First article on Medium

Hi everyone! I haven't been active here for a while because I've shifted my focus from HR and talent management topics to brand marketing and category creation for startups.  

If this topic interests you, you can find me over at Medium.  My first article What founders get wrong about category leadership is now live.

Managers in the Middle: The Disconnect Between Managers and HR

 

I don’t think many folks would disagree these days that employee experience is an important pillar of business success, but there’s one group of employees who may not be feeling the vibe and that’s managers.  Around all the recent hype about the great resignation, there’s also a mounting body of evidence that managers as a sub-group are increasingly overwhelmed and dissatisfied. 

For example, research from Visier found that typical resignation patterns have changed over the last two years, with larger percentages of senior – and more costly to replace - employees leaving than previously.  Reasons cited include pay, family obligations, and burn out caused by the expanded scope of manager responsibilities.

We all know the old adage that people leave managers not companies, and HR has led the charge on giving employees a voice and holding managers accountable for engaging and developing their team.  While the impact this has had on weeding out poor leaders is unclear, at least there is now attention on the critical importance of quality leadership.  On the flip side, however, the ever-growing list of responsibilities and sometimes conflicting expectations puts a burden on ‘good’ managers that’s increasingly difficult to carry.

A fascinating survey from Humu on manager v. HR priorities found a complete disconnect in what each group considers to be manager priorities.  Whereas managers are focused on ensuring their teams are appropriately staffed and able to complete their work without burning out, HR priorities read more like a board meeting presentation with buzzwords like ‘agility’ and ‘transformation.’ 

Leaving aside the question of why HR is so poorly aligned with team leaders who execute their strategic priorities on a day-to-day basis, what’s really going on here?  HR priorities reflect C-level priorities, which are at times out of touch with the rest of the business and fail to provide a clear roadmap for success.

Increasingly, managers are caught between the rock of having to deliver concrete business results and the hard place of being expected to individually nurture, develop and engage each member of their team.  At first glance there doesn’t seem to be any contradiction here because high performance, professional growth and high engagement should go hand in hand.

You’d think, but it doesn’t always play out like that.  An recent HBR article Managers Can’t Do It All paints a picture of a beleaguered manager trying to execute on executive priorities like agility and transformation with over-extended direct reports and shrinking control over her team’s work and outcomes.  To cap her feeling of overwhelm and failure, she gets a negative engagement survey from her team, who are – like her – frustrated by things outside of her control.

To that manager, her work experience might look something like this:

1. In the calibration meeting, her boss overrules her performance review for one of the members on her team.

 2. This leads to a difficult conversation with her employee because she doesn’t agree with the assessment but has to act as if she does.

3. When HR roles out the engagement survey, disgruntled employees who feel underappreciated express their dissatisfaction.

4. In the follow up debrief with HR, the manager feels attacked on all sides and put in an unwinnable situation.

This is an exaggerated scenario, and we can all think of ways the manager could have reacted more appropriately in each situation.  Nonetheless, in addition to managing outcomes managers are now also on the hook for feelings, which are subjective and influenced by multiple factors that are outside a manager’s direct control. 

Of course, any leader has to cope with factors that can’t be directly controlled but there’s a golden ratio of control v. non-control that continues to widen for middle managers with each new strategic initiative. The result is like a club sandwich in which executives, employees, and HR are the bread and managers are squeezed in the middle like wilted lettuce. 

Added to all this, the rise of hybrid and remote work has made the manager job even more demanding and complex as they try to navigate a new communication and leadership paradigm.  According to this Fast Company article about manager burnout, being accountable for their team’s performance, wellbeing and engagement makes managers less likely to unplug and thus more vulnerable to burnout than other employee groups. 

This is an opportunity for HR to align with this mission critical employee group and provide much-needed active support for manager priorities like combating team burnout, retaining talent, hiring, and onboarding – so managers can focus on coaching and developing their teams, and also take the time they need to recharge. 

How can HR better support managers? Here are a few ways:

·      Provide direct support for manager pain points – Managers have an important role to play, but it lies within HR’s remit to provide recruiting and administrative support for hiring managers, as well as a smooth onboarding experience for new hires.  

·      Help managers develop their teams - Providing personalized, on-demand training modules will enable people to learn efficiently while managing time and workloads more effectively.

