In 2022, leaders across industries seem to have one thing in common: they report that their organizations are spending more time firefighting than ever before. A prevailing reactionary culture has emerged, born of the business climate of the past three years. In that time we’ve seen shutdowns, layoffs, large scale resignations, wildly changing employee expectations, supply chain challenges, interest rate hikes, and rising costs of attracting and retaining employees. The list goes on and on. Many organizations are still understaffed at several levels of the hierarchy and the resignation environment continues to disrupt progress. A large percentage of front line workers are new, and due to inexperience, there may be only so much they can do without strong guidance. Key staff supporting positions are also understaffed, including IT, Maintenance, and Engineering departments—all contributing to an atmosphere of intense firefighting. How can you reduce or eliminate firefighting and get back to more purposeful work?
One important aspect of stablizing our organizations, reducing firefighting, and paving the way to a less reactive culture is employee retention. We can learn a great deal from recent McKinsey’s research that found the top 3 reasons employees are resigning in the current environment:
- Uncaring leaders
- Unsustainable workload
- Lack of development/advancement
Top reason for accepting the next job offer:
- Adequate compensation
If we want to forge a path forward from the firefighting to a more purposeful, engaging culture, we need to focus on these four factors:
- Caring leadership
- Sustainable workload
- Adequate pay
- Development and advancement
This blog will focus on caring leadership. Future blogs will focus on the other three factors.
Caring Leadership:
- Be more visible. A fellow consultant told me recently of a survey he conducted asking employees across many organizations, “What is the number one piece of advice you would give leadership in your company, post COVID?” Surprisingly, the top response was, “Be more visible, communicate with employees face to face, get out into the main work areas.” Employees told him that hiding out in offices to minimize contact with employees is no longer necessary or appropriate, especially when more and more employees no longer work in a virtual setting. COVID discouraged interaction even in companies that did not move to virtual work. For leaders, it’s time to get out, be more visible to employees. In my client organizations, I strongly recommend the Leadership Teams get out into the main work areas at least once a day, let employees see you and relate to you. These people kept our organizations running during recent (and continuing) upheaval. We need to show our support and appreciation.
- An important aspect of demonstrating caring leadership is talking to employees more. How much do you know about your employees? Whether you’re top leadership or front line supervisors, talk to employees about non work-related subjects as much as if not more than work related activities. Get to know them. I was becoming acquainted with a night supervisor at a new client recently. He exemplifies caring leadership. In this location, one supervisor oversees 10+ manufacturing lines. His location is understaffed at every position; maintenance is way behind in it’s PMs. Firefighting is a norm across shifts. He knows every employee on his shift by name, knows about their families and hobbies, inquires about how they’re doing. The newest employees in the plant are hired into his shift and have the lowest skill levels than any shift in the operation. Yet, slowly but surely, that shift’s performance is doing amazingly well compared to other shifts.
- Recognize their efforts. This supervisor also recognizes employee contributions—from showing appreciation on a daily basis—these are people who easily may be tempted to “call off” for night shifts– to their contributions and ideas on improving processes and reducing downtime. Every employee hears from him whether with recognition or non-work related conversation much more often than they hear any type of corrective feedback. When they see him coming, employees do not automatically think it’s bad news because he relates to them positively much more often than he relates in ways that could be perceived as corrective. And because he anticipates coaching needs before they may occur, the corrective action doesn’t seem critical.
- Anticipate coaching based upon the skill level of the employee. This supervisor anticipates what feedback or coaching employees need based on their skill levels and time of experience in the plant. To newer employees, he frequently and regularly introduces tips of how to better operate a machine, or typical issues an employee may encounter in producing a particular product.
Demonstrating caring leadership is step one in reducing firefighting. There is much more that can be discussed on this topic and additional blogs will follow this one. Please feel free to email me or message me in LinkedIn.