enhances a sense of ownership and fulfilment among team members and lightens the manager’s workload.
This enquiry-led approach sits at the heart of a new style of management called Operational Coaching®. The aim is to encourage sustainable but achievable change in the everyday behaviour of managers and how they relate to team members.
In a recent randomised-control trial conducted by the London School of Economics (LSE), managers learning to apply the skills of Operational Coaching® were found to have adopted new behaviours that led to a statistically significant 70% increase in the time they spent coaching their team members in the flow of work.
They also improved their capabilities across all nine competencies measured. The robust results from the research open the way for many more managers to develop a new approach to their management style.
Creating a culture of support and engagement
Ultimately, we derive our daily purpose and self-actualisation from work. It’s where we spend our most productive effort, so the quality of this must be high. We need to feel valued at work, and we need managers to create that culture where people are supported and validated. Managers, too, deserve to experience managing other people as the privilege it should be and not the burden it’s become.
Adopting an enquiry-led approach make this possible. As a skillset in its own right, the more advanced use of enquiry as a style of engagement is a surefire way of stimulating more of a collaborative approach and building deeper and more effective relationships. Asking questions pulls people towards you; they’re an irresistible invitation for others to advocate.
If organisations want employees to thrive in their jobs, feel less stressed and be more engaged, our managers and leaders must also be all of these things. Not only will this positively leverage the extent of managers’ influence on the health and wellbeing of their employees, but it will also allow them to look after their own wellbeing, ultimately improving business outcomes.
Dominic Ashley-Timms and Laura Ashley-Timms are the CEO and COO of Notion and co-authors of The Answer is a Question: The missing superpower that changes everything and will transform your impact as a manager and leader
