People management has been evolving over the generations, paving the way for productive development conversations that benefit both the organisation and the employee, writes Michelle Halloran.
There has been a gradual sea-change in the role of the people manager over the last few decades, but it has taken a global pandemic to catapult us into a new way of working. Now, as we optimistically enter the post-pandemic world, it is time for a radical break with the past, to ditch our outmoded perspectives on people management and take a hard look at the role of the 21st-century people manager.
From the top down, organisations must stop pretending that managers with staff reporting to them can perform a fully loaded, 40-hour-a-week job, with a bit of ‘HR soft stuff’ thrown in on the side. Organisations need to start budgeting – in terms of time and money – for the investment required for their people to properly function and perform well in the new world of hybrid working.
Old habits die hard
Many of us have inherited a view of ‘people management’ involving uniform nine-to-five working hours, little flexibility, a strict dress code, and the expectation of often-unquestioning respect and compliance. Structured, objective performance management and review processes are a relatively new replacement for the once-a-year ‘quick chat’ to be told whether or not you were going to get the much longed-for pay rise. Your boss was typically a white male in his forties or fifties – benevolent when you did well; strict and disciplinarian when you did not.
This model of people management has its roots in the traditionalism of the generation born from 1928 to 1944, at a time of economic hardship, when the old class system was still prevalent, and you respected authority unquestioningly.
Evolving workforce generations
The ‘Baby-Boomer’ generation (born 1945 to 1964) wanted much more from their working lives. They had learned from the experiences of the previous generation, seeing them gain very little in terms of improved quality of work and life in the post-war years, despite their sacrifices. However, while they may have done some hell-raising in their youth, and instigated the beginnings of a more equitable society, by the time they hit their mid-twenties, most were settled down and working even harder than their parents in evolving white-collar roles – you didn’t have to be American to buy into the American Dream. While their style and tone were less formal, and there was a shift in the gender balance at work, they (male and female) continued the patriarchal style of people management.
Generation X (born 1965 to 1979) threw down the gauntlet in the area of gender equality, and achieved some real change in terms of family-friendly working hours. They also introduced and implemented performance management in the workforce, a concept driven by increased global business competition, where pay was linked to the achievement of targets, and an employee review was conducted once a year at which an employee’s rating was discussed and explained.
Then came Generation Y, or the ‘Millennials’, (born 1980 to 1994). Since 2016, ‘Gen Y’ has comprised the majority of the workforce; therefore, knowing how to lead and motivate them is vital to the success of any people manager. The first ‘digital natives’, with access to vast resources of information and opinion, they do not unquestioningly accept what their boss tells them. With businesses driven hard to compete by rapidly advancing technology and globalisation, Gen Y has to work smarter, harder and faster than any previous generation. To maintain this level of productivity – adapting to unprecedented levels and speed of change – today’s employees need a lot of time, emotional sustenance and practical support from their managers, without which they will feel let down and move on to another employer.
The early indications for Generation Z, born after 1994, are that they view being an employee and having their own professional ‘gigs’ on the side as not being mutually exclusive. Understanding how precarious job security can be, they are emerging as self-reliant and flexible but needing at least as much emotional support at work as Gen Y.
The 21st-century people manager
As a 21st-century people manager, your language and approach needs to move away from performance reviews towards ‘development conversations’, or even, simply, ‘check-ins’. These should be planned and scheduled. The more frequently you, the manager, make these calls, the shorter they will be, as they become part of a running conversation between you and your team member. This is especially important in a hybrid work environment where we cannot avail of ad hoc, informal conversations as we could pre-pandemic.
Allocate roughly a day a week into your schedule to have these employee check-ins. These should be strategic, not tactical conversations, with the emphasis on how the team member feels they are performing and coping with their work. This discussion must sit outside other routine discussions and communications about what needs to get done.
In Table 1, I set out a suggested plan for managing development conversations with each of your team members (reporting to you as their line manager), outlining the frequency and purpose of each conversation, and useful questions to ask. (Quarterly and monthly meetings can encompass weekly check-ins as they fall due.)
The business case
So, you may be asking, if I am going to spend all this time talking to my team members, helping them to perform, how do I get my own job done? I can’t afford to spend a day a week on employee development conversations!
Well, you can’t afford not to. There is extensive research on the positive impact of proper employee engagement on profitability and productivity. For example, a comprehensive report published by Gallup in 2017, involving meta-analysis of 339 research studies across 230 organisations in 49 industries and 73 countries, found that business or work units in the top quartile of employee engagement outperformed bottom-quartile units by 10% on customer ratings, 17% in productivity and 21% in profitability. Work units in the top quartile also saw significantly lower staff turnover, theft, absenteeism, and fewer safety incidents and quality defects.
Taking as the baseline Gallup’s 21% increase in profitability as a result of higher employee engagement, if one day per week is allocated for people managers to have development conversations with their team members, costing 20% of the organisation’s people managers’ time, the impact on profit will be positive. Further gains and savings are available from increased productivity and customer satisfaction, lower staff turnover and absenteeism, reduced wastage, higher quality adherence, and so on. The business case for allowing people managers time to manage their people is clear.
Human nature being what it is, however, such change will be resisted, despite the pressures from the generational transition outlined and the recent acceleration towards complex, individually tailored working arrangements. An organisation could introduce such change through a pilot scheme, evaluating results after 12 months using metrics like internal and external customer satisfaction, team productivity, absentee rates, staff turnover and quality of output.
Budgeting time for people management is a change in approach that is long overdue. We have the motive – a more profitable business and a happier place to work – and with the shift towards hybrid working, we now have the opportunity.
Michelle Halloran is an independent HR and people management consultant.
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