The role of managers in driving employee engagement and performance

Cecilia Westin Curry, Assoc CIPD, Development Partner, discusses supporting managers to drive employee engagement.

Companies with highly engaged employees outperform those with lower engagement time and again. Not only that, but research shows that a fifth of all employees are actively disengaged and work against their employers – potentially causing real damage in addition to costing their employer money through a lack of performance and contribution.

How can this be? And what could be done about it?

One recurring theme crops up in various research: In today’s rapidly changing working world, managers across all levels have not been set up for success.

With employee engagement so essential to company performance, how can organisations better help managers meet the needs of their employees?

First, what’s the problem with employee engagement?

Eighteen per cent of employees worldwide are disengaged, according to analytics, advisory and management consultancy Gallup.

These employees are not merely neutral, doing little or ‘quietly quitting’.

Instead, they are working against their employer, potentially damaging the company.

As a result, many companies worldwide see lower productivity, higher absenteeism, lower customer loyalty and unattained business outcomes than they could have done.

In a rapidly changing working world, economy, and world order where many PESTLE forces affect us and happen to us – out of our immediate control – it would make sense to focus on what we can control. There is an old OnTrack mantra – “control the controllables” – where we encourage focus and energy where it matters the most.

For businesses to thrive through current uncertainties, they must provide focus, energy, support and commitment to give their managers the right mindset, toolkits and skills to engage employees. With such tools and techniques, businesses can help managers generate a shift in the organisational culture towards one where more employees want to engage and work for, rather than against, their employer.

But to do this, we must first understand why so many employees are disengaged.

Gallup identifies 12 basic, individual, teamwork and growth needs that impact employee engagement.

Basic needs include employees knowing what is expected from them and having the resources to carry out their work to the expected quality.

Individual needs include receiving recognition for doing good work and having a manager who is perceived to genuinely care about them as a person. Employees also need to feel aligned with their organisation’s purpose and feel that their job is meaningful in the bigger picture.

Teamwork needs include wanting and needing fellow team members and colleagues to appear committed to doing good work. In turn, this means firms need to address low morale or poor performance if present.

Finally, to feel engaged, employees want and expect opportunities to learn, develop and grow. Mentoring, clear career pathways and support and development frequently score as some of the top criteria workers are looking for today when applying for a new role.

However, while most managers want to do a good job, not all have acquired the skills to recognise and/or fulfil their team members’ needs. Often, at no fault of their own. Instead, the pace of change has left managers and their organisations running to catch up.

Between Covid, global supply chain disruption and now inflation, many companies have not had the time, capacity, or budget to dedicate to the training and development required to help set their managers up for success in the post-Covid hybrid and volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous (VUCA) world they operate in.

Clients are telling us there is a gap ‘out there’ for basic managerial skills to meet the demands of today’s employees. Areas such as coaching, motivating and rewarding, psychological safety and how to conduct great conversations are vital for all managers.

While this situation is not new – as my father says ‘for as long as there’s been managers and workers, there’s always been nay-sayers and quiet quitters’, what is new is that employees today will not accept this situation for long. They may quietly quit for some time while looking elsewhere and then they will quit entirely, leading to high staff turnover and lower morale for those that remain. Employees today expect more from their working life than quietly quitting. If they do not get it – they go.

So, to increase employee engagement, we must get better at giving managers at all levels the support they need to help meet the needs of their employees.

Supporting managers: Building a toolkit for success

Frequently, managers are promoted into their roles because they are good at the technical aspects of their job. But they may not yet have the skills they need to manage people. They may not have the experience, or the training required, to have the right conversations to help build an engaged team and drive employee engagement.

So, we need to give managers a toolkit to help them discover how their people think and feel and understand their engagement. We need to set them up for success by adopting a more coaching-focused style of management that emphasises employee development. We need to help them role-model good managerial behaviour, how to coach in the flow of work and spot when mentorship may be the right path forward.

Importantly, this toolkit should work for the modern office environment, and focus on helping them create conversations and moments that matter in a more virtual world.

In practice, this means companies taking a moment to reflect on whether they have set the standard for good management, and what that looks like. What values and behaviours must managers exhibit to reflect organisational values? Companies must then support their managers to role model these behaviours.

There are different frameworks for achieving this, but the goal is to work through some key questions. What values does the organisation expect of them? Do we have behavioural leadership and competency frameworks in place reflecting the managers we need? How do these align with the business? How do we help managers understand, hone, and exhibit the behaviours needed to attract the right talent and take our organisation into the future?

In broad terms, development should focus on three areas:

1. Getting the foundation for good management right – get behavioural and competency frameworks in place. Identify what good management and leadership look like within our organisation.
2. Identifying the gaps – work to identify where managers and leaders sit in relation to the competency and behavioural framework criteria and map out the pathway required to bridge the ‘here and now’ with the ‘where we want to be’.
3. Curriculum design – put together a curriculum of development that helps managers and sets them up for success.

While the skills areas needed often revolve around the fundamentals of leading self and others and leading in a business context, we are seeing a big increase in a need and focus on helping managers develop greater self-awareness as a priority.

Through greater self-awareness, managers will better understand how their behaviour influences the creation of high-performing teams and environments. They’ll understand how building psychological safety helps trust and transparency and ultimately high-engagement talent thrive. Greater self-awareness also helps managers appreciate how to communicate to create impact and how to create the right environment to meet the needs of their people.

When employee engagement creates such vast differences in business outcomes, global companies need to take the time to go back to basics, develop their managers and set them up for success. In doing so, they will set themselves up for the future and gain greater productivity and retain their competitive advantage as employers. Improved business performance will follow.

OnTrack International frequently helps global organisations overcome such challenges and train capable leaders to deliver business results. For more information, please see https://www.ontrackinternational.com/business-challenge/leading-others/.

tionships while navigating the range of communications channels we are now expected to use at work.

Contact us for more information on how to develop your people and teams.