By Brian Kropp, Alexia Cambon & Sara Clark
A year into the pandemic, the long-lasting effects of Covid-19 on the way people work is becoming clear. From now on, many employees will function in a hybrid world with more choices about where, when and how much they work. Analysis by Gartner, the research firm for which we all work, shows that 46% of the work force of mid-size companies is projected to work in a hybrid setting in the near future.
These changes will also affect those in managerial roles. Within the last five years, human resources executives have started to hire and develop managers who are poised to be great coaches and teachers. But the assumption that coaching should be the primary function of management has been tested since the pandemic began. Three disruptive, transformative trends are challenging traditional definitions of the managerial role:
Normalization of remote work
As employees and managers have become more distributed, their relationships to one another have become more asynchronous. Gartner estimates that in more than 70% of manager-employee relationships, either the manager or the employee will be working remotely at least some of the time going forward. Managers will have a dramatically smaller window into the realities of their employees’ lives and will begin to focus more on individuals’ outputs and less on the processes used to produce them.
Acceleration in use of technology to manage employees
Many companies have invested in new technology to monitor their remote employees during the pandemic. Organizations have been buying scheduling software, expense report auditing tools and even technologies to replace manager feedback using artificial intelligence. While companies have been focused on how technology can automate employee tasks, it can just as effectively replace the tasks of managers. At the extreme, by 2024, new technologies could potentially perform as much as 69% of the tasks historically done by managers, such as assigning work and nudging productivity.
Employees’ changing expectations
As companies have expanded the support they offer to their employees in areas like mental health and child care during the pandemic, the relationships between employees and their managers have started to shift to become more emotional and supportive. Workers now often expect their managers to help them improve their life experience, rather than just their employee experience.
The trends outlined above mean that we are headed for a new era of management where it’s less important to see what employees are doing and more important to understand how they feel. To be successful in this new environment, managers must lead with empathy. In a 2021 Gartner survey of 4,787 global employees assessing the evolving role of management, only 47% of managers were ready to do this. The most effective managers of the future will be those who build fundamentally different relationships with their employees.
Empathetic managers are able to contextualize performance and behavior: They transcend the simply understanding of the facts of work and proactively seek information to place themselves in their direct reports’ contexts. Empathy requires developing high levels of trust and care and a culture of acceptance within teams. This is a lot to ask of individuals, but it’s worth it. Gartner’s analysis shows that managers who display high levels of empathy have three times the impact on their employees’ performance than those who display low levels. And employees at organizations with high levels of empathy-based management are more than twice as likely to agree that their work environment is inclusive.
Creating a new work force of empathetic managers is especially difficult for mid-size companies. While larger companies can earmark billions of dollars for managers’ development, smaller companies are more fiscally constrained. Mid-size companies also often don’t have the scale to create a managerial class within their work force—they need managers to be both managers and doers.
Mid-size companies need to develop more empathetic managers without massive investment and continue to have those managers work rather than just manage. Here’s how to achieve this balance:
Develop empathy skills through vulnerable conversation practice
The task of leading with empathy can be intimidating. Many managers understand empathy conceptually but aren’t sure how to use the quality as a management tool. Managers need opportunities to practice—and, crucially, room to make mistakes. To build empathy, Zillow creates cohorts of managers across the organization who engage in rotating one-on-one conversations with peers to troubleshoot managerial challenges. These conversations offer frequent, psychologically safe opportunities to engage in vulnerable conversations focused on how managers can commit to specific actions to care for themselves while supporting the well-being of their team members. Managers are able to practice their empathy with their peers, asking specific questions to understand others’ challenges and articulating their own circumstances in response to probing queries.
Empower a new manager mindset by creating a network of support
Managers’ motivation to be empathetic increases when they have a support system that makes it clear that ensuring employees’ well-being isn’t their responsibility alone and when organizations invest in roles designed to support them. Goodway Group, a fully remote company, has created a dedicated role, the team success partner, whose responsibilities include fostering trust and psychological safety and supporting team health. Managers work with team success partners to respond to the unique challenges distributed employees are facing; this includes facilitating remote conversations and supporting the assimilation of new team members.
Create manager capacity for empathy by optimizing reporting lines
Managers are already struggling with the demands of an evolving work environment, and actions that drive empathy are time consuming. One key part of the solution is to help managers prioritize their workload to focus on fewer, higher-impact relationships with individuals and teams. Recognizing the pressure on managers to maintain team connectedness in a remote environment, leaders at Urgently, a digital roadside assistance company, rebalanced their managers’ workloads. When managers have a team whose size they can handle, they’re able to dedicate time to fostering deeper connections and responding with more empathy.
To be successful in today’s evolving environment, companies have to think holistically about how current trends will affect their managerial class. Organizations that equip leaders to be empathetic will achieve outsized returns on performance.
Brian Kropp is chief of research for the Gartner’s HR practice, where Alexia Cambon is a research director and Sara Clark is a senior research principal.
Image courtesy of www.pexels|karolina grabowska