The Link Between Supervisors and 50% Better Performance
From the Eye on the Workforce Blog
by Joe Wynne
Workforce management is a key part of project success, but project managers often find it difficult to get trustworthy information on what really works. From interpersonal interactions to big workforce issues we'll look the latest research and proven techniques to find the most effective solutions for your projects.
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A lot has been said about employee engagement, especially in this blog. It’s important people! Now this recent article has some excellent planning ideas for achieving employee engagement, a big missing piece. To remind us of what improvements are possible, it describes many surveys covering way over half a million employees worldwide. Organizations with highly engaged workforces performed up to 50% better than those with low engagement. That’s 50% more deadlines met on time, fewer mistakes, better issue resolution, better adjustments to changes, much better attitude; I’m guessing just a whole different environment than you are used to.
The article goes on to explain the lynchpin to the successful execution of any workforce performance improvement initiative is the front-line supervisor. In your organization that could be team leads, project managers, anyone who is the first-level supervisor. To get that employee engagement, your organization must train supervisors in the correct skills and motivate them to support employee engagement.
Consider your organization’s ability to manage initiatives through its front-line supervisors. Have major initiatives used the supervisors successfully in the past? Have they been trained and otherwise prepared to motivate and focus their teams? Or have they been promoted and generally left to their own devices? If you find a gap in this area, you have a clear opportunity to fill a gap that will show significant business benefit.On the other hand, the same reason that there is a gap means that it will be difficult to fill. More on this in future posts.
Posted on: January 27, 2008 09:04 PM |
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Comments (2)
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Shawn Belling
Chief Technology Officer and Adjunct Faculty| Geno.Me/University of Wisconsin
Fitchburg, Wi, United States
Employee engagement is a direct result of employee perception of how decisions get made in the workplace. Managers think they are soliciting employee input and are "empowering" employees. But employees perceive this differently: They are not being engaged in the decisions they want to participate in. Managers don't always get this.
Further, employee engagement is a direct result of the organizational culture. If the organization's leadership truly wants engagement, employees feel this and act accordingly. Training managers and supervisors is pointless if founders, CEOs, senior management, etc are only paying lip service to engaging employees.
The issue is that engaging employees is WORK. Hard work, at that. It requires thoughtful management that is employee-focused vs just 'results focused'. The solution is either in educating managers long before they are managers to be good followers (with certain expectations of their managers), AND providing tools that make engagement easy.
Obvious tools include ones that regularly survey the employees to determine what they think; their confidence in achieving objectives, how they feel about working conditions, their ideas for improvement, etc. Then, managers will not be able to ignore the issues (without their boss knowing they are ignoring important issues.)
Thanks for posting. We all need to be reminded of the factors that really matter.
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