A friend and fellow consultant recently spoke to a large group of CEOs at a Denver conference. The presentation focused on key ways to combat “The Great Resignation” since experts say that it will continue through 2022. He made the point that the employees of 2022 hold very different expectations from those of 2019 and early 2020—employees expect greater work flexibility, less burnout, and better relationships with managers. Employers need to adapt. He said his presentation did not go over too well. The CEOs argued that “sooner or later the employees will be back; they have to make a living.” Aside from incorrectly assuming that their former employees were not working and had not moved on to better employers, these meeting participants were not heeding the reality that employees expect better work environments.
To meet the demands of changing work expectations, many organizations are improving their organizational climates in order to recruit and better retain employees. To fulfill this need, organizations are focusing on re-tooling their managers as coaches. There are three steps:
1.) Conduct an assessment to find out the current state of manager-employee relationships. There are several ways to do this. You may wish to survey employees, conduct small focus groups, or do one on one interviews around key symptoms such as causes of burnout or causes of high turnover. If your organization has been experiencing high turnover or low morale, I’d recommend that you use an outside organization to conduct the assessment, since there may be little employee trust for an internal survey or focus group process. Seek out consulting firms with a positive track record of conducting effective assessments.
2.) Develop and implement training programs to develop leaders as coaches, focusing not only on coaching skills but also on addressing the strengths and opportunities for improvement discovered through the assessment. Training should develop competencies and skills related to:
a. Coaching skills: developing employees from their various experience levels.
b. Employee and team engagement: relationship building and performance expectations.
c. Compassionate accountability: how accountability works in the new environment.
3.) Provide feedback to reinforce managers’ new skills. Training is only “step one.” Just because people have been trained on a new skill does not mean that they will use it. Once training has started, managers need to receive feedback related to how well they are implementing their new skills. Every manager’s behavior should support the desired organizational culture. Feedback should be ongoing because behavior change is difficult to achieve. Why? One manager can do a lot of damage in your organization, and when managers do not demonstrate the desired, newly-learned behaviors, they need feedback, and a lot of it. One Boston-based professional services firm was making a specific effort to improve its culture—each year aspiring to become one of the Top 100 Places to Work. For several years, they missed the mark. Generally, the organization had a great culture, but there were concerns. To uncover opportunities for improvement, the business used an external consultant to conduct an assessment using survey instruments that went directly to the external firm and were completely confidential. There was one functional area in the organization that scored the company culture very negatively, and this functional area comprised about 25% of the employees. Data from the employee surveys ranked this department as being a very unpleasant place to work—some employees reported that it was a toxic environment driven by a negative leader—an EVP in the company. Efforts were made to train and develop the leader but to no avail. Because of his long tenure in the company and role on the Board, he was not let go; but he was removed from the reporting structure. Within a fairly short period, this area achieved improvement, and the company has achieved a truly better work environment. The moral of the story is “one manager can undermine your culture.”
Hold managers accountable. Your organization can track improvement in managers’ skills through continuing surveys; morale measurement tools; turnover/retention measures; and employee, team, or departmental performance numbers. Many organizations align manager performance reviews, rewards, recognition, and incentives to the new behaviors.
No organization knows exactly what will happen next in the continuing evolution of our organizations in the post-pandemic world; but for now, we know from expert research and from our own experiences that we must adapt to the new expectations for the work environment, or we may encounter more resignations and retention challenges.
For more information or for a complimentary 60-minute strategy session for developing managers as coaches, please set a meeting, email me, and/or follow or message me on LinkedIn.