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With the global realisation and attitude that ‘life is short’, people are putting themselves first more than they were before. How an employee’s values are met within their workplace can be make or break for an organisation. People are now voting with their feet, with staff more likely to jump ship and find new roles that align better with what matters most to them, rather than stick with the traditional stability of an unsatisfying and unrewarding job.
If the pandemic has taught us anything, it is that people’s values have changed when it comes to the world of work. With the global realisation and attitude that ‘life is short’, people are putting themselves first more than they were before. How an employee’s values are met within their workplace can be make or break for an organisation. People are now voting with their feet, with staff more likely to jump ship and find new roles that align better with what matters most to them, rather than stick with the traditional stability of an unsatisfying and unrewarding job.
It is no surprise that there is a higher expectation for employee value and well being. These days, when you come to work for an organisation, you expect that your contribution is going to get recognised. So, when that recognition is not present and they are not valued, staff is not prepared to put up with it. Employees are also increasingly frustrated with a lack of feedback, with many managers ill-equipped at giving feedback and handling challenging conversations. Workplace stress levels are still scarily high, with increased workloads in short time frames leading many to want to work from home or absent themselves from work altogether. Compound this with a lack of clarity as to where their careers are heading and a lack of confidence in managers to have open career conversations and we have perhaps a better insight as to why companies are struggling to retain their employees.
Indeed, Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2022 report* found that employee engagement levels everywhere are shockingly low—79 per cent of workers disengaged globally, and the percentage of engaged employees in South Asia at just 27 per cent. They found strong links between engagement and performance outcomes such as productivity, job satisfaction, profitability and retention. Disturbingly, South Asia also had the highest regional percentage of employees who do not feel respected at work (81 per cent), having a huge knock-on effect on workforce happiness, engagement and innovation. With low engagement levels estimated to have a $7.8 trillion cost on the global economy, managers and leaders must take urgent action now to respond to the human needs of their workforce if they are to keep them engaged and operating at their highest level of potential.
The time to rehumanise management is now. But managers themselves are struggling to keep pace with the constantly changing world of work. Through successive rounds of delayering, continual reorganisations, budget constraints and the drive to improve margins, managers have found that the pressures upon them have continued to increase, often doing the work of two or more people which is taking them further and further away from being able to spend quality time with team members. And it was the pandemic that threw this chronic failure of management into stark relief. With the added challenges of adapting to hybrid-working models, a higher demand from staff for better work-life balance, managers are feeling overwhelmed, overworked and exhausted.
The workplace is seeing a rising number of ‘accidental managers’—employees promoted to a managerial position due to their technical strengths, but who lack the vital skills needed to deal with the ‘people’ side of leadership in order to boost productivity and performance. Teaching managers how to be a coach, once seen as a panacea for helping managers perform differently in their roles, has singularly failed to transform organisations. No surprise perhaps when specialist performance consultancy Notion established that coaching only ever reaches less than 5 per cent of an organisation and typically it is much less than 1 per cent. The reason for this they discovered is that the coaching models being taught are Executive Coaching models like GROW, reinforcing the idea that coaching should follow a structured, sit-down process. These ‘Manager as Coach-type’ training courses all teach time-starved managers how to conduct coaching sessions, rather than learning how to use coaching during daily interactions with team members.
So, what can organisations do differently to take the benefits of coaching and make them relevant and applicable for a manager? According to Notion, the focus needs to shift towards the behavioural aspects related to coaching that managers can learn to adopt to help them utilise more of an enquiry-led approach. This Operational Coaching™ style of management that Notion has defined ditches the commandand-control style, helping managers to stop firefighting and instead learn how to quickly ‘change state’ to have ‘in the moment’ coaching conversations every day with their employees. And there is a simple but effective method all managers can follow to achieve this – the STAR® model:
The STAR® coaching model focuses on changing your behaviour as a manager, instead of trying to change the behaviour of the other person. It helps managers cultivate new coachingstyle behaviours in the moment, which can:
Rehumanising management is giving people those human skills to develop their management capability in order to develop the people that directly report to them. This will enable managers to deliver a transformative coaching culture throughout the entire organisation, connecting with employees on a human level where they feel valued, listened to and can develop the confidence to fix problems independently providing them with their own skills for a successful future and giving managers some of their time back.
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