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Note: This is a guest post from Complí, a Hireology partner that manages HR and compliance initiatives across the entire workforce. We’re sharing expert content from the Compli team on the Hireology blog on a regular basis.
They lead teams, coordinate projects, discipline and terminate employees, hire and onboard new recruits, coach future leaders, and oversee workforce compliance activities—all while ensuring everything happens on time and, ideally, under budget.
How do managers manage it all?
The unfortunate truth is that not all them of them do—because not all of them can. Faced with a cavalcade of organizational and legal responsibilities, today’s managers are busier than ever, and spread increasingly thin. And yet, employers too often neglect their managers, funneling resources into sales efforts, marketing campaigns, product developments, and other priorities that appear to have greater urgency (and which only compound managers’ workloads).
If your organization is a ship, your managers are the sails.
They can either propel you toward your destination or send you drifting in the wrong direction. And without functional, stable, well-supported management, it’s going to take you a lot more effort to get where you’re trying to go. Here are a few reasons why:
Manager Performance Has a Direct Financial Impact Your Company
Let’s start with an obvious impact of manager performance: employee engagement. A recent Gallup study uncovered several startling statistics related to workforce engagement and employee–manager relations:
- Across teams and industries, the variance in employee engagement scores is at least 70% due to managers. In other words, managers largely determine the ways employees feel about their jobs. Unengaged and disengaged managers incite disengagement among their teams.
- Only about 30% of U.S. workers feel engaged at work, which Gallup says “demonstrate[s] a clear link between poor managing and a nation of ‘checked out’ employees.”
- Unengaged and disengaged managers cost the U.S. economy over $319 billion annually.
Furthermore, the same study linked employee engagement to key performance indicators such as customer satisfaction, higher profitability and productivity, lower turnover, less absenteeism, fewer quality problems, fewer instances of theft, and fewer safety incidents. In the researchers’ words, “when a company raises employee engagement levels consistently across every business unit, everything gets better.”
In addition to encouraging employees to act in a safer, more efficient, and more ethical manner, managers also play a direct role in mitigating risk. Because they interact with and oversee frontline employees on a daily basis, your managers are key to the success or failure of your compliance initiatives.
There’s a Management Skills Gap, and Most Organizations Succumb to It
For this reason, the management hiring process is as important—if not more important—than manager training and education. According to Gallup, “[f]or too long, companies have wasted time, energy, and resources hiring the wrong managers and then attempting to train them to be who they’re not. Nothing fixes the wrong pick.”
Suffice it to say, organizations should carefully consider how they recruit and develop their managers. When less than 20% of managers have what it takes to succeed, your company can gain a competitive advantage by overcoming the skills gap.
Managers Are Stressed Out—But Supporting Them is Relatively Simple
Managers lead busier lives at work than ever before, and are coping with historically high levels of stress as a result. A 2016 article for the Society for Human Resource Management lays the facts bare:
Compared to 10 years ago, the average manager has 50% more direct reports and spends 15% less time with them. And managers have the highest rates of anxiety and depression of any worker group, as evidenced in a 2015 Columbia University Study of nearly 22,000 full-time workers.
Consider the effects of all this stress on your workforce. In a 2018 paper published in the Academy of Management Journal, researchers Elad N. Sherf, Ravi S. Gajendran, and Vijaya Venkataramani propose “that many managers are, simply put, too busy to be fair”: “They are often expected to juggle multiple responsibilities under intense time and work pressures, and so treating employees fairly may take a backseat to other pressing priorities.”
Fortunately, organizations can reduce management workload—and thereby encourage fairness and improve employee engagement and productivity—in a relatively simple way: by automating manager training and incorporating it into day-to-day business. Rather than asking managers to put their projects on hold, an automated workforce training and compliance platform can assign and administer training in short chunks over time, precisely when the information is most relevant. This way, your managers will stay on top of what’s expected of them during every aspect of the employee lifecycle.
About Complí
Complí provides a cloud-based solution that manages HR and compliance programs across your workforce. Automate learning and compliance business processes in one easy-to-use system for your employees and your managers. Deliver defensible proof of compliance to your auditors and executives to keep cool, calm, and compliant.
The Hireology and Compligo platforms are now integrated and work together to help businesses manage workforce programs across the entire employee lifecycle. Through the integration, customers can easily find the best candidates, efficiently complete hiring & onboarding processes, and keep employees on track with ongoing regulatory and compliance requirements.