·      Equip managers for flexible work arrangements – Increased flexibility can help improve engagement and productivity out but leading remote or hybrid teams requires new skills and communication styles so it’s essential to make sure leaders are ready for the challenge.

·      Have a transparent job level and pay structure – Offering a comprehensive career and rewards roadmap won’t magically make performance and development discussions easy but will help managers have more productive conversations.

·      Encourage meeting free days - Remote work has resulted in more meetings than ever and it’s time for a reset. To learn more about the impact of meetings and busy work on mental health and business performance, check out this short video Finding Your Flow in the Post-Pandemic World of Work. 

To conclude, managers tend to get lumped in with employees when it comes to mental health and engagement strategies, but they face unique challenges that put them at heightened risk of burnout or flight. Left unattended, companies risk alienating this critical and expensive to replace talent segment.

Maximize Flow and Avoid Burnout at Work

The modern workplace has built in delays, interruptions and distractions that have a negative impact on productivity, engagement, and mental health. Companies can improve flow with leadership development and smarter work design. Here's how: https://youtu.be/FYYoBMgZKnQ

Things to do with COVID

After two and a half years of not getting COVID - including a very tense time during which my daughter was seriously ill and getting it would have been a disaster - I finally had my first personal experience with it.

All in all, it sucked less than pretty much every cold I've ever had, no doubt thanks to vaccinations, but it's a major inconvenience because you're quarantined even if you feel fine.  It goes against the grain somehow.

So, there I was holed up in my room for eight days in splendid isolation.  Even my kids, who (whom?) I adore but who have needed something from me literally every 90 seconds since being born, left me in peace.  What to do with all this enforced downtime?

1. Learn to use video editing software - I've been meaning to do this for a while but what with work, kids, etc., haven't gotten around to it.  So I made two videos using two different free programs, the Microsoft Video Editor and Animaker.  MVE is very basic but only took about 10 seconds to learn. Animaker took a bit longer to assemble all my bits but was also pretty easy.  I created this two minute animated short about manager burnout if you'd like to watch it.
2. Sort everything - My closet and drawers have never looked this good. Everything has a place.  Everything fits. It's magnificent!
3. Inventory emergency supplies - No, no, nothing to do with the state of the world. I'm from Los Angeles where we take disaster preparedness very seriously.  Sad truth is I've gotten a bit soft living in Germany, where there are no earthquakes, fires or gang wars to keep you living in a state of readiness, but everyone should have basic emergency supplies and an up to date supply manifest.  I also sampled several emergency ration bars and so far this one's my favorite because it's light, delicious, and lasts 20 years.
4. Catch up on admin and appointments - I hate using the phone because either it's my evening if I'm calling the US, or because my phone German is pretty rough and the other person always sounds judgy.  However, when your own family is avoiding you and you can't go anywhere the phone starts to look like a friend.  Even admin starts to wear a more appealing face because it's something to do. So I did it.
5. Work - Yeah, I did some of that, too.
6. Connecting with old friends - There were a lot of people I owed a personal note or update to, so I did that as well.  It was nice.
7. Peloton - My husband bought a Peloton bike last year over my protests but I LOVE IT!!!  Best of all, although I was banned from our home gym, they offer all sorts of bodyweight strength and fitness programs you can do in the privacy of your COVID isolation chamber.
8. Beauty treatments - Normally these are tricky because you don't have any privacy in a big family but COVID changes all that.  I finally broke out that Laszlo moisture mask I've been saving for a special occasion and wore it for the full 20 minutes without anyone making 'burn victim' jokes.  Yes, husband, I mean you!!
9. Re-read Agatha Christie - There's just nothing as soothing as the Grand Dame of mystery, specifically Miss Marple.  I suppose back in the day these were quite thrilling but nowadays it's just soothing like garlic mashed potatoes for the brain.
10. Binge watch Brooklyn 99 - OK, so when my kids started watching this awhile back I thoguht it was the stupidest show I'd ever seen but I kept finding myself laughing out loud each time I walked by.  The plot is thin but the dialog is clever and the acting is superb.  It is in my humble opinion the perfect binge show.

Let me conclude by saying I'm not one of those astonishing people who work full time, get a Ph.D., and do two hours of yoga a day while raising five kids who all get straight As.  I'm no slouch but I tend to mosy through my day and triage stuff that can't wait.  However, I embraced the novel experience of enforced downtime rather than fighting it.  If you find yourself in a similar situation perhaps some of these ideas will inspire you.  

Meanwhile, I wish you all good health!

Are managers at higher risk of burnout?

 Employee experience is essential for business success, but a critical sub-group tends to get less attention than they require. Managers face unique challenges that put them at heightened risk of burnout. Left unattended, companies risk alienating this critical and expensive to replace talent segment.

You can learn more here in this short animated video I created using Animaker: https://youtu.be/2xxdvPrgUec

Find Your Flow and Avoid Burnout in the Post-Pandemic World of Work

Today's article is about the hidden costs of flow killers at work in terms of mental health and organisational performance, and how HR can lead the charge on minimizing distractions and improving flow across the business.

Flow is a mental state in which a person performing an activity is fully immersed with a feeling of energized focus, full involvement and enjoyment in the process of the activity. In fact, when we talk about how engaged employees do their work, we’re basically talking about flow state.

Given the positive impact of flow on engagement and performance, why is the modern workplace plagued by so many avoidable flow busters?  Why do people spend 60% of their time on busy work, or work about work, instead of... well... actual work?

What do we mean by busy work?  It's stuff like replying to endless email threads, sitting in unnecessary meetings, chasing colleagues for input or suport, waiting for approvals, searching for information, or compiling information from different sources into new formats.

Interruptions and delays have a cumulative effect. First there’s the loss of focus, and the time (23 minutes) it takes to refocus. This can have a knock-on effect of creating more delays or unwanted downtime. The lost time has an opportunity cost that can be calculated.

 

Harder to calculate but still important is that it’s demotivating to be delayed or prevented from making progress, and constant interruptions are exhausting.  So, from a mental health perspective this is concerning, especially with so many people working remotely.

Technology has enabled organizations to digitalize and automate processes, but an average employee switches between job-critical applications as many as 1,100 times every day, or about every 36 seconds.  How much quality work  gets done in 36 seconds?

Technology has helped organisations digitalize but has also had the unintended consequence of turbocharging busy work.  And Corona - or more specifically, remote work - exacerbated this trend because organizations adopted more technology to meet and collaborate remotely.

On the one hand, remote work has a positive impact on productivity because it removes commuting (and in some cases, putting on pants) from the equation. But what about flow?  Here it gets a little muddy, because for many people there are various distractions at home, such as having your kindergarten close.

According to a recent study from MIT, knowledge workers spend more than 85% of their time in meetings, resulting in lower productivity and satisfaction, and less effective collaboration. 

Whereas removing 60% of meetings and replacing them with more targeted communication and project management tools increased cooperation by 55% and improved employees’ psychological, physical, and mental well-being.

One more thing to bear in mind is that meeting via conferencing tools can also lead to a state of online fatigue, which resembles an early stage of burnout.  The upshot is that remote work has many benefits but doesn't necessarily improve flow, and we have an opportunity to rethink culture, leadership, and how work gets done.

When remote work was new, most companies moved what they used to do online with new tools.  It worked well enough and got us over the hump, but people are tired and not necessarily able to do their best work because quality work requires focused attention. 

We can’t eliminate meetings, distractions, and interruptions but we can be smarter in our approach. We can, for example, control how much time we spend in meetings, on busy work, or switching between applications. We can take steps to limit interruptions and bake flow into our culture.

HR thinks critically about employee wellbeing, engagement and performance, and flow is a critical ingredient for all three.  HR can play a key role improving flow across the business by creating organizational awareness, developing leaders to minimize distractions, and partnering with key stakeholders to maximize flow in work design.

If you'd like to learn more about these areas of opportunity for HR to improve organizational flow check out this short talk about Flow at Work on YouTube.

 

https://youtu.be/iSRm7QE9yJ8

To conclude, there are enough distractions in the world and in the workplace and we can’t remove all of them, but we can be smarter and more intentional about how we work and how we use technology at work.

Resilient HR, Resilient Company

Why does HR still struggle to find the right balance between administration and strategy? 

How can HR continue to build its influence and drive strategy in the post-Corona workplace?

Where can I find the answers without reading a long blog post?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CF3jpuQf6TE